Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  But although humans seem to have a deep-seated need for these altered states of consciousness, for an escape from the restrictions of mundane existence, liminality is also rather scary. The fact that we restrict our collective pursuit of altered states and alternative realities to specific, limited contexts suggests that our desire for such liberation is by no means unequivocal – that it is balanced by an equally powerful need for the stability and security of everyday reality. We may be enthralled by the liminal experience of the carnival, but we are also afraid of it; we like to visit alternative worlds, but we wouldn’t want to live there. Alcohol plays a double or ‘balancing’ role in the context of festive rituals: the altered states of consciousness induced by alcohol allow us to explore desired but potentially dangerous alternative realities, while the social meanings of drinking – the rules of convivial sociability invariably associated with the consumption of alcohol – provide a reassuring counterbalance. By drinking, we enable and enhance the experience of liminality that is central to festive rites, but the familiar, everyday, comforting, sociable rituals of sharing and pouring and round-buying, the social bonding that is synonymous with drinking, help us somehow to tame or even ‘domesticate’ the disturbing aspects of this liminal world.

  So, there are the universals. But there are also some cross-cultural variations. Although alcohol and celebration are inextricably bound together in all societies where alcohol is used, the connection appears to be stronger in ‘ambivalent’ drinking cultures – those with a morally charged relationship with alcohol, where one needs a reason for drinking, such as England – than in ‘integrated’ drinking cultures, where drinking is a morally neutral element of normal life and requires no justification. The English (along with the US, Australia, most of Scandinavia, Iceland, etc.) feel that they have to have an excuse for drinking – and the most common and popular excuse is celebration. In ‘integrated’ drinking cultures (such as Latin/Mediterranean cultures) there is little or no disapprobation of alcohol, and therefore no need to find excuses for drinking. Festivity is strongly associated with alcohol in these integrated cultures, but is not invoked as a justification for every drinking occasion: a celebration most certainly requires alcohol, but every drink does not require a celebration.

  The Celebration Excuse – and Magical Beliefs

  As well as cross-cultural research with my SIRC colleagues on festive drinking, I did a study a few years ago specifically on English celebrations and attitudes to celebrating. This study involved the usual combination of observation-fieldwork, informal interviews and a national survey.

  The main finding was that the English will seize upon almost any excuse for celebratory drinking. As well as the established calendrical festivals, a staggering 87 per cent of survey respondents mentioned bizarre or trivial events that had provided an excuse for a festive drinking session, including: ‘my teddy-bear’s birthday’, ‘my mate swallowing his tooth’, ‘when my neighbour’s snake laid eggs after we’d thought it was a male’, ‘the first Friday of the week’ and ‘the fourteenth anniversary of the death of my pet hamster’.

  In addition to the more outlandish excuses, over 60 per cent admitted that something as mundane and insignificant as ‘a friend dropping in’ had provided a good enough excuse for a bout of celebratory drinking. More than half the population celebrate ‘Saturday night’, just under half have celebratory drinks merely because ‘It’s Friday’ and nearly 40 per cent of younger respondents felt that ‘the end of the working day’ was a valid excuse for drunken revelry.

  Calling a drinking session a ‘celebration’ not only gets round our moral ambivalence about alcohol, providing a legitimate excuse for drinking, but also in itself gives us a sort of official licence to shed a few inhibitions. Celebrations are by definition ‘liminal’ episodes, in which certain normal social restraints can be temporarily suspended. A drink that has been labelled ‘celebratory’ therefore has even greater magical disinhibiting powers than a drink that is just a drink. ‘Celebration’ is a magic word: merely invoking the concept of celebration transforms an ordinary round of drinks into a ‘party’, with all the relaxation of social controls that this implies. Abracadabra! Instant liminality!

  This kind of magic works in other cultures as well – and drinks themselves can be used to define and ‘dictate’ the nature of an occasion, without the need for words, magic or otherwise. Certain types of drink, for example, may be so strongly associated with particular forms of social interaction that serving them in itself acts as an effective indicator of expectations, or even as an instruction to behave in a specified way. In most Western cultures, for instance, champagne is synonymous with celebration, such that if it is ordered or served at an otherwise ‘ordinary’ occasion, someone will invariably ask, ‘What are we celebrating?’ Champagne prompts festive, cheerful light-heartedness, which is why it is generally regarded as inappropriate to serve it at funerals. In Austria, sekt is drunk on formal occasions, while schnapps is reserved for more intimate, convivial gatherings – the type of drink served defining both the nature of the event and the social relationship between the drinkers. The choice of drink dictates behaviour to the extent that the mere appearance of a bottle of schnapps can sometimes prompt a switch from the ‘polite’ form of address, Sie, to the intimate du. In England, although we do not have the same clear linguistic distinctions, beer is generally regarded as a more informal, casual drink than wine, and serving beer with a meal indicates expectations of informal, relaxed behaviour – even guests’ body language will be more casual: slumping a bit rather than sitting up straight, adopting more open postures and using more expansive gestures.

  In this respect, then, the English are not very different from other humans, but our belief in, and need for, the disinhibiting powers of both drinks and magic words is perhaps stronger than most other cultures’, as our social inhibitions are more formidable. Our ambivalence and magical beliefs about alcohol are defining features of all English rites of passage, from the most important life-cycle transitions to the most trivial, trumped-up, teddy-bear’s-birthday rituals.

  Christmas and New Year’s Eve Rules

  The English year is punctuated by national calendrical holidays: some are mere commas, while others are more important semi-colons; the Christmas holiday and New Year’s Eve are the final full stop. Most calendrical rites were originally religious events, often ancient pagan festivals appropriated by Christianity, but the Christian significance of many of these rites is largely ignored. Ironically, they might be said to have reverted to something more like their original pagan roots, which serves the Christians right for hijacking them in the first place, I suppose.

  Christmas and New Year’s Eve are by far the most important. Christmas Day (25 December) is firmly established as a ‘family’ ritual, while New Year’s Eve is a much more raucous celebration with friends. But when English people talk about ‘Christmas’ (as in ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ or ‘I hate Christmas!’), they often mean the entire holiday period, from the 23/24 December right through to New Year’s Day, including, typically and traditionally, at least some of the following:

  •Christmas Eve (family; last-minute shopping; panics and squabbles; tree lights; drinking; too many nuts and chocolates; possibly church – early-evening carols or midnight service)

  •Christmas Day (family; tree; present-giving rituals; marathon cooking and eating of huge Christmas lunch; the Queen’s broadcast on television/radio – or pointedly not watching/listening to the Queen; fall asleep – perhaps while watching Toy Story, ET or similar; more food and drink; uncomfortable night)

  •Boxing Day (hangover; family ‘outing’ of some sort, if only to local park; long country walk; visiting the other set of relatives; escape from family to pub)

  •27–30 December (slightly strange limbo period; some back at work, but often achieving very little; others shopping, going for walks, trying to keep children amused; more overeating and drinking; visiting fri
ends/relatives; television; DVDs; pub)

  •New Year’s Eve (friends; big, boozy parties or pub-crawls; dressing up/fancy-dress; loud music; dancing; champagne, banging pans, etc. at midnight; fireworks; ‘Auld Lang Syne’; New Year’s resolutions; taxi-hunt/long cold walk home)

  •New Year’s Day (sleep late; hangover).

  Many people’s Christmases may not follow this pattern, but most will include a few of these ritual elements, and most English people will at least recognise this rough outline of an average, bog-standard Christmas.

  Often, the term ‘Christmas’ comprises much more than this. When people say ‘I hate Christmas’ or moan about how ‘Christmas’ is becoming more and more of a nightmare or an ordeal, they are generally including all the ‘preparations’ for and ‘run-up’ to Christmas, which may start at least a month ahead, and which involve office/workplace Christmas parties, ‘Christmas shopping’, a ‘Christmas panto’ and quite possibly, for those with school-age children, a school ‘nativity play’ or Christmas concert – not to mention the annual ritual of writing and dispatching large quantities of Christmas cards. English people understand ‘Christmas’ to include any or all of these customs and activities, as well as the Christmas-week celebrations.

  The school nativity play is, for many, the only event of any religious content that they will encounter during the Christmas period, although its religious significance tends to get lost in the social drama of the occasion – particularly the issue of whose children have been fortunate enough to secure the leading roles (Mary, Joseph) and the principal supporting ones (Three Kings, Innkeeper, Head Shepherd, Angel-of-the-Lord), and who must suffer the indignity of playing mere background shepherds, angels, sheep, cows, donkeys and so on. Or the school may have been gripped by a sudden fit of political correctness and attempted to replace the traditional nativity with something more ‘multicultural’. This being England, the squabbles and skirmishes over casting and other issues are rarely conducted openly but are more a matter of indirect scheming, Machiavellian manipulation and indignant muttering.

  The Christmas panto is a bizarre, quintessentially English custom. Almost every local theatre in the country puts on a pantomime at Christmas, in which a children’s fairy-tale or folk tale – such as Aladdin, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Dick Whittington, Mother Goose, etc. – is performed, always with men in drag (known as pantomime dames) playing the main female parts and a woman in men’s clothes as ‘principal boy’. Tradition requires a script full of salacious double-entendres for the grown-ups (at which many of the children laugh heartily), and much noisy audience-participation for the children, with cries of ‘HE’S BEHIND YOU!’ ‘OH NO HE ISN’T!’ ‘OH YES HE IS!’ – a ritual into which adult members of the audience often throw themselves with considerable gusto. No English politician could ever get away with Obama’s ‘YES WE CAN!’ campaign chant: even in a sympathetic audience, many would be unable to resist shouting out the panto-response: ‘OH NO WE CAN’T!’

  The Christmas Moan-fest and the Bah-humbug Rule

  ‘Christmas shopping’ is the bit many English people are thinking of when they say that they hate Christmas, and usually means shopping for Christmas presents, food, cards, decorations and other trappings. As it is considered manly to profess to detest any sort of shopping, English men are particularly inclined to moan about how much they dislike Christmas. In a recent survey, 47 per cent of men admitted that they leave all their Christmas shopping until the last minute, on Christmas Eve, and 30 per cent confessed that they buy gifts from motorway service stations. (I say ‘admitted’ and ‘confessed’, but I suspect there may be an element of macho pride in such statements.) The Christmas-moan is now something of a national custom, and both sexes generally start moaning about Christmas in early November.

  There is effectively an unwritten rule prescribing ‘bah-humbug’, anti-Christmas moaning rituals at this time of year, and it is unusual to encounter anyone over the age of eighteen who will admit to unequivocal enjoyment of Christmas. This does not stop those who dislike Christmas taking a certain pride in their distaste, as though they were the first people ever to notice ‘how commercial the whole thing has become’ or how ‘it starts earlier every year – soon there’ll be bloody Christmas decorations in August’ or how it seems to get more and more expensive, or how impossibly crowded the streets and shops are.

  Christmas-moaners recite the same platitudes every year, fondly imagining that these are original thoughts, and that they are a beleaguered, discerning minority, while the eccentric souls who actually like Christmas shopping and all the other rituals tend to keep quiet about their unorthodox tastes. They may even join in the annual moan-fest, just to be polite and sociable – much as people who enjoy rain will often courteously agree that the weather is beastly. The cynical ‘bah, humbug!’ position is the norm – particularly among men, many of whom find something almost suspiciously effeminate about an adult male who admits to liking Christmas – and everyone loves a good Christmas moan, so why spoil their fun? Those of us who actively enjoy Christmas tend to be almost apologetic about our perversity: ‘Well, yes, but, um, to be honest, I actually like all the naff decorations and finding presents for people . . . I know it’s deeply uncool . . .’

  Not all Christmas-moaners are mindless, sheep-like followers of the ‘bah-humbug’ rule. Two groups of Christmas-haters who have good reason to complain, and for whom I do have sympathy, are parents struggling on low incomes, for whom the expense of buying presents that will please their children is a real problem, and working mothers for whom, even if they are not poor, the whole business can truly be more of a strain than a pleasure.

  Christmas-present Rules

  A gift, as any first-year anthropology student can tell you, is never free. In all cultures, gifts tend to come with some expectation of a return. This is not a bad thing: reciprocal exchanges of gifts are an important form of social bonding. Even gifts to small children, who cannot be expected to reciprocate in kind, are no exception to this universal rule: children receiving Christmas presents are supposed to reciprocate with gratitude and good behaviour. The fact that they often do no such thing is beside the point: a rule is not invalidated just because people break it. It is interesting to note that in the case of very young children, who cannot be expected to understand this rule, we do not give Christmas presents ‘directly’, but invent a magical being, Father Christmas, from whom the gifts are said to come. The traumatic discovery that Father Christmas does not exist is really the discovery of the laws of reciprocity, the fact that Christmas presents come with strings attached.

  English squeamishness about money can be a problem in this context, particularly for the upper-middle and upper classes, who are especially sensitive about it. Talking about how much a Christmas present cost is regarded as terribly vulgar; actually telling someone the price of their present, or even that it was ‘expensive’, would be crass beyond belief. Although general, non-specific complaints about the cost of Christmas presents are allowed, harping on and on about the financial aspects of gift-exchange is uncouth and inconsiderate, as it makes recipients of gifts feel awkward.

  Actual expenditure on Christmas presents seems to be inversely related to income, with poor, working-class families tending to give more lavish gifts, especially to children, often going heavily into debt in the process. The middle classes (particularly the ‘interfering classes’) tut-tut sanctimoniously over this, and congratulate themselves on their superior prudence, while tucking into their overpriced organic vegetables and admiring the tasteful Victorian ornaments on their tree.

  New Year’s Eve and the Orderly-disorder Rule

  New Year’s Eve, which more of us will admit to enjoying (although some of the bah-humbug brigade make the same complaints every year about the boring sameness of it all) is a more straightforward carnival – with all the usual, standard liminal stuff: cultural remission, legitimised deviance, festive inversions, altered states of consciousness, commun
itas, collective effervescence and so on – and it is more obviously a direct descendant of pagan mid-winter festivals, uncluttered by Christian meddling with the imagery or sanitisation of the rituals.

  As with Freshers’ Week, office Christmas parties and most other English carnival rites, the extent of actual debauchery and anarchy tends to be greatly overestimated, both by the puritanical killjoys who disapprove of such festivities and by those participants who like to see themselves as wild, fun-loving rebels. In reality, our New-Year’s-Eve drunken debauchery is a fairly orderly sort of disorder, in which only certain specified taboos may be broken, only the usual designated inhibitions may be shed, and the standard rules of English drunken etiquette apply: mooning but not flashing; fighting but not queue-jumping; bawdy jokes but not racist ones; ‘illicit’ flirting and, in some circles, snogging, but not adulterous sex; promiscuity but not, if you are straight, homosexuality, nor heterosexual lapses if you are gay; vomiting and (if male) urinating in the street, but never defecating; forgetting your address or even your name, but never forgetting to buy your round, and so on.

  Minor Calendricals – Commas and Semi-colons

  And as New Year’s Eve is understood to be the most debauched and disinhibited of our calendrical rites, the rest (Hallowe’en, Guy Fawkes’ Night, Easter, May Day, Valentine’s, etc.) tend to be pretty tame – although they all have their origins in much more boisterous pagan festivals.

  Our May Day, with staid, respectable, usually middle-aged morris dancers and the occasional innocent children’s maypole, is a revival of the ancient pagan rites of Beltane. In some parts of the country, counter-culture/New Age revellers with dreadlocks, beads and multiple body-piercings celebrate May Day alongside the morris dancers and the Neighbourhood Watch/parish council types – an odd-looking juxtaposition, but generally amicable. Hallowe’en – fancy-dress and sweets – is a descendant of All Souls’ Eve, a festival of communion with the dead, also of pagan origin and celebrated in various forms in many cultures around the world.