Christmas

by Judith Flanders

  † Zwarte Piet is one of the few black helpers to have survived into the twenty-first century, regularly visiting Dutch towns and cities at Christmas. He is, therefore, the focus of modern discussions of racism, the many other black helpers having vanished into history.

  * This abbreviated form of Græcum est; non legitur – it’s Greek to me – was presumably all the distressed student could manage while under swinish assault.

  * Turkeys had an air of strangeness to them that became embedded in many European and Middle Eastern languages, where the word implies an origin in Turkey or India; in eastern countries, the point of origin is either thought to be somewhere in South America, usually Peru (as is the case too with Portuguese), or Europe, when turkeys became a French, Dutch or simply ‘western’ chicken.

  * Charles I lost the Battle of Naseby decisively to Cromwell, leading to the Parliamentarians’ ultimate victory in the Civil War.

  * This ban survived until 1958, when Christmas became an official holiday in Scotland for the first time in a quarter of a millennium.

  * However, by the eighteenth century, oranges were also being given as year-end gifts by people in England and in the colonies, so it may have been a happy coincidence, later worked into something more significant.

  * One of these tunes was repurposed, with new lyrics, in Britain in 1853, and became ‘Good King Wenceslas’. As with early carols more generally, a number of songs included here were not for Christmas at all.

  * Pepys owned a copy of The Gentlewoman’s Cabinet Unlocked, which contained a fruitcake recipe, so his might have been made with nutmeg, cloves, mace, cinnamon, ginger, sack and rose-water.

  † In the seventeenth century a slut was a dirty woman, not a sexually promiscuous one, or a servant (given coal fires and lack of running water, servants were often very dirty). The word could also have an affectionate overtone: Pepys referred to one of his maids as ‘a most admirable Slut [who] pleases [him and his wife] mightily’.

  * This was not solely a seasonal tradition. Horace Greeley, later editor of the New York Tribune, remembered that in his New Hampshire childhood in the 1820s, it occurred ‘On the first of January, and perhaps on some other day that the big boys chose to consider or make a holiday.’

  * Early twentieth-century folklorists situated the origins of these plays in Greek antiquity, or the Roman occupation, or pagan days. However, the first surviving reference to a play with the characters of St George, the Turk and a doctor, dates from 1685; the first surviving play-text itself, half a century after that.

  * Note the assimilation in the language, with the addition of the English ‘-ing’ to the Norwegian Julebukk to turn the goat itself into an activity, just as the belsnicklers did with their belsnickling.

  * The origins of the term Boxing Day in Britain to mean 26 December is unclear. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of usage of the term dates from 1833, but Swift’s complaint on the day more than a century earlier suggests otherwise. And in 1743 a witness at a trial felt no need to explain what she meant when she said she had seen a man attacked ‘the day after boxing day’.

  * Sir Roger was given the name of a popular dance of the previous century. Various versions, to various tunes, can be seen on YouTube.

  * It was possibly an unthinking recognition of the holiday’s topsy-turvy traditions that led Jane Austen to have the upstart, socially ambitious Mr Elton propose to the landed, upper-class Emma on Christmas Eve. Emma’s rejection of his suit makes clear social class is key: ‘She was insulted … he was her inferior.’ The novel was published on 23 December 1815.

  * Until the 1860s the fashion in dining in Britain was not too far from the ‘messes’ of the Middle Ages, although the array of mixed sweet and savoury courses was now called ‘removes’. Diners selected from among them, and no one was expected to eat everything.

  * Turkeys did not travel well. Before the railways in the nineteenth century, almost all animals were driven alive to market and slaughtered there. Turkeys however, had to be fitted with little leather boots to protect their feet on their march, and the expedition began in August: they lost so much weight en route that the fattening-up process had to recommence once they reached their destination. The expense of the boots, and of the prolonged walk and feeding, ensured an extraordinarily high price for them once they finally were put on sale. At Christmas, however, the birds were killed where they were reared, Norfolk being a mere three days’ journey from London by stagecoach.

  * What might today be the last gasp of this holiday was established in 1794, with the death of Robert Baddeley, who had been a cook, then a valet, before becoming an actor at Drury Lane. In his will he left money for an annual Twelfth cake for that theatre’s company, which continues to be served there every 5 January, although it has been renamed the Baddeley cake in his honour.

  * The Julian calendar gained nearly three days every 400 years, an anomaly corrected with the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, first in 1582 in the territories ruled by Spain. Other Catholic countries followed, but Protestant Europe took longer. Britain adopted the new dating in 1752, when the day after 2 September became 14 September. (It is, incidentally, for this reason that the British tax year ends on 5 April, which under the old calendar was Lady Day, 25 March and New Year’s Day.)

  * The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1825 for its first citation of ‘Christmas’ to mean seasonal greenery as decoration, but as early as 1706 a newspaper article used the phrase ‘Windows … stuck with Christmas’ without needing to explain.

  * While the word is capitalized, as all German nouns are, the plural has an English ending, Putzes, following the pattern of the belsnickles and Julebukks.

  † One generation’s populism is another’s high culture. The eighteenth-century antiquary John Brand dismisses a carol from c.1548: ‘It is hardly credible that such a Composition … should ever have been thought serious,’ he grieves. Had its author ‘designed to have rendered his Subject ridiculous, he could not more effectually have made it so.’ The lyrics he cites – ‘O my dear heart, young Jesu sweet, / Prepare a cradle in thy spreit’ – indicate that this is ‘Balulalow’, a sixteenth-century Scottish lullaby later refashioned by Benjamin Britten in his Ceremony of Carols (1942), one of his greatest, and most widely performed, works.

  * The phrase ‘De Goedheiligman’ is used today in the Netherlands to refer to the saint; I have been unable to determine if it was in use before Pintard, or whether this was a New World borrowing.

  * This is not the 1780 book of that title published in Boston (mentioned on p. 94), but one published in New York in 1821. As well as the ‘firsts’ mentioned above, it was the first book in the new world to be printed with lithographs, a technological innovation that would ultimately lead to inexpensive colour printing – important for the colour of Santa’s suit. It has been suggested that the book’s author might have been James Paulding, the brother-in-law of Washington Irving and himself a formidable promoter of the St Nicholas-is-New-Amsterdam-Dutch school.

  * Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville (1794–1865) was in life an apparently harmless member of the upper classes, known mainly for being a good cricketer. However, when his diary, which he kept for over forty years, was published on his instructions after his death, it left many, like Queen Victoria, ‘horrified and indignant at this dreadful and really scandalous book. Mr Greville’s indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude, betrayal of confidence and shameful disloyalty towards his Sovereign make it very important that the book should be severely censored and discredited’, particularly as ‘The tone in which he speaks of royalty is … most reprehensible.’ For once Queen Victoria was correct: it is his complete lack of deference that makes the book such a delight.

  * The illustration shows the gifts, but there was no mention of when they were given. Other sources tell us that the queen continued to give presents at New Year, not on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, until her death in 1901.

  * This marks the begin
ning of the evolution of the Christ child, Christkind in German, Christkindl as a diminutive, into Kris Kringle. In 1830, one Pennsylvania resident referred to Christ-kinkle nights, and by 1837, children waited for Christkingle. In 1842, two books were published in Philadelphia, Kriss Kringle’s Book and Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree: A holliday [sic] present for boys and girls. By this time, all of the German elements of the Christkind had vanished, and Kris Kringle had become another name for Santa Claus, a bearded old man with a sleigh pulled by reindeer. By 1848, a Midwestern bank director used Kris Kringle as a synonym for Santa without explanation.

  * Some assume this indicated the renown of German trees; I suspect, however, that the word ‘famous’ was being used colloquially, as an expression of approval. Dorcas Societies took their name from the woman in Acts 9:36–9 who was ‘full of good works and almsdeeds’: usually formed around church groups, Dorcas societies made clothes for the poor.

  * The success of The Lamplighter, first published in 1854, must also have promoted the American Santa across Europe, as the book was translated into French, German, Italian and Danish. This was not Santa’s first journey across the Atlantic, however. He had travelled to England soon after Moore’s poem was published in 1823: in 1827, the Gentleman’s Magazine referred to ‘the ideal Sandy Claus of the American children’, giving his Dutch ancestry while adding that ‘in the opinion of the majority’, he was ‘a little old negro’.

  * The origins of Santa’s home at the North Pole are uncertain: it was possibly by association with his reindeer. Another historian has suggested that Santa moved to the North Pole after the fate of the expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, led by John Franklin, was revealed in the 1850s. If so, a substantial gap in time intervened.

  † The picture was painted while Weir was a drawing master at West Point military academy. It can’t be said if his most prominent artist pupil, James McNeill Whistler, saw it or not, but over the course of his career his other students formed a cavalcade of American history: Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, George Armstrong Custer, William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant.

  * A swift plot summary of the book, for those who have managed to avoid any of its hundreds, if not thousands, of adaptations. A Christmas Carol opens seven years after the death of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s business partner. Scrooge despises Christmas with its, to him, false expressions of goodwill. He refuses to join his family’s Christmas party, and rejects solicitations for Christmas charity. The most he will do is grudgingly give his clerk, Bob Cratchit, a single day off. On Christmas Eve, he is visited by the ghost of Marley, doomed to walk the earth dragging the chains he forged during a life spent dedicated to accumulating wealth. Instead of business, he tells Scrooge, it was ‘Mankind [that was] was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.’ To avoid the same fate, Scrooge must heed the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to revisit his lonely childhood, and the day his fiancée leaves him, claiming that he loves money more than her. The Ghost of Christmas Present then shows the material lack and emotional riches of the Christmases of working men and women, including the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner, enjoyed despite their poverty and the serious illness of their small son, Tiny Tim. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge his own lonely, unmourned death; in contrast, Tiny Tim’s death devastates his family. Scrooge begs for the chance to reform, and in the morning, sets all in motion: he sends a turkey to the Cratchits, he reconciles with his family and increases Bob Cratchit’s wages. He becomes a ‘second father’ to Tiny Tim, ‘who did NOT die’, and ever after, ‘it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!’

  * One of the strangest consequences of this misunderstanding is the long-running Bracebridge Dinner, held annually at Yosemite National Park, in California. In 1927, slow bookings prompted a local hotel to stage an evening’s entertainment based on Irving’s stories, hosted by ‘Squire Bracebridge’ himself, with a newly invented ‘Lord Neville Bracebridge’. Equally invented were many other details of the evening, which at one and the same time is described as being set in 1718 and in the Renaissance, although one twentieth-century director of the show described it as ‘vaguely Elizabethan’. Irving, however, was not its only brush with greatness. The photographer Ansel Adams directed the event for nearly half a century, once playing the role of the jester (it is perhaps needless to say that there is no such character in Irving). Today, seven or eight dinners are held each December, bookable as part of a package with a stay at the hotel.

  * He also devotes just seven of the essay’s 482 lines to religion; John Bull gets five.

  * A tiny, but perhaps telling, example of the importance of Christmas in popular culture before Dickens can be found in a police-court report of 1834, where a servant named Edward Christmas Day was accused of robbery. Presumably his parents, Mr and Mrs Day, had found the holiday prominent enough that they gave their son his unusual middle name, to render his surname festive.

  † In part, it was A Christmas Carol’s production standards that gave rise to the idea the book had been a failure on publication. It actually sold extremely well – 6,000 copies in one week, and five printings in the first five months. But the expensive binding, and resulting high production costs, meant that the ratio of income to sales was skewed: sales were good, but the author made less money than he expected.

  * For those who say that today’s Christmas begins earlier every year, the anodyne necklace advertisement of 1728 (p. 96) was printed in late November, while as early as the 1820s advertisements for annuals were not unknown in October. By the end of the century, Die Reklame [The Advertisement], a German trade magazine, warned that after early December, shoppers were too worn out to act on new advertisements. In 1929 a consortium of retailers in Los Angeles promoted ‘the 1929 Wonder of Christmas’ in October. In fact, as early as 1661, one almanac took it for granted that preparations began in November, when ‘the Cook and the Comfit-maker make ready for Christmass’.

  * For comparison, the Homestead Act passed the same year entitled western settlers to claim government land for homesteading at $1.25 per acre.

  * That this is the function of gift wrap is reinforced by the recognition that today home-made gifts, usually food items, are barely ever wrapped, or just have a label or bow added. They don’t need wrapping when their labour itself expresses the giver’s affection.

  * This description makes clear how carefully memories of the holiday must be examined. Stowe’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher, born in 1813, wrote that until he was thirty, ‘Christmas was a foreign day … I knew there was such a time, because we had an Episcopal church in town, and I saw them dressing it with evergreens, and wondered what they were taking the woods in church for; but I got no satisfactory explanation.’ And yet just seven years later, his mother, who one presumes was one of the adults who failed to explain the holiday to him, was making tree decorations. In a similar fashion, in 1860 a York newspaper reported that a tree that year was topped by an angel ‘carved from wood a century ago by Louis Miller’. Miller was born in 1796, so either he had not made the ornament, or ‘a century ago’ was more a reflection of nostalgia of than reality.

  * Callithumpian was a word of some political significance. Originating, sometimes as gallithumpian, in the West Country in England, it denominated Jacobins or other radical protestors. The callithumpians also drew on the traditions of groups formed for economic and social protest, who frequently used disguise, including cross-dressing.

  * Nisse is a diminutive of the name Niels, and follows a European pattern of referring to spirits in appeasingly childish ways – the little folk, the kindly ones.

  † These gremlins are tonttuja in Finland, where they wear reindeer moccasins. />
  * The origins of the proverb are cloudy. The playwrights John Webster and Thomas Dekker collaborated on a now lost play with that title in 1602, and, in the same year, Dekker used the phrase in his Satiromastix: ‘… you and your Itchy Poetry breake out like Christmas, but once a yeare’. Whether they, or one of them, came up with the phrase, or it was already in use, is unknown, although I have been unable to find any uses of it before that. It was however soon in common speech, and by 1659 it was included in a compilation of ‘Proverbs, or, Old sayed sawes & adages’.

  † Dickens may have seen an 1831 letter in The Times, when a labourer employed by an MP and banker applied to the magistrates when his Christmas Day holiday went unpaid. The magistrate regretted there was no law obliging payment, adding however that he thought the employer’s behaviour was ‘shabby’.

  * Many visitors to Britain today are bemused to find no newspapers printed on Christmas Day and, frequently, Boxing Day. Yet this is a tradition of the twemtieth century: The Times stopped publishing on Christmas Day only in 1913, and on Boxing Day in 1918.

  * Although, unlike the 1851 census, these US attendees self-reported, which might mean the figures are overstated. Figures for the USA in the twenty-first century hover around 37 per cent when self-reported, 22 per cent when assessed independently. Compared to Europe, however, even that latter figure is remarkable, the most religious countries in Europe (over 50 per cent in Malta and Poland, 46 per cent in Ireland) being outliers; few others rise into double figures.