cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ridge Boards and the Golden Bough I damn near got the ridge board in place yesterday. Bob came over and helped me get the thing up on top of the building. Then he held a 2x4 brace in place while I nailed it in. There needs to be one at each end of the roof to temporarily hold the ridge board in place until enough rafters are installed to hold it up. However, we had only just measured and marked the location for the second brace at the other end of the roof when it started to rain. The wind whipped up as well. Bad time to be crouching on top of a building, hanging over the edge of it and swinging a hammer. So we had to stop short and get the tarps over it all and get the hell off of the roof right away. We'll get that ridge board up this afternoon for certain. The ridge board is kind of a big deal. The construction company that built my parents' house many years ago is owned by friends of ours. All they do is high-quality, one of a kind residential construction. No tract houses or anything. Anyway, on every house that they build, they have a ridge party when the ridge board gets installed. It's a big tradition. Seems like a good idea to me. And for some reason one is supposed to attach either a small tree or an evergreen bough to the very top of a building under construction. Steel workers often have ceremonies and parties that go along with this when building skyscrapers. But the basic tradition goes back at least hundreds of years in Europe. Frazer writes in 'The Golden Bough' about trees and tree branches being fastened to houses as a blessing in seasonal ceremonies, although I don't think that he gets into the construction thing per se. It sounds Germanic to me. I should re-read the tree worship stuff in The Golden Bough to see what I can glean that might relate to this modern custom. Today, once the ridge board is up, I will go into the woods and cut a cedar bough to use for this purpose. 10:40 - 2008-04-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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