For, while Christmas has transformed itself over the centuries, from a time for the nobility to display their wealth to their dependants, to a time for adults to enjoy what little extra they could gather, to a festival primarily for and about children – from elite to mass, from adult to child, from public to family – while the holiday has altered, it has survived, it has thrived, because, ultimately, Christmas is not what is, or even has been, but what we hope for.
Part of the meaning of Christmas is in repetition, but a very particular form of repetition, a repetition of forgetting and remembering, of remembering and misremembering. The early twentieth-century journalist G. K. Chesterton wrote dozens of pieces on the holiday, one of which was a story entitled ‘The Shop of Ghosts’. In a shabby London shop, an ‘old and broken’ white-bearded proprietor refuses all payment for the toys he stocks, prompting the narrator to recognize him as Father Christmas, just as another customer enters, none other than Charles Dickens, to whom Father Christmas confides that he is dying. Dickens waves it away: ‘Dash it all, you were dying in my time.’ The next customer is the eighteenth-century essayist Sir Richard Steele, who is also astonished by the old man’s complaint, ‘for the man was dying when we wrote about Sir Roger de Coverley and his Christmas’. So too with Ben Jonson, who remembers Father Christmas’s failing health in the seventeenth century. Finally ‘a green-clad man, like Robin Hood’ wonders at the phenomenon that is Father Christmas: ‘I [also] saw the man dying’, he remembers before it is given to Dickens to comprehend the greater truth: ‘Mr Dickens took off his hat with a flourish … “I understand it now,” he cried, “you will never die.”’
It is this cycle of death and renewal that is the heart of Christmas. It allows us an illusion of stability, of long-established communities, a way to believe in an imagined past, when it was safe for children to play in the street, when no one locked their doors and everybody knew their neighbours, all the while unconsciously omitting the less desirable parts of those times. In our imagined past, we can vicariously enjoy Jane Carlyle’s Christmas party romp while remaining oblivious to Hannah Cullwick’s back-breaking, filthy eighteen-hour work-days. We can imagine the taste of home-grown and home-preserved vegetables while overlooking the miles trudged carrying buckets of water, or weeding in the blazing sun, or fear of a drought that would bring starvation.
The stories of family holidays of the past are similarly misted and softened, the edges smoothed away unconsciously. Psychologists studying the function of memory have found that, over time and over generations, distressing or embarrassing elements in the retelling of family events vanish; incidents that have no physical or emotional meaning to the next generation are forgotten; details that are unfamiliar to their audiences are replaced by more familiar details from their own lives. We can see how this has regularly occurred in Christmas celebrations in every country. When people say they miss the old holiday traditions, few mean that they miss people creeping up on their house and firing guns in the middle of the night. Or that they miss wearing goat-skeletons on their heads. Or that they miss Christmas being the one day in the year that they can afford to eat meat.
What they mean is that they miss what we understand emotively to be the central core of the holiday, not the lives we have, but the lives we would like to have, in a world where family, religion, personal and social relationships are built on firm foundations. It is not, therefore, surprising that the most profound changes in the celebration of Christmas accompanied the four great revolutions of the modern period in the West: the Civil War that toppled Charles I and brought Cromwell to power, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. These revolutions brought changes that were irreversible. Industrialization, modernization, urbanization: all contributed to a communal desire for the past, for a place and a time that never existed, where we are loved, protected and cherished.
The rituals of Christmas allow us to believe, if only for one day a year, that that world exists. And the real magic? By repeating the rituals, we can go back there every year. Christmas nostalgia is not only for the Christmases of our childhoods, or those we have read about, or seen in films and television. It is a conflation of all of those Christmases, a pick-and-mix collection of traditions, emotions and rituals. Some are ours, some our parents’, or what we think we remember of what our parents have recalled of their own childhood Christmases. Others come from books, from magazines, from how Martha Stewart or Nigella Lawson or the Food Network or Oprah tells us things have ‘always’ been done, validating our own, or brand-new, customs by claiming that they are long-standing rituals based in historical reality.
‘Ceremony’, wrote a seventeenth-century historian, ‘keeps up all things; ’Tis like a Penny-Glass to a rich Spirit, or some excellent Water; without it the Water were spilt, the Spirit lost.’ So do our inexpensive Christmas containers, our rituals and traditions, enable us to savour the rich emotions and values that lie within.
Ultimately, we need to believe that Christmas is, as Scrooge’s nephew Fred tells him
a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!
Further Reading
In the last forty years, Christmas has started to be taken seriously as a subject. There are now many academic books, and some more general introductions. Good overviews are Mark Connelly, Christmas: A History (2012) and Paul Frodsham, From Stonehenge to Santa Claus: The Evolution of Christmas (2008).
For Christmas in Britain, the standards are J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, The Making of Modern Christmas (2000); J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s Christmas: A Social History (1978); and Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, Christmas Past (1987). Some of these are now somewhat out of date, but they remain important. The sections on Christmas in Ronald Hutton’s The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996) are essential reading too.
For Christmas in Germany, books in English include Karin Friedrich (ed.), Festive Culture in Germany and Europe from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (2000) and, especially, the magisterial Joe Perry, Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History (2010).
Among the many books on Christmas in the USA, Karal Ann Marling, Merry Christmas! Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday (2000) takes an original and innovative look at various customs. Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (1996) and Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (1995) are both highly recommended, especially for their use of diaries, letters and other original sources.
For those with a sociological bent, Daniel Miller (ed.), Unwrapping Christmas (1993) is the standard work on how, what and why we do what we do on the day.
The origins of the Christmas tree are neatly summarized by Bernd Brunner, Inventing the Christmas Tree, trans. Benjamin A. Smith (2012); and the leading expert on Santa and St Nicholas remains Charles W. Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (1978).
For further reading on the fluidity of custom and tradition, the introduction in Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2010) has never been surpassed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (1983), while not dealing with Christmas as such, have much to say on history and how we read it.
A complete reading list, together with full notes on all the sources used in this book, appears online, at:
www.christmas-biography.com
ALSO BY JUDITH FLANDERS
A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin
The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime
The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London
The Making of Home: The 500- Year Story of How Our Houses Became Our Homes
FICTION
A Murder of Magpies
A Bed of Scorpions
A Cast of Vultures
About the Author
JUDITH FLANDERS is an international bestselling author and one of the foremost social historians of the Victorian era. Her book Inside the Victorian Home was shortlisted for the British Book Awards History Book of the Year. Judith is a frequent contributor to the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement. She lives in London. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Legend
A partial holiday calendar
When Mince Pies Reign
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Further Reading
Also by Judith Flanders
About the Author
Copyright
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
CHRISTMAS. Copyright © 2017 by Judith Flanders. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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ISBN 978-1-250-11834-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-11835-6 (ebook)
First published in Great Britain by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan
First U.S. Edition: October 2017
eISBN 9781250118356
First eBook edition: October 2017
* Citations and notes for all sources can be found online at www.christmas-biography.com.
* For a summary holiday calendar, see here.
* 25 December was the shortest day of the year when the Julian calendar was adopted in 45 BCE. Until the leap year was inserted in 8 CE, the reality of a solar year of 365.25 days meant that by 4 CE, Easter, calculated from the vernal equinox, had drifted away from its intended mooring. The vernal equinox was therefore moved from 25 to 21 March, and the autumn equinox and summer and winter solstices automatically moved too, thus unintentionally separating the winter solstice and Christmas Day.
* Bede also wrote that there had been a pagan solstice festival called Modranicht, or Mother Night, but no other reference to it has ever been found. The word Christmas, or, rather, Cristesmæsse, Christ’s mass, replaced Yule in the British Isles sometime after the ninth century, when referring to the liturgical date, not the celebrations around it. That word gradually became standard, except in areas of Viking settlement, and Yule returned only in the nineteenth century, when the love of Olde England brought about a revival of what was then thought to be a relic of pagan days.
* In some places children left out straw, carrots and sugar for Sleipnir, but as carrots were not introduced into Europe until the eighth century, this is by necessity a much later contribution.
* By 1752, George II was merely going through the motions, and the ceremony was unimportant enough that a spectator felt able to mock the king’s reputation for tightfistedness by noting that he offered only ‘a small bit’ of gold. By the 1850s Queen Victoria did not make the offering in person any longer, now dispatching the gifts via a servant, and a spectator dismissed the entire ceremony as ‘a mere rag of Popery’.
* ‘Course’ is a modern word, and not quite equivalent to the structure of medieval meals, which were made up of ‘messes’, a series of dishes both sweet and savoury, all laid out at once. These were then replaced with a second messe, also of multiple sweet and savoury dishes.
† This was made for a feast at the Salters’ Company in the City of London. By the seventeenth century the City’s reputation for elaborate seasonal feasts had become a byword:
The like was never seen …
Men may talk of country Christmases, and court gluttony,
Their thirty-pound butter’d eggs, their pies of carps’ tongues,
Their pheasants drench’d with ambergris, the carcasses
Of three fat wethers [sheep] bruis’d for gravy to
Make sauce for a single peacock, yet their feasts
Were fasts compar’d with the city’s.
* The length of Advent was initially fluid, sometimes beginning as early as St Martin’s Day, or Martinmas (sometimes Martlemas), 11 November. From the twentieth century, it began on the Sunday nearest to St Andrew’s Day, or 30 November. For commercial, non-religious Advent calendars (see p. 169–170), it begins on 1 December.
* Although one folklorist has dryly referred to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s book as ‘one of our first historical novels’, the word ‘wassail’ is used in Beowulf, in the eighth century, but simply as a toast, with no Christmas connection.
* Coyting was quoits, when a player tried to toss a ring over a stake set in the ground. In logating, or loggat, a spherical wooden shape was aimed at a peg. (It is from this that the idiom ‘at loggerheads’ originated.) I have been unable to discover what ‘clash’ might have been.
† In Norman French, ‘noel’ was originally an exclamation of seasonal happiness, as in Gawain. By the fifteenth century, the word had been transferred to the day itself as an alternative, if in English slightly affected, name.
* In the British Isles, quarter days were the four days in the year when leases began and ended, rents fell due, servants were hired and school and university terms began. They were Lady Day (25 March, which was the start of the new year until 1752), Midsummer (24 June), Michaelmas (29 September) and Christmas Day.
* Today the four surviving Inns of Court – Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, and Inner and Middle Temple – are the professional trade bodies for barristers in England and Wales.
* This type of extravagance could not survive the upheavals following the king’s death. Edward’s pageant overseer was the Duke of Northumberland, who unfortunately then backed the wrong heir, and his execution for treason put a damper on this festive role.
* Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was possibly also written to be performed on Twelfth Night, although the first performance we know of occurred on Candlemas 1602. The diarist Samuel Pepys attended a production of the play on Twelfth Night 1663, dismissing it as ‘a silly play and not relating at all to the name or day’.
* Wafers were small disks made of flour paste, generally used to seal letters or documents, but many of the early descriptions of trees included coloured decorative wafers.
* That carols were not restricted to Christmas can be seen in today’s English usage, where we often say Christmas carol, despite it being vanishingly rare for a carol to be anything except a Christmas song. Defining a carol, however, ranges from the difficult to the impossible. The Oxford English Dictionary says a carol is ‘A song or hymn of joy sung at Christmas in ce
lebration of the Nativity’, but this definition overlooks the hundreds of carols in praise of trees, holly, ivy, drinking and feasting, including ‘O Tannenbaum’, ‘The Boar’s Head Carol’ and ‘Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly’. It also neglects the many carols that can more readily be classed as folksongs or ballads, such as ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’. The simplest answer, perhaps, is that a carol is anything people decide is one.
* There were a few women too, although not many. In the alpine intersection of what is now Germany, Italy and Austria, the Perchta, or sometimes Berchta, the wife of Odin, and occasionally the leader of the Wild Hunt, appeared on Twelfth Night. She was prone to slitting her victims’ stomachs with a knife, replacing their organs with stones and straw. This fate could be avoided by eating Twelfth Night cakes or, in some regions, herring and dumplings, or pancakes. Other areas were visited by Frau Holle, or Frau Freen or Frick, which may be a link to the goddess Frigga. A few of these female apparitions cared for unbaptized babies, or rewarded diligent housewives, but usually they were women of fury, trailing havoc in their wake.
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