Nov 30th - Feast Day of St. Andrew the Apostle

And here I'd always thought that Andrew was one of the more uninteresting saints....

Twice I'd encountered him on the streets of the City of the Angels: first, as San Andreas Avenue, on western Mt. Washington; and then, passing almost the entire north-south breadth of the city, as St. Andrews Place. Certainly St. Andrews Place is a fascinating street to study, traversing so many communities and economic classes of L.A. - even boasting a classic encounter between rich and poor at the intersection of St. Andrews and Venice Boulevard, where the wealthy neighbors to the north set an iron gate to keep out their meager neighbors a block to the south....

No, the problem seem to lay more with the saint himself - a stodgy sort of fellow, rustic and lacking in discernible character traits.

But I just saw, on the Patron Saints website, a great little legend or, better, superstition about the fellow:
"An old German tradition says that single women who wish to marry should ask for Saint Andrew's help on the Eve of his feast, then sleep naked that night; they will see their future husbands in their dreams."

Apparently, as patron saint of unmarried women, Andrew has been able to convince maidens over the years to shed their clothing in exchange for a little matchmaking. In this vein Wikipedia informs us that "In some areas in Austria, young girls would drink wine and then perform a spell, called Andreasgebet (Saint Andrew's prayer) while nude and kicking a straw bed." The goal of this slightly odd activity is that it would "magically attract [her] future husband."

It's such a fascinating idea, that somehow over the years a tradition developed, of thousands of women going to sleep in the nude the night of November 29th; and of sometime soon thereafter (for the belief must have had some efficacy for it to endure) these women would marry "the man of their dreams," as it were.

Why would St. Andrew have exacted such a bargain though? Why did he choose only to help women who sleep in the nude the eve of his Feast Day? What is Saint Andrew really like? How does he feel on his the morning of his Feast Day, as these women awaken? Now I have a great curiosity about him.... I'm going to have to think on this for some time.