A day when it is ‘certain to rain heavily’. But it didn’t really did it? I experienced it as a nice warm sunny day.
On this day you, supposing you are someone who wants to find out who your true lover is, must:
Carefully peel an apple in one piece.
Turn round three times with the peel in your right hand
The peel will fall in the shape of your the first letter of your true love’s name.
Drop the peel over your left shoulder
See what shape letter it forms on the ground and this will be the first letter of your true love’s name.
And if it breaks into pieces you are doomed, probably, to never finding your true love.
To make this work you have to repeat:
St Simon and St Jude, on your I intrude
By this paring I hold to discover
Without any delay, to tell me this day
The first letter of my own true love.
Jude is the Saint of:
Lost Causes
Desperate causes
Hopeless causes
The Hopeless and the Despaired.
So maybe the apple peel isn’t going to work for you (although he is also the Patron Saint of the Impossible).
Simon the Zealous was martyred by being sawn in half, and is, of course, the patron saint of woodcutters and lumberjacks. Jude aka Thaddeus was martyred with an axe. They are linked by the same Saint’s day because they went to Syria together to preach where they were met their fates.
There are at least four Judes who may or may not be different people. One of them, who may have been Jesus’ brother, wrote the Epistle of St. Jude. This letter, on slim foundations, is a possible explanation of why he is the Saint of Lost Causes because he warns of the dangers of the wicked working against salvation. But if this is true than the Lost Cause is Christianity so I think not. His real name was Judas and the identification with Judas Iscariot is given as another reason for the Lost Causes association but why?