Christmas

by Judith Flanders

  When Herrick becomes our sole, or most detailed, source, matters become even less certain. In ‘Christmasse-Eve, another Ceremonie’ Herrick describes what sounds like a long-established practice:

  Come guard this night the Christmas-Pie,

  That the Thiefe, though ne’r so slie,

  With his Flesh-hooks, don’t come nie

  To catch it.

  Yet no one else records anything remotely like this. Perhaps the poem is a political allegory; Herrick would not be alone in writing about politics in holiday disguise. Ben Jonson’s 1616 Christmas, His Masque also comments on the current political turmoil: a character named variously Old Christmas, Christmas of London and Captain Christmas affirms that, although he was born in Pope’s Head Alley (a real London street as well as a nod to the Puritan belief that Christmas was a ‘popish’ day), he is ‘as good a Protestant as any’. His ten children, Misrule, Carol, Mince Pie, Gambol, Post-and-Pair (a card game), New Year’s Gift, Mumming, Wassail, Offering (charitable giving) and Baby Cake (another name for a Twelfth Night, or bean cake), were personifications of Christmas practices ‘of old’, looking back to an ideal Christmas that was no more.

  Personifying the holiday became a favoured tool of promoters of the season, be it using him as a ‘King of good cheer and feasting’ or turning him into an old man behind bars under the Commonwealth.

  The first personification had appeared at least a century earlier. It was, however, in Alsace, not in England, that the Weihnachtsmann, the Christmas Man, first emerged in the early sixteenth century. He was followed by the Christkind, introduced in Protestant regions by Martin Luther. Initially a devout holy child, by the nineteenth century the Christkind had softened, becoming an angelic blond, girlish figure in a white dress, wearing a gold crown surmounted by a candle. Sometimes he was smaller, more childlike, and called the Christpuppe, or Christ-doll. But neither could compete in ubiquity with St Nicholas and his accompanying helper.

  The St Nicholas legend had developed in the Netherlands when it was under Spanish occupation between 1581 and 1714. There, by the seventeenth century, St Nicholas was accompanied by his Moorish helper, Zwarte Piet, as he deposited small presents in the shoes of good children, leaving it to Zwarte Piet to mete out punishment to the bad. Elsewhere on the continent, St Nicholas had earlier handed out apples and nuts, symbols of harvest and plenty; it is possible that oranges were now added in this country ruled by the princes of the House of Orange-Nassau.* So were baked goods: honey cake and a spice cake called parliament bread were sold seasonally across the Netherlands, while in Dordrecht, a claescoeck, or Nicholas cake, was a regional speciality.

  Such gifts of food were becoming common, whether given by St Nicholas, the Christkind or the Weihnachtsmann, even as the custom of presenting gifts to show loyalty to a feudal lord were dying away as feudalism itself was dying. In England, Old Christmas had not been a gift-bringer, but there gifts of obligation continued for a time. The diarist Samuel Pepys recorded that his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, commander of the fleet that brought Charles II back to England, had as ‘an Earle [given] 20 pieces in gold in a purse to the King’, ‘as is usuall at this time of the year’. Soon, however, the destabilized monarchy finished the custom off: it was rumoured, and may have been true, that Charles II had turned all of his gifts over to one of his mistresses, making an already unpopular requirement less popular still.

  By contrast, gift-giving between equals increased. In the Netherlands there were sanctjes, little cards bearing an image of St Nicholas. In France and in England, for the increasing numbers of the literate, books were becoming the standard gift, and would remain so, while in England small items of jewellery, wine and luxury foods also came into vogue. Food and drink dominated: in 1660 Pepys recorded receiving a turkey from an old friend, a bird from the country remaining a frequent year-end gift throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. He also received a dozen bottles of sack (white wine) from his patron.

  This latter was not, of course, a gift between equals. Lord Sandwich was a member of the Council of State and a peer; Pepys was a naval administrator – a civil servant. And this quasi-gift – a tip, or top-up to payments made throughout the year, was, and was to remain, a seasonal staple. It also remained, for the giver, a source of seasonal grumbling. When Christmas was forbidden, wrote John Taylor, apprentices and servants, deliverymen and boys were all out of luck: ‘their Christmas Boxes were banished’ too. With the return of the monarchy came the return of Christmas boxes. When Pepys paid his shoemaker, he automatically ‘gave something to the boy’s box against Christmas’; another year, he ‘dropped money at five or six places, which I was the willinger to do, it being Christmas Day’.

  It was literally Christmas Day, 25 December, when Pepys made these payments: the shops were all open. For half a century closed shops had indicated Christmas observance; now open shops meant the same, because Christmas was the time of eating and drinking, and some foods had to be purchased on the day of consumption.

  Pepys’s Christmas dinner in 1662 had included a mince pie, a ‘brave plum-porridge and a roasted Pullet’, the sort of winter meal that a family of middle income would expect. By contrast, great houses still served up great feasts. The first major cookbook in English giving household recipes set out in 1660 ‘A Bill of Fare for Christmas Day’:

  Oysters.

  1. A collar of brawn.

  2. Stewed Broth of Mutton marrow bones.

  3. A grand Sallet.

  4. A pottage of caponets.

  5. A breast of veal in stofado.

  6. A boil’d partridge.

  7. A chine of beef, or surloin roast.

  8. Minced pies.

  9. A Jegote [gigot] of mutton with anchove sauce.

  10. A made dish of sweetbread.

  11. A swan roast.

  12. A pasty of venison.

  13. A kid with a pudding in his belly.

  14. A steak pie.

  15. A haunch of venison roasted.

  16. A turkey roast and stuck with cloves.

  17. A made dish of chickens in puff paste.

  18. Two bran geese roasted, one larded.

  19. Two large capons, one larded.

  20. A custard.

  The second course for the same Mess.

  Oranges and Lemonds.

  21. A young lamb or kid.

  22. Two couple of rabbits, two larded.

  23. A pig souc’t with tongues.

  24. Three ducks, one larded.

  25. Three pheasants, 1 larded.

  26. A Swan Pye.

  27. Three brace of partridge, three larded.

  28. Made dish in puff paste.

  29. Bolonia sausages, and anchovies, mushrooms, and Cavieate, and pickled oysters in a dish.

  30. Six teels, three larded.

  31. A Gammon of Westphalia Bacon.

  32. Ten plovers, five larded.

  33. A quince pye, or warden pie.

  34. Six woodcocks, 3 larded.

  35. A standing Tart in puff paste, preserved fruits, Pippins, &c.

  36. A dish of Larks.

  37. Six dried neats [ox] tongues.

  38. Sturgeon.

  39. Powdered Geese. Jellies.

  With this went music, for ‘the Holidayes and Musicke … must bee in tune’, ‘and not a Cup of drinke must passe without a Caroll’. In carols, food and drink were linked, with many lyrics giving at most a nod to religion before turning to more important things:

  Now that the time is come wherein

  Our Saviour Christ was born,

  The larders full of beef and pork,

  And garners filled with corn …

  These carols were now everywhere. The very first collection had been English, in 1521, but after that, carol publishing moved to continental Europe. One of the most influential collections was compiled by the head of the cathedral school in Turku, in what is now Finland, in 1582. Entitled Piae Cantiones Ecclesiasticae et Scholasticae V
eterum Episcoporum (Pious Church and School Songs of the Ancient Churchmen), it was a collection of seventy-three Latin hymns and carols sung in Germany, England, France, Sweden, Finland and Italy, together with their tunes.* More carols were written in the languages of each country. By the end of the seventeenth century, the following were all known: ‘Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly’, ‘The First Nowell’, ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen’, ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’, ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’, ‘The Coventry Carol’ and ‘The Somerset Carol’ in the British Isles; in Poland ‘Lulajże Jezuniu’ (the melody of which was adapted by Chopin in his first Scherzo, in 1830); in Germany, ‘Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her’, written by Luther himself, and parts of ‘O Tannenbaum’ (the first verse and musical setting are probably sixteenth or seventeenth century, the later verses and musical adaptation are nineteenth century); and in Sweden, ‘Nu är det Jul igen’, to name but a few. New France had ‘Jesous Ahatonhia’, its first indigenous-language carol, written by the missionary Father Jean de Brébeuf in Huron (Wyandot), in which Jesus lies in a birchbark lodge as great chiefs from afar come bearing beaver pelts.

  The lyrics of carols could encompass the nativity, Christmas greenery, or love, or they could be comic verses, or political satire. One 1675 carol booklet, ‘Make Room for Christmas All you that do love Him’, outlined a tradesman’s Christmas: visiting neighbours, roasting apples by the fire, listening to a merry tale, singing ‘melodious Carrols’, and ‘so we’l be higly pigly one with another’.

  Too higgledy-piggledy, perhaps: many continued to fear the holiday seduced the population ‘to Drunkenness, Gluttony, & unlawful Gaming, Wantonness, Uncleanness, Lasciviousness, Cursing, Swearing’ and, ultimately, ‘all to idleness’. The playwright William Davenant, sometimes said to be Shakespeare’s godson, had a character claim that more children were ‘begot i’ the Christmas Holydaies’ than at any other time of the year, ‘when the Spirit of Mince-Pie Raignes in the blood’.

  And yet the splendidly named Ofspring Blackall, both High Church and High Tory, and soon to be the Bishop of Exeter, felt no need to apologize. Christmas, he wrote, was ‘the time of the whole year, for good Eating and Drinking’. For it was the sociable aspect of Christmas that was thriving, even as more formal, organized entertainment was going into decline. In 1635, just before the Civil War, in the Inns of Court, one eager bencher had paid £2,000 to be named Lord of Misrule; fifty years on, the Inns’ senior members were effectively forced to bribe one of their juniors to take on the role. And while the legend of the open-handed hospitality of the Middle Ages endured – as late as 1777, to be generous was to be ‘as free as an open house at Christmas’ – even those great families who entertained, if not as promiscuously as many believe, were altering their behaviour. In part this was a reflection of changes in architectural fashion. No longer did the upper classes live in houses with central great halls. Small tenants were now wined and dined in the kitchens, servants’ halls, or housekeepers’ rooms, or in the butlers’ pantries, while the parlour was for blood-kin and social equals and accommodated fewer high-level servants such as land agents and stewards, who had previously eaten with the family.

  That is not to say there was less entertainment: civic bodies, guilds, local grandees, those high in the church hierarchy, all gave breakfasts, dinners and ceremonial feasts. But private citizens, the ‘true bred Gallant and man of Quality’, began to disdain such occasions, instead ‘slip[ping] up to London’ for the entire cycle of days, ‘to save charges’, that is, the expense of feasting his tenants and dependants.

  Now men of quality were spending Christmas very much like the middle classes: small family groups, if that, on Christmas Day. On 25 December 1661, Pepys went to church, then dined alone with his wife before going out for a walk, followed by a ‘merry’ supper with friends.

  It may be that the violent disorders and topsy-turvydom of the Civil War had temporarily suspended the taste for pretend disorder and topsy-turvydom. Some street festivities continued: court records in Scotland reported people out ‘gyseing with a false beard’, or ‘gyseing in womenis habite’, with their ‘faces blaickit’. But such customs continued to be more prominent in other parts of Europe. The Scandinavian equivalent of the English hobby-horse was the Yule goat, a wooden beast sometimes topped by an actual goat skull, its tail strung with bells, its jaw manipulated by sticks to snap at bystanders as it pranced down the streets. In some regions an ox, ram, fox or bear replaced the goat as the centrepiece, and young single men, elected Christmas bishops or priests, often joined in. Their faces blackened, or wearing collars of hay, the mock-clergymen oversaw ‘weddings’ and ‘communion’. From at least the sixteenth century, star boys, children dressed as the Magi and wearing paper crowns, some with their faces blackened (for Balthazar, in European Christian tradition often said to be Ethiopian), sometimes accompanied by others portraying Herod, or soldiers, or Judas, carried stars of Bethlehem from house to house, singing carols of the Magi’s journey or acting out the nativity story. On 26 December, St Stephen’s Day, the Yule or Staffans Ride saw young men compete on horseback. It was also a day for anonymous practical jokes, ‘signed’ by leaving a Staffan, a doll, at the site of each trick. In Switzerland the gift-bringer known as Samichlaus (Swiss-German for Sankt Klaus, that is, Niklaus) took part in house-to-house processions accompanied by masked young men making noise with horns, bells and guns.

  In England, outdoor events clustered not around Christmas Day, but around Twelfth Night. Wassailing was a moveable feast, and some took cider to orchards on Twelfth Day, or drank the health of their farm’s oxen with a ring-shaped cake hanging over the largest animal’s horn:

  Fill up your cups, my merry men all:

  For here’s the best ox in all the stall;

  Oh! He is the best ox, of that there’s no mistake,

  And so let us crown him with the Twelfth-cake.

  More common were domestic Twelfth Night celebrations, replacing the older courtly entertainments. The highlight was the Twelfth Night cake, with its bean and pea to select the Twelfth Night king and queen. In the New World, when the French explorer Robert de La Salle was mapping out the Mississippi Basin, he recorded: ‘on Twelve-Day we cry’d, The King Drinks … tho’ we had only Water…’ Herrick described a similar salute with ‘joy sops’, or cake dipped in wine, and guests who ‘drinke / To the base from the brink / A health to the King and the Queene here’. The cake was probably spice or plum (dried fruit) cake, although it was the nineteenth century before a recipe formally named a fruitcake a Twelfth Night cake. The first recipe we know of for a bean cake, in 1620 in Geneva, was a honey and ginger cake, not fruitcake. Pepys recorded celebrating Twelfth Night in five of the ten years his diary covers, always with a cake to mark the day.*

  Pepys and his friends were not just electing a Twelfth king or queen. By now, the evening’s entertainment had expanded, and tokens in the cake designated a multitude of ‘characters’, one for each of the party, selected either from popular current plays, or archetypes – a knave, a cuckold, a slut.† As the tokens got bigger, and there were more of them, while the cakes became more elaborate and expensive, the names of the characters began to be written on slips of paper and drawn from a hat instead of being baked into the cake. Soon pastrycooks stocked cards printed with an engraving of each character, and street-sellers sold broadsides printed with Twelfth Night poems, surrounded by the characters, which could be cut up, one character to a slip, for the hat.

  * * *

  By the seventeenth century, Christmas was a season. A book describing ‘every action … proper to each particular Moneth’ of the year called January, not December, the month of Christmas:

  it shares the chearfull carrolls of the wassell cup, Beasts, Fowls, and Fish come to a generall Execution [to be eaten] … and Cards and Dice purge many a purse … a good fire heats all the house, and a full Alms-basket sets the beggar to his prayers, Masking, and Mumming, and choosing King and Queen, the m
eeting of the friendly, and the mirth of the honest.

  Domesticity, warmth, family feeling, carols, eating and drinking – Christmas was on the move again.

  Chapter Four

  The ban on Christmas in the British Isles and Puritan New England had, counter-intuitively, made the holiday more, rather than less, visible. However the hospitality of the landed gentry had been organized, it had taken place in their houses: the tenants, their dependants, were welcomed and given food and drink, if only on the doorstep as they wassailed the house.

  In the southern American colonies, where the upper classes prided themselves on following English customs, grandees like the planter William Byrd II continued this older, private tradition: he and his family went to church, ate roast beef and turkey and ‘In the evening we were merry with nonsense and so were my servants.’ Others maintained an air of patrician ignorance of the people’s celebrations: Jefferson rarely mentions the day, Washington spent it foxhunting, or doing end-of-year accounts. Some, like Landon Carter, a Virginia planter, found satisfaction ‘in not letting my People keep any part of Christmas, because the more civilized show themselves too foolish’. Over thirty years, he mentions Christmas just thirteen times in his diary, mostly in the form of date references – his tobacco would be planted by Christmas, for example.

  For the people, however, the day was spent in taverns and inns, and then out on the streets. For them, Christmas had become a winter carnival. Preachers, of course, disapproved. The Puritan minister Increase Mather saw the holidays – ‘as they are called’, he added, holding the word out with metaphorical tongs – being spent in drinking, gambling, ‘Revellings’, ‘mad Mirth’, and, in case his listeners hadn’t been paying attention, he repeated drinking. Yet three of his socially prominent congregants disagreed: ‘I Con, they Pro,’ Mather noted succinctly. Half a century later there was a significant shift when his son, Cotton Mather, one of the most influential ministers in New England, denounced behaviour arising from the holiday, but not the holiday itself: his ‘Black List’ condemned the ‘Evil Customes’ he saw around him. Gambling and drinking that became ‘riot’ were prevalent at all gatherings, where young people might be tempted. And temptation was notably seasonal: the illegitimate birth rate had a suspicious leap in September and October, more than hinting at what had occurred the previous Christmas.