Chapter Eleven: November Is for November
I used to rush through November.
Not on purpose. It’s just that December was waiting at the end of it, all lit up and loud, and November felt like the long, brown, damp corridor you have to walk down to get there. Head down, collar up, nearly there.
I don’t know when that changed. Possibly the afternoon I lost a whole hour watching starlings (more on that later) and realised nothing had gone wrong. The washing was still on the airer. The world hadn’t ended. And the light outside, brown and gold and dim and gorgeous, was something I’d been walking straight past for years.
So the decorations are in the attic, and they’re staying there until December, because I’ve decided that November is for November. Christmas is better when it arrives all at once, like a surprise party the whole house has been quietly planning. The admin is done, mind. Father Christmas is booked and the food slots are in the diary. That was October. This is the month for the little things that make December magical, done very slowly.
It’s dark by half four. Light the fire. Come in.
November Snapshot (dates worth a circle)
Dates worth a circle for November 2026. Grab a pen. These are the ones I’ve got circled.
1 and 2 November, All Saints and All Souls: Two quiet days for remembering. The month starts gently, which I like.
5 November, Bonfire Night: Remember, remember. Toffee apples, sparklers in the garden and the village bonfire.
7 to 21 November, Somerset carnival season: Seven towns and two weeks of illuminated processions. Bridgwater opens the circuit on Saturday the 7th at 6pm, and Glastonbury closes it on the 21st.
8 November, Remembrance Sunday: Poppies, wreaths and two minutes of quiet at eleven.
9 November, New Moon in Scorpio, 7.02am: The darkest sky of the month. A note below.
11 November, Armistice Day and Martinmas: Two things on one date. The silence at eleven, and a saint who gave away half his cloak.
18 November, Shepton Mallet Carnival, 7.30pm: Ours. A Wednesday night and half the town on the pavement.
22 November, Stir-up Sunday: The last Sunday before Advent, when the Christmas pudding gets stirred.
24 November, Full Beaver Moon, 2.53pm GMT: A near-supermoon. See the Moon Moment below.
26 November, Thanksgiving: Not ours, but I have American friends and a firm belief in any excuse for a very large dinner.
That’s the lot. Circle the ones that feel like yours and let the wind take the rest.
Summer is softening. That's not an ending. That's the best bit.
〰️
Summer is softening. That's not an ending. That's the best bit. 〰️
Flora & Feelings
The garden in November: seedheads, starlings and the sound of leaves
November stops showing off.
October was all colour and drama. November is the month the garden takes its make-up off. It’s brown, it’s damp and it’s dark before tea, and I’ve decided to find this restful.
The colour has drained out of the borders, but the structure hasn’t, and that’s what I notice now. The seedheads standing up in the beds like tiny sculptures. The ivy glossy against the wall. The chrysanthemums in orange and yellow and red, still holding the line as if nobody’s told them it’s over. The garden has gone monotone, and somehow it looks more like itself.
The spiders have reclaimed the place, by the way. I can’t get from the back door to the washing line without walking through at least one web, and I’ve stopped apologising. On misty mornings the whole garden goes soft, and soft white mushrooms appear under the hedge and among the shrubs overnight, as if someone’s been busy while we slept. The bramble leaves have turned red and purple. The squirrels are frantic. A green woodpecker keeps turning up on the lawn looking like he’s lost a bet. The winter plants are waiting in the wings: hellebore, sweet box, evergreen clematis and, a little later, winter aconite. Mostly not yet, but you can feel them thinking about it.
The Leaves
If you can get out before the rain, kick through them. That’s the whole instruction.
Gold and brown and orange, raked into wet piles or lying fresh and crisp on the path, and the sound they make! I’d walk a mile out of my way for that sound. It’s my favourite autumn activity and I’ve never grown out of it. If you see a grown woman kicking through a pile of leaves on a Somerset lane, that’s me. Say hello. I won’t stop.
The Dried Collection
The house, meanwhile, is full of things that never need watering. Dried wheat. Poppy heads. Branches from the oak tree. Dried hydrangea heads in bowls on corners. They’ve lasted me years, and they’re the only plants in the house I’ve never killed. The best bit is that you can keep adding to them. A Sunday afternoon walk with a carrier bag, picking up whatever the hedgerows have dried for you, is about the best thing I know to do with a Sunday afternoon. It’s free, it’s quiet, and you come home with something.
The Starlings
Guess what I read: a lot of them aren’t ours at all. They arrive from northern Europe for the winter, which means the ones swirling over the Somerset Levels have travelled a good deal further than I ever will. They gather from about now until the start of March, and the show begins roughly an hour before sunset. More starlings than you can count, folding and unfolding in the sky like one enormous breathing thing, and then all at once dropping into the reeds as if someone had pulled a plug. The Avalon Marshes are one of the best places in the country to see it, and I can’t think of a better free thing to do on a November afternoon.
Sometimes they land in my garden, and I lose an hour without noticing.
Weather Soul
Ice in November to bear a duck,
Nothing after but mud and muck.
That’s the old rhyme. If I’ve learned anything about Somerset, it’s that we get the mud either way.
Then there’s Martinmas on the 11th. If the wind is in the south-west that day, it’s said to stay there until Candlemas in February and make for a mild winter. If it’s a north wind, bring a hat. I’ll be checking the weathervane on the 11th with the same face the whole country pulls on St Swithin’s Day.
Folklore Focus: November’s history and traditions: soul cakes, the Gunpowder Plot, Martinmas and Stir-up Sunday
The Month That Was Number Nine
November comes from novem, the Latin for nine. You know the drill by now. It was the ninth month before January and February shuffled everything along, and it’s been wearing the wrong number ever since. The Anglo-Saxons were less polite and called it Blōtmōnath, usually translated as the blood month or the month of sacrifice, because it was when the livestock that couldn’t be fed through winter were slaughtered. Cheerful. It’s a good reminder that this was the month of getting ready in the most practical sense imaginable, which makes my leaf garland feel a bit frivolous.
All Saints, All Souls and the Soul Cake
The first two days of the month are for remembering the dead, All Saints on the 1st and All Souls on the 2nd. Before Halloween became a shopping event, this was the real business. On All Souls, children and the poor went door to door singing for soul cakes, small spiced buns, in exchange for a prayer for the household’s dead. A soul, a soul, a soul cake. It’s where trick-or-treating is thought to come from, and I love that the original deal was cake in return for remembering.
Remember, Remember
Bonfire Night marks the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and we’ve been lighting fires on the fifth ever since. Somerset takes it further than anyone. The county has a whole circuit of illuminated carnivals that grew out of the Guy Fawkes celebrations, with enormous carts lit by thousands of bulbs rolling through the streets after dark. Bridgwater is first and biggest, and it ends with squibbing, which is lots of large fireworks fired at once, tied to poles and held above people’s heads. Ours is Shepton Mallet.
The feeling is the same wherever you stand. A bonfire against a starry sky, the flames reaching for the horizon, and then the fireworks go up and everyone, toddlers and grandparents and teenagers pretending not to care, tips their head back and goes ooh. We’ve been doing that for over four hundred years. I don’t think we’ll ever grow out of it.
Martinmas
On the 11th it’s Martinmas, the feast of St Martin of Tours, who as a young soldier cut his cloak in half with his sword to share it with a beggar. That’s the whole story, and it’s a good one: someone cold, someone with a cloak, a decision. Martinmas was once a big marker in the farming year, and the spell of mild weather that sometimes lands around it is called St Martin’s Summer. So November has its own little Indian summer, if you’re feeling hopeful. I am.
Stir-up Sunday
The last Sunday before Advent, this year the 22nd, is named after the opening words of that day’s prayer: Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people. Someone along the way noticed that “stir up” was also exactly what you’d want to do to a Christmas pudding, and it stuck. Guess what I read: the pudding is meant to be stirred from east to west, in honour of the journey of the Three Wise Men, by every member of the household in turn, each making a wish. A silver coin goes in. Nobody tells anyone their wish. I love all of it.
Remembering
Remembrance Sunday falls on the 8th, and Armistice Day on Wednesday the 11th, a hundred and eight years after the guns stopped at eleven in the morning in 1918. Poppies were among the first things to grow in the churned-up soil of the Western Front, and they’ve stood for remembering ever since.
In our village, the children from the school carry the poppy wreaths from the church, through the village, to the memorial in the graveyard. It’s the smallest procession you can imagine, and I find it hard to watch without something happening to my face. Children who’ve never met a single person whose name is on that stone, carrying wreaths very carefully and very seriously, because they’ve been told it matters. It does.
Everything is the colour of honey. Don't rush through it.
〰️
Everything is the colour of honey. Don't rush through it. 〰️
Moon Moment: The Beaver Moon
Full Moon in Gemini
Tuesday 24 November 2026 at 2.53pm GMT.
It looks full from the 23rd to the 25th.
The Beaver Moon is the last full moon of autumn, and it’s a near-supermoon, a touch bigger and brighter than usual depending whose definition you use. (NASA says yes, a stricter rule says no. I’m calling it near and leaving it there.)
The name comes from beavers busy building their lodges before winter, or, less cosily, from trappers setting their traps before the swamps froze. It’s also called the Frost Moon. Either way it’s a moon about getting ready, which is the whole month. October’s Hunter’s Moon was about filling the larder. This one is about the details: the lining, the last bit of mud on the roof.
It reaches full at 2.53 in the afternoon and rises in London just after three, so it spends the rest of the afternoon climbing out of the east as the light goes. It sits in Gemini, the sign of chat and curiosity and a bit of a gossip, and I can’t think of a moon better suited to cake, coffee and a proper catch-up.
The Beaver Moon Ritual
Go outside at about four, when it’s properly up and the sunset is still going. Coat, hat, gloves, something hot to drink. Stand there for five minutes. Then, and this is Gemini’s bit, send one person a message that says: look out of the window.Nothing else. Don’t explain. They’ll look, and for a minute you’ll both be seeing the same moon.
That’s the whole ritual. It costs nothing and it’s lovely.
New Moon Note
Monday 9 November 2026, the Scorpio moon
The new moon arrives at 7.02 on Monday morning, so the sky is at its darkest the night before, which happens to be the night of Remembrance Sunday. It sits in Scorpio, the sign that doesn’t do small talk, so I like it for asking one honest question.
What are you rushing through right now?
It isn’t a judgement, I’m asking myself too. The school run, the washing, the job, the month itself. Write the answer somewhere. Then do one thing slowly this week.
The Joy Edit
Six invitations for the committed life
October was a lot of saying no. Protecting the thing from September, defending the diary, closing the curtains. November says yes again, but only to the right things. Here’s what I’d say yes to.
Make the leaf garland: Go for a walk with a carrier bag and collect the best leaves you can find, the crisp, dry ones in good colours. Peg them along a length of string, or thread them with a needle and cotton. They curl as they dry, which is the charm. Hang it somewhere well clear of the fire. It comes down when December’s decorations go up, which means it was never competing with Christmas. It was just November, being decorative.
Go and watch the starlings: About an hour before sunset, somewhere with a wide view. The Avalon Marshes on the Levels are the famous spot, and the RSPB runs a starling hotline (07866 554142) from 1 November that tells you where they roosted the night before, so a quick call will save you a wasted drive. Take a flask and a torch for the walk back. Or just stand at the end of your garden and look up. They might surprise you.
Keep the gathering small: Text someone and say the kettle’s on. Coffee and cake, a tin of homemade biscuits, a walk with a flask. Nobody needs a roast, and nobody’s counting. Hospitality in November is a decision, not an obligation, and the smaller you make it, the more often you’ll actually do it.
Stir the pudding on the 22nd: Even if you bought it. Stir it and put it back in the cupboard. It’s the tiniest of rituals and it makes December feel like it’s already on its way.
Stand still for two minutes on the 8th: At the village memorial if there’s one near you, or in your kitchen. Wear a poppy. Let it be quiet. It doesn’t need to be more than that.
Light the fire at three: Not at six. The dark arrives early enough, so meet it first. A fire in the afternoon changes the whole shape of the day. Someone will start poking it mid-conversation, and that’s how you know it’s working.
November reminder, write this somewhere obvious: November is for November. December can wait.
Picnic, But Make It November: The flask, the fire pit and the car picnic we don’t discuss
October’s picnic was the pub roast. November’s is smaller and warmer and entirely portable: the picnic you carry rather than the one you set down.
The Walk with a Flask
A flask of soup, a tin of homemade biscuits and a walk with somewhere to stop. Stand at a gate, pour, and hold the cup in both hands like it’s the most precious thing you own, because at that moment it is. The soup is hotter than you think and the biscuit is better than it has any right to be.
The Fire Pit
S’mores over the garden fire pit, in coats, with children who are far too excited and a marshmallow that will inevitably catch fire. Blankets on knees, hats on heads and nobody wanting to be the first to go inside.
The Carnival
Candy floss in a bag and hot chocolate in a cardboard cup that is slightly too hot and slightly too weak, standing on a pavement in Shepton Mallet with half the town while a cart the size of a house goes past covered in lights. That’s November at its most November.
The Car Picnic
And there is also, and I say this with love and no shame, the midweek McDonald’s in the car, eaten between clubs and errands with the heating on and the windows steaming up. Technically it’s a picnic. It’s food, it’s eaten somewhere that isn’t a table, and nobody’s washing up. I’m not saying it’s in the Duchess of Picnics handbook. I’m saying it should be.
What to pack, the November basket:
A flask of soup, and a second flask for the tea
Homemade biscuits in a tin
A jacket potato in foil, which doubles as a hand warmer
Godminster, always, in every month
A s’mores kit if the fire pit’s calling
Hats, gloves and a proper blanket
The good glasses are on sabbatical until spring. The flask has taken over.
The best November picnic is the one you drink standing up, in the cold, feeling oddly rich.
Etiquette, as ever, kindly enforced:
Leave the field, the lane and the layby as you found them, and take your cardboard cups home. Wave at every other walker you meet. November walkers all wear the same hat-and-gloves look of quiet triumph, and it would be rude not to acknowledge it. Pour the first cup for someone else.
At the carnival, let the little ones go to the front, and wave back at the people on the carts. They’ve been building those floats for months, and they’d like to know someone’s looking.
The midweek McDonald’s has one rule of its own: the wrappers come home with you, not down the side of the seat.
And if it rains, which it will, because it’s November, pack up cheerfully and call it a success. You went. The soup was hot. That is always the whole thing.
Cooking with the Seasons
November recipes and ideas: slow-cooker chilli, casseroles, toffee apples and parkin
November’s kitchen has one big rule: let the slow cooker do the work. The chilli goes on in the morning, the jacket potatoes go in the oven, and by the time everyone’s home it’s ready and nothing is burnt. A casserole in the oven works the same way. The risk of a burnt dinner suddenly drops to almost nothing, and so does my stress level.
What to Cook This Month
Slow-cooker chilli with cheese-layered jacket potatoes: Chilli on at breakfast. Potatoes baked until the skins crackle, then split, layered with cheese and chilli and more cheese, and back in the oven to melt. November in a bowl.
A casserole in a heavy dish: Something that can sit in the oven for hours and forgive you if you forget it for twenty minutes. Add dumplings if the mood takes you.
A roast, or two: I might do one or two for family and friends before Christmas, but the proper roast invitations I’m saving for January and February, when everyone’s tired and needs feeding.
Toffee apples: Small crisp Somerset apples, a stick, glossy toffee. A word of warning: the toffee is very hot, and no grown-up has ever eaten one without looking slightly ridiculous.
Parkin: Sticky ginger and treacle cake, traditional for Bonfire Night, and better after a few days in a tin, so make it early.
Biscuits and a loaf cake: For the small gatherings. Nothing fancy, just something to put on the table when someone says they’ll pop round.
Sloe gin: The jar from September, hiding in a dark cupboard, is nearly there. A tiny taste at the end of the month to check, and then back it goes for Christmas.
Tiny Somerset Swaps
Small crisp apples for the toffee, from the farm shop, the ones with the handwritten labels. Sausages and good cheese for the jacket potatoes from the same place. Godminster, obviously, because a jacket potato is really just a cheddar vehicle.
Waste-Not Note
Leftover chilli → on toast tomorrow, or back on another potato, nobody’s judging.
Casserole leftovers → a pie with a lid. Parkin crumbs → over yoghurt.
Jacket potato skins → crisped in the oven with salt.
This month you’ll find me …
November is the month I stop rushing it.
Hanging the leaf garland over the mantel, well clear of the sparks, which is the kind of detail I’m told matters.
Wearing a poppy on my coat by the back door, next to the wellies. Poppies were one of my nan’s favourite flowers.
Doing sparklers in the garden on the 5th, and then the village bonfire in wellies in a field, with a toffee apple and a hat pulled down.
At the Shepton Mallet carnival on the 18th, in thermals (yes, thermals, I’m not ashamed), and then home to the log burner glowing.
Drinking chai lattes. Not pumpkin spice, never pumpkin spice. Chai is my autumn treat, and this is the month it starts.
Wearing the wool jumpers that have come out of hiding, and not taking them off until March.
Watching the starlings, who sometimes land in the garden, and losing an hour I’d planned to spend doing something useful. I regret none of it.
Stirring the pudding on the 22nd, wish made, and, as tradition demands, not shared.
Feeling, for the first time, that November isn’t a corridor to December. It’s a room, and it’s lovely in here.
November. Slow down. It’s nice in here.
May your fire be lit before the dark arrives, your biscuits survive until the guests do, and your November be allowed to be exactly itself.
With love, Gemma x
Stay a while …
Come and be nosey …
The blanket is always out over on Instagram. Behind the scenes Picnicscapes, Somerset life as it actually happens, and the occasional opinion about gingham.
