A Brief History of the Boar’s Head Festival
by John Shiffert
The signature event in the St. Peter’s evangelism calendar since 1980, the Boar's Head and Yule Log Festival celebrated its 42nd renewal in January 2025. Thus, there is a lot of history to the Boar's Head at St. Peter’s, far too much for this venue. So, we’ll take a brief dive into origins.
According to the program for the fourth St. Peter’s festival (Jan. 8. Jan. 9, 1983), the original Boar’s Head dates back to Roman times, with the serving of the Boar’s Head (one would assumed a cooked boar’s head, since it was the first dish at the great Roman feasts) representing the triumph of Christ over evil, since the boar was considered a menace to man and a great evil in Norman England. (Something William the Conqueror would agree to.)
As to the first boar’s head procession, mythology tells us that a youth was walking through a forest, studying a book of Aristotle when he was attacked by a wild boar. He shoved Aristotle down the boar’s throat with the cry of “Graecum est!” Latin for “It’s Greek to me” (what Aristotle had to do with a Christian legend is a mystery). More specifically, Oxford and Cambridge universities were holding boar’s head festivals as early as the 14th Century.
Jumping ahead to January 1979, another fearless individual, St. Peter’s organist and choirmaster Robert H. “Bob” Rosenberger, flew to Palm Beach, Florida to research a festival held at an Episcopalin church there. As the “father” of St. Peter’s Boar’s Head Festival, Bob was the guiding light of a successful pageant for many years. His only disappointment with St. Peter’s festival was that they could never get permission to use a live donkey to bring the holy family on stage.
Speaking of the holy family, the program for the 1983 Boar's Head has a couple of interesting inclusions. We all know that our distinguished Church Council President, Gary Rotenbury, now fulfills the role of Joseph with heart, passion and song. However, in 1983, the role of Joseph was a non-singing role, and Gary was playing Good King Wenceslas. As for the holy family, Susan Neborak played Mary and a totally non-singing John Shiffert, Sr. played Joseph. A well-known “ham” himself, Jack Shiffert was a fine actor, but a terrible singer… lol.
