Celebrating New Year’s Day in one of the last poteaux-en-terre houses in America

How is it that a 225-year-old house still stands in Ste. Geneviève? And how is it that Ste. Geneviève and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, are the last two places on earth where fiddlers and singers still assemble on porches on New Year’s Eve night, demanding in archaic French that the maître and maîtresse of the house feed them and dance to their music?

La guillonée is a Gaulish begging ritual said to date back to Iron Age Druid priests who walked through oak groves on December 31, sickling down bunches of au gui l’an neuf—mistletoe for the New Year. Fur-trappers, living on the island of Montreal in 1611, sang the traditional la guillonée song. They sang it in the village of Kaskaskia, Illinois, where Joseph-Vital Ste. Beauvais was born in 1736.

After Beauvais built this house in 1792, there’s no doubt men gathered on his porch, stamping their feet and demanding entry. Like most French colonial houses, the Vital Ste. Gemme Beauvais House is “earthfast,” built around posts driven into the ground, a construction style common in medieval times.

See also: The restoration of this 225-year-old Ste. Genevieve home was a “labor of love”

In 1999, chef Yvonne Lemire bought this house, excavating dirt once packed into the basement to smother a leaky pipe. She also patched walls, using bousillage (clay, moss, and horsehair), and installed colonial-era cabinetry. After using it as home base for her French cooking school, Rosemary & Thyme, Lemire put the house on the market last year, ready for a new family to live there.

But there’s nothing truly new about the new year—or the so-called New World. That’s the true message of la guillonée, which more likely comes from the Gallic word eginane: the germ of the wheat. The true shape of time is a circle, like the seed that drops in the fall, sprouts in the spring, and continues on, generation after generation.