Christmas Miscellany
Page 11
Today, mistletoe is becoming rarer in this country for, as well as oak, it particularly likes to grow on apple trees, and apple orchards have been shrinking in size and number throughout England over the last half century at an alarming rate. Much of the mistletoe you see on sale at Christmas will have been imported from Normandy.
The more modern practice of kissing under the mistletoe can be traced back to eighteenth-century England. Young women who stood underneath the mistletoe could not refuse a kiss, and if any unfortunate girl remained unkissed under the berries it was said that she would not marry during the coming year. In one version of the custom, every time a young man stole a kiss from a girl he plucked a berry from the mistletoe bough. When all the berries had been plucked, the privilege ceased, as is recalled by this ditty:
Pick a berry off the mistletoe
For ev’ry kiss that’s given.
When the berries have all gone,
There’s an end to the kissing.
At one stage, during the Medieval period, a new legend sprang up briefly that the cross on which Christ had been crucified was made from mistletoe—rather than holly, as a previous legend had stated—because at that time people believed that the mistletoe had once been a tree itself. The story went that the mistletoe was so ashamed of the use to which it had been put that it shrank to become the parasitic plant we know today and, at the same time, was denied any contact with the ground. In Brittany, France, the plant is still known as Herbe de la Croix (“herb of the cross”) because of this association.
It is likely that this legend drew from the Norse myth of the death of Balder, in which the mistletoe had then also been the innocent means of the Norse god’s death. This attempt to Christianize the pagan mistletoe, however, was not successful and the plant was forbidden to be brought into any church building. The exception to this rule was York Minster, where a large bunch of mistletoe was laid on the altar every Christmas.
It was once the case that Christmas decorations, including boughs of mistletoe, were treated with great respect. It was considered extreme bad luck to throw them away—you didn’t even dare let any piece fall onto the floor—and instead they were burnt or fed to cows. However, the mistletoe bough was carefully put away until it was time for a new one to replace it in twelve months’ time. In this part of the country mistletoe was once associated with New Year rather than Christmas and was not put up until New Year’s Eve:
Forth to the wood did merry-men go,
To gather in the mistletoe.
(From ‘Old Christmas’ by Walter Scott)
Did you know . . ?
Duke Guillaume of Normandy was crowned King William of England in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066.
Today, this once favored feast is barely celebrated at all, instead becoming a rather gloomy affair, an anticlimax of a day when the Christmas tree, cards, and other decorations are taken down. However, there are some Twelfth Night traditions which have lasted the test of time and are still practiced today.
One of these is the service held at St James’ Palace, London, attended by the royal family. At this service, members of the royal household present the Chapel Royal with the three gifts brought to the Christ child by the Magi. Another tradition, upheld by the cast of the play then being performed at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane at that time, is the eating of the Baddeley Cake.
This is as a result of a stipulation made in the last will and testament of one Robert Baddeley, an actor from the eighteenth century, after whom the cake is named.
In the West of England, Twelfth Night is the time when wassailing ceremonies are carried out.
At one time in England, Twelfth Night was known as being an appropriate occasion on which to carry out various good luck rituals, as well as for its religious processions which almost went hand-in-hand with the spirited, and genial, revels. Some of these rituals were linked to the countryside and farming, seeing as how, in England’s past, people’s lives were so strongly connected to the land and the ever-changing seasons.
One of them had farmers lighting bonfires to drive evil spirits away from their farms and fields, the drunken agriculturalists cheering as they circled the fires to hasten the hobgoblins on their way.
There was also the time-honored guessing game, whereby the (now probably inebriated) farmer had to guess what was being roasted in the kitchen before being permitted to reenter his own home. This was not as easy as it might sound, because his good wife might have something as ridiculously inedible as a shoe turning on the spit.
And then there were the Morris men dancing in the streets, as well as fools, hobbyhorses and all. Practical jokes were the name of the game on Twelfth Night, as was the playing of games—particularly games of chance—with everyone determined to make the most of the last day of the holiday season.
Having taken down the Christmas cards and decorations for another year, Twelfth Night presented one last opportunity for a knees-up, the highlight being the cutting of the twelfth-cake. The renowned diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about the celebrations in his household. In an entry from 1668 he writes of offering his guests “an excellent cake which cost me near twenty shillings, of our Jane’s making, which was cut into twenty pieces, there being by that time so many of our company.”
Once everyone had enjoyed the cake made by Pepys’ servant, they partied until 2 am, dancing and singing. The diarist also mentions that his neighbors joined them in this carousing, but then, from the sounds of it, they probably had little choice. It was either go round to the Pepyses’ and join in the fun or spend a sleepless night in bed being kept awake by the party going on next door!
Did you know . . .?
The title of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will, makes reference to the Twelfth Night tradition of servants dressing up as their masters, men as women, and so forth. In it, the heroine Viola dresses up and masquerades as a man. Like many of Shakespeare’s comedies, its humor centers on a case of mistaken identity.
The traditional Twelfth Night cake was supposed to have a dried pea or bean hidden somewhere inside it. Whoever found the bean was proclaimed king or queen for the rest of the evening’s fun and frivolity. It then became their responsibility to announce the toasts and lead everyone else in the drinking that ensued.
Twelfth-Cake
175 g/6 oz. flour
175 g/6 oz. sugar
3 tbs brandy
175 g/6 oz. butter
3 eggs
340 g/12 oz. currants
40 g/1½ oz. flaked almonds
25 g/1 oz. orange and lemon peel, finely chopped
1 tbs honey
1 tsp of vinegar
Soften the butter and add to the sugar and cream in a mixing bowl. Cream the mixture until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well; also add a tablespoon of flour to stop them from curdling. Pour in the brandy, followed by the flour and then the spices. Fold them all in, keeping the mixture light and airy. Lastly stir in the currants, almonds, peel, and honey. The mixture needs to be poured into a prepared cake tin, which is when you can also add a pea or bean, if you wish (but do not use a kidney bean, as if it is undercooked it can prove toxic!). Bake for two hours until the cake has browned on top.
However, some kings and queens also earned themselves the responsibility of covering the bill the next day. In time, the bean became a silver sixpence which was cooked inside the Christmas pudding rather than the cake.
The baking of the twelfth-cake brought out the competitive natures of London shopkeepers during the nineteenth century, with rival firms trying to outdo each other in terms of quantity as much as quality. In 1811, one Adams of Cheapside made the bold claim that his cake “considerably surpasses in size any that has hitherto been made in London, or in fact the world.” He went on to say that the monster confection weighed close to half a ton and had been made using “two and a half hundredweight of currants and upwards of a thousand eggs.”
However, the twelfth-cak
e had had its day and the tradition was beginning to die out around the country. Instead it was replaced by the Christmas cake, which actually made use of many of the same ingredients. One of the last twelfth-cakes was made for Queen Victoria by one Mr. Mawditt, the First Yeoman of the Confectionery, in 1849. It was decorated with a scene of an eighteenth-century picnic. However, it was Queen Victoria who helped set the trend for large, rich fruitcakes. The firm of Gunter and Wand made her such a cake for her wedding in February 1840, and so it became popular to have rich fruitcakes made for weddings in general. However, it is unlikely that those that came after Victoria’s were ten feet in diameter! Another hundred smaller cakes were also made for Victoria and Albert’s wedding, which were given to the royal couple’s friends.
Mrs. Beeton (1836-1865) is arguably one of the most famous cookery writers in history, and among the many recipes that she has handed down to us is one for that most seasonal of treats. So rather than using the scribbled recipe handed down from your grandmother this year, why not try Mrs. Beeton’s take on the cake for a change?
Mrs. Beeton’s Christmas Cake
5 cups of flour
1 cup of melted butter
1 cup of cream
1 cup of treacle
1 cup of moist sugar
2 eggs
15 g/½ oz. of powdered ginger
225 g/½ lb. of raisins
1 tsp of carbonate of soda
1 tsp of vinegar
Put the flour, sugar, ginger and raisins into a basin and mix these dry ingredients together thoroughly. Then stir in the melted butter, cream, treacle and wellwhisked eggs. Beat the mixture for a few minutes. Dissolve the soda in the vinegar, add it to the dough, and mix the whole lot together well. Spoon the mixture into a well greased cake tin and bake it in a moderate oven for 1¾ to 2¼ hours.
WHY IS CHRISTMAS SO OFTEN SHORTENED TO XMAS?
Xmas (sometimes X-mas) is a common abbreviated form of Christmas, usually pronounced “eks-mas.” Because it removes the word Christ from Christmas, some people believe it to be irreverent, but how did such a practice come about?
In fact, it dates back further than you might suspect, and has nothing to do with devaluing the Christian festival at all. In reality, both “Christ” and “Christmas” have been abbreviated for at least 1,000 years. The word “Christ” appears in Medieval documents as both “XP” and “Xt” and can even be found in this form in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from 1021. But why were those particular letters used?
Some believe the “X” is used as a symbol of the cross on which Christ died, but it is not the case. For early Christians, simply being a Christian was a dangerous business. The persecution of those who professed to the worship of Christ by the Romans was at its height, and the stories of Christians being thrown to the lions in Rome’s Coliseum have become the stuff of legend. To live and worship in such times required no small amount of subterfuge on the part of early Christians. To communicate with other like-minded individuals they employed all sorts of signs and symbols which, to the uninitiated, would have meant nothing. These signs and symbols included the fish (employed because the letters of the Greek word for fish, ichthys, taken in order, were the initial letters of the phrase ’Iησoϖ—ς Xρɩστóς Θεoυ—Yɩóς, Σωτηρ, meaning “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior”) and the labrum, made up of the letters “X” and “P.”
"X” and "P” are the capital forms of the first two letters of the Greek spelling of Christ (or Χρɩστóς) and, as a result, should be pronounced “chi” and “rho.” These two letters are often seen merged together, with one letter over the top of the other, in the form of the labrum, in churches around the world, particularly those of the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox denominations. By the fifteenth century, “Xmas” was widely used as an abbreviation of “Christmas,” in part due to the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, in around 1436. This new-fangled machine used moveable type, giving the printer much greater flexibility and a quicker work rate. That said, to set the type was still a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive job, as it was completed by hand. As a result, abbreviations were common in all manner of publications, including religious ones. In fact, the Church itself used the capital letter “X” in place of the word Christ, to cut the printing costs of books and pamphlets. Newspapers and other publications followed suit, substituting not only “X” for “Christ” and “Xmas” for “Christmas,” but also “Xian” for “Christian” and “Inanity” for—you guessed it—“Christianity.”
So you can see, the use of “Xmas” in place of “Christmas” is not solely a modern practice and it is certainly not part of a conspiracy to cross Christ out of the festive season, or for secular, commercially driven celebrations to usurp the Christian holiday. It is simply another of those ancient Christmas traditions that has been forgotten with the passage of time.
And, on that note, I would like to wish you a very merry Xmas!
So we keep the olden greeting
With its meaning deep and true,
And wish a merrie Christmas
And a happy New Year to you.
(Old English saying)