The
curious world of
CHRISTMAS

Celebrating all that is weird, wonderful and festive

Niall Edworthy

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First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers

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2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

For Alfie and Eliza

Thanks

It is impossible to put together a book of this nature without a great deal of help from a great many people. My first thanks must go to Susanna Wadeson, my editor, who came up with the idea for the book and, as ever, was so imaginative and helpful in her original suggestions and feedback. Thanks too to the production and sales teams at Transworld, especially Deborah Adams, Manpreet Grewal, Fiona Andreanelli, Sheila Lee and Geraldine Ellison, and to Lucy Davie who produced the lovely design for the cover. I owe a further debt of gratitude to the unsung archivists at the Imperial War Museum and their equally helpful cousins at the British Library in St Pancras and the newspaper library in Colindale, London. Thanks once again (for the eighteenth time now!) to my agent, Araminta Whitley at Lucas Alexander Whitley. Long may her advice continue to be even more sensible than her shoes.

Contents

Love It or Loathe It:

Introduction

Farting Dwarves and Peacock Pie:

How Our Ancestors Celebrated Christmas

The Surgeon

Elephants on the Thames:

Christmas Weather

The Mountain Rescuer

Reindeer Sausages and Minced Coffins:

Christmas Food and Drink

The Vicar

Bring in the Trees:

The Origins of Christmas Traditions

The Racehorse Trainer

Turkey in the Trenches:

Christmas at War

The Serviceman

Happy Reunions, Terrible Tantrums:

Christmas and the Family

The Disc Jockey

Will the Real Father Christmas Please Stand Up?

The Origins of Santa Claus

The Firefighter

Moon Orbits, Tsunamis and Train Crashes:

News Stories That Shook Christmas Day

The Lifeboatman

Turkey Kebabs and Steamed Goldfish:

Christmas Customs around the World

All the Trimmings:

Christmas Odds and Ends

Acknowledgements

Love It or Loathe It:

Introduction

IT IS A GREAT PARADOX OF CHRISTMAS THAT IT SHOULD PROMISE US all a period of tremendous harmony, peace and fun, and yet, to a minority in our midst, it somehow manages to deliver nothing but anxiety and ill-feeling. For the Christmas grumblers, the annual winter holiday is not a generous gift in life’s stocking, it’s a lump of coal; a holiday period so intolerable that a return to the drudgery and routine of the workplace in the dark days of January never comes soon enough. These curmudgeons are the direct descendants of the dramatist George Bernard Shaw, whose feverish denunciations of the festive season always came speckled with a shower of froth: I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas, the Irishman spat. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous, and demoralizing subject.

With his long white beard and dancing eyes he may well have looked like Santa’s skinny younger brother, but no one in history has despised Christmas quite as intensely as Shaw. Not even the seventeenth-century Puritans, who went so far as to ban its celebration for 15 years. Nor the billions of non-Christians, who choose to ignore it, tolerate it and look upon it from a distance with a mildly bemused indifference. (The Japanese, bless them, even join in the celebrations.) Not even Vexen Crabtree, Britain’s most high-profile Satanist, loathes Christmas like Shaw loathed it. Vexen feels only indifference towards the celebration of Christ’s nativity and reportedly still eats his turkey dinner on the day.

As a socialist, Shaw was riled by the materialism and consumerism of the holiday period and what he saw as an all-too-brief flash of middle-class charity towards the poor and less fortunate; as an atheist turned mystic, he must have been repelled by the overtly Christian dimension of the holiday; as a radical rationalist, he will no doubt have been appalled by its superstitious pagan elements and the absurdity of Father Christmas and his airborne reindeer. As a serious dramatist and man of letters, he was horrified by the immense silliness of the Christmas pantomime – and all the other quaint, unintellectual, sentimental and indulgent aspects that the season brings us by the sleigh-load. As a devout vegetarian and teetotaller, perhaps it was his physical disgust at the thought of all that roasted animal flesh and booze that excited his bile.

No one has articulated their scorn for Christmas quite as powerfully or wittily as Shaw, but there has always been a very vocal minority who share at least some of his views on the subject and no doubt there always will be. In a strange way, the Christmas moaners have become as much a feature of the season as a turkey lunch or a well-decorated tree. Somehow it wouldn’t be quite the same without them.

There is of course another type of Christmas extremist, an altogether happier chap for whom the annual winter holiday is a perfectly smashing, absolutely wizard occasion. He is the Christmas fanatic who will beat you over the head with turkey drumsticks until he pops out of his Santa suit if you so much as whisper a word of weariness about the world’s largest religious festival. He is simply nutty for Noël. (I say ‘he’ advisedly because these ‘crazy’ Christmas cavorters are rarely female.) You can spot a Noël Nutter from 100 paces. He will be the one at the Christmas party wearing some combination of the following: a) a jumper or tie with a pattern of reindeers mating; b) comedy glasses which squirt snow and then wipe the lenses with built-in wipers; and c) a revolving bow tie.

In all likelihood, the Noël Nutter’s front garden – and probably his roof – will be crammed with every imaginable item of Christmas kitsch: an eight-foot-high light-up inflatable snowman, a Santa sleigh with full set of reindeer and faux presents, several thousand outdoor lights and a road sign reading Santa Stop Here! Christmas Prat, I think, is the proper scientific term for this species and I’m not sure I’d invite him round for a Christmas drink any sooner than I would the whingers in the Shaw camp. To some extent, the Christmas Prat is the very reason why the Shavian moaners come over all gloomy and break out in a rash each December. Remove the Prat – and all who encourage and sell to him – and you remove a great deal of the reason to dislike Christmas.

Somewhere in between these two groups of extremists who have unwittingly joined forces and done their best to despoil the image of our ancient winter festival, you will find the rest of us: a vast global population of people living in predominantly Christian cultures for whom Christmas remains, by and large, and if celebrated properly, a truly joyful period of the year.

On a superficial level, Christmas is a time when the ordinary rules of daily life are suspended for a week or two, when the tools of work are laid down and the workplace vacated, when scattered families and old friends gravitate to each other’s homes to exchange gifts and greetings, when miserable diets and boring exercise programmes are abandoned and we can eat and drink ourselves daft, when strangers treat each other with greater kindness and civility, when fireplaces, candles and decorations bring some warmth and cheer against the cold and bleak landscape outside, when a sense of brotherhood and kindness towards the less fortunate is roused, when television and theatre try even harder to entertain us, when fair-weather and lapsed Christians can enjoy going to church without feeling a little uncertain as to whether or not they should be there … For the truly devout among us, the Christmas period is of course a wonderful and highly significant time in the calendar, even without any of the above. Falling where it does, the Christmas holiday period also has the virtue of drawing a line under one year and stirring up promise and hope for another, wiping clean the slate of our experience, and allowing us to start all over again and have another bash at getting our lives right. Christmas also acts as a milestone, or a marker, in our family lives, tracking our development and relationships over the years.

These are all great reasons to look forward to Christmas and to cherish every day of it when it comes, and when the often stressful business of preparing, organizing and staging it allows. But it seems there is something far deeper at work in this anticipation and enjoyment, something more than plain physical indulgence and holiday-time recreation. What is it about the sound of a distant carol floating on the air, the smell of a freshly carved turkey or a pan of mulled wine, or the sight of a snow-bound landscape or a tastefully decorated pine tree that excites, for so many of us, such feelings of warmth, reassurance and expectation? The answer, I think, is found in the past: the past of our own lives and in the wider, deeper past of our civilization, our history, our roots.

On the face of it, 25 December is a date in a religious calendar when Christians celebrate the birth of Christ, a central day of religious observation that has expanded into a longer, more secularized holiday period. The truth, however, is far more complicated and interesting. Most of us are dimly aware that there are elements of pagan ritual blended into the Christian and commercialized secular customs of the holiday. It is well known, for instance, that the practice of hanging up mistletoe in our homes has some connection with the Druids. What I hadn’t understood before setting out to research this collection was quite how many of our Christmas traditions are pagan in origin, stretching back thousands of years, deep into the past of European civilization. These ancient customs, many of them linked to winter solstice festivals, were absorbed into the Christian experience. Over the centuries they have been modified, moulded and repackaged to the point where we now think of them as being mainly Christian in origin, with just a hint of paganism about them.

In truth, it’s the other way round. There is no criticism of the Church, or disappointment, in this observation. On the contrary, I find it exciting that whenever we bring a Christmas tree or some holly branches into our homes, when we exchange gifts with one another, when we light our candles and fires, when we throw a Christmas party or lay on a feast, we are performing a modern-day version of our distant ancestors’ winter celebrations. I may not wear an animal-skin loincloth or live in a wattle-and-daub hut or hunt and gather my own food – well, not since my university days at any rate – but the way I celebrate Christmas links me, through dozens of centuries, with my primeval forebears. Over the centuries, various cultures and civilizations have contributed to the constantly changing nature of Christmas: Romans, Persians, Celts, Norsemen, medieval kings and noblemen, Puritans and Parliamentarians, enterprising Victorians, German princes, American settlers, to name but some. I cannot think of any other event that manages to connect us to our earliest roots as directly as all the rituals of Christmas.

Above all else, though, Christmas is about children and it is this association with innocence, the link with our own childhood, that is the most evocative and emotive aspect of the season. Our prime concern as adults is that the children, especially the younger ones, have a memorable and happy time. It’s difficult not to share their sense of mounting excitement as the year advances and first the Christmas period and then the day itself approaches. (By the same token, it’s easy to understand why people without children rarely show great enthusiasm for Christmas; I wonder whether it’s significant that Bernard Shaw never produced a family.) By entering into the spirit of Christmas, we allow ourselves to indulge briefly in a world of innocence and in a childlike sense of wonder. That purity of feeling was stolen from us when we became world-weary grownups, but at Christmas we can suspend our scepticism and cynicism, forget the harsher world of adult experience for a while, surrender ourselves to sentimentality and join in the awe and the wonder and the excitement. In short, we become children again. There’s nothing cool or clever about liking Christmas, and that, I suspect, is what I like about it. I’m with Charles Dickens, not Bernard Shaw, on this one: Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas.

Farting Dwarves and Peacock Pie:

How Our Ancestors Celebrated Christmas

THE DATE OF CHRIST’S BIRTH HAS BEEN a matter of dispute for centuries, but most scholars agree that 25 December is a suspiciously convenient point in the calendar. The date just happens to be the day of the winter solstice in the old Julian calendar, when pagans across Europe and the Middle East celebrated the birth of the new sun with a series of ceremonies, feasts and wild parties. It also marked the end of the Roman feast of Saturnalia, a week-long celebration in honour of Saturn, the god of agriculture and plenty. Natalis Solis Invicti (‘the day of the birth of the unconquered sun’) was an especially popular holiday throughout the Roman Empire. The early Church struggled to eradicate ancient pagan traditions such as the solstice celebrations and, though we cannot be certain, it seems likely that the authorities thought it sensible to absorb and then shape the various winter festivals into a Christian form, rather than alienate people by banishing them altogether.

THE ROMAN HOLIDAY OF SATURNALIA HAD DEVELOPED INTO A WILD festival starting on 17 December and ending with the winter solstice celebrations, during which time only cooks and bakers were allowed to work. Even slaves were freed from their duties to join in the revelry, which included street processions, fire and torch ceremonies, lavish feasts, dressing up in animal skins and other costumes and a great deal of drinking. There followed a few days’ break to recuperate before the Romans launched themselves into the Kalends celebrations, the equivalent of our New Year, which rivalled Saturnalia for revelry and drunkenness. During the end-of-year holiday the Romans also exchanged gifts and decorated their homes with evergreens, just as we do at Christmas today.

Handily, many of the Roman traditions of Saturnalia lent themselves to Christian interpretation. The holly with which people bedecked their homes came to represent Christ’s crown of thorns, and the giving of presents was a symbol of Jesus Christ as God’s gift to man. Even the pagan tradition of scattering corn and straw throughout the home was easily Christianized because it reminded worshippers of Christ’s lowly surroundings in the Bethlehem stable.

NOWHERE IN THE GOSPELS OR THE WRITINGS of the early Christians is there any mention of Christ’s birthday. It was several centuries after his lifetime that the date became a matter of conjecture and argument. This was partly because early Christians had no interest in birthdays. The Epiphany (today, 6 January) was of greater importance: in the Eastern Churches, this was the day for celebrating Christ’s baptism; in the West it was to commemorate the manifestation of Christ’s glory and his revelation to the Magi. Some early Christians even took exception to the recognition of birthdays because it distracted from their more significant ‘deathdays’, when saints were martyred and Christ had given his life for mankind. Exactly when the Church decided upon 25 December as the birth date of Jesus is unclear, but it almost certainly came to be accepted as that during the fourth century, possibly during the reign of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor.

The ancient peoples of the Angli began the year on the 25th of December when we now celebrate the birthday of the Lord; and the very night which is now so holy to us, they called in their tongue, ‘modranecht’, that is, the mother’s night, by reason we suspect of the ceremonies which in that night-long vigil they performed.

ST BEDE (c. 673–735)

De Temporum Ratione

The outgoing of the Romans and the incoming of the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, disastrously affected the festival of Christmas, for the invaders were heathens, and Christianity was swept westward before them. They lived in a part of the Continent which had not been reached by Christianity nor classic culture and they worshipped the false gods of Woden and Thunder and were addicted to various heathenish practices, some of which are mingled with the festivities of Christmastide … The Anglo-Saxon excesses are referred to by some of the old chroniclers, intemperance being a very prevalent vice at the Christmas festival. Ale and mead were their favourite drinks; wines were used as occasional luxuries.

W. F. DAWSON

Christmas: Its Origins and Associations, 1902

IN THE MIDDLE AGES, THE CHURCH JOINED IN THE GENERAL REVELRY at Christmas time with some very peculiar and irreligious traditions of its own. One such was the custom of the Boy Bishop. At the beginning of December, usually 6 December (St Nicholas’s Day), in cathedrals across Britain and Europe, a young choirboy was elected to be bishop until the 28th, Holy Innocents’ Day. He was chosen either by the bishop or by his fellow choristers, depending on the cathedral, and for three weeks the young boy, dressed in cope and mitre and carrying a crook, travelled the diocese with his high-pitched soprano chums, carrying out a number of grown-up duties. The election of the boy drew huge crowds to the cathedral and there was much hilarity as the senior clergy swapped places with the choristers. After the service, there followed a lavish feast at which the choristers were allowed to eat as much food and drink as much wine as they wished. This was the high point of the year for medieval choristers, who led a harsh, thankless life otherwise. Their days were usually long and hard, they were often fed poorly and they were frequently beaten by their masters. During his travels, the Boy Bishop visited monasteries and larger churches, preaching sermons written for him by a senior clergyman. The tradition of the Boy Bishop was disliked by many within the Church, but others justified it on the grounds that it demonstrated vividly how the lowly and meek were able to acquire authority and respect, just as Jesus had done in his life. The Boy Bishop tradition was ended in Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, but continued for almost another 200 years elsewhere in Europe.

THE MEAT OF THE PEACOCK IS TOUGH, DRY AND UNAPPETIZING BUT that didn’t seem to bother the royals and nobles of the Middle Ages. To them, the Indian forest bird was a spectacular speciality, and it was served up in the dining halls of castles and baronial homes amid great pomp and ceremony. Often the bird was made into a large pie with the head sticking out through the crust at one end and its huge feathery tail sticking out of the other. Cooks sometimes discarded the meat of the peacock altogether and filled the pies with tastier birds such as goose and chicken.

CHRISTMAS DAY 1066: ‘THE BASTARD’ BECAME ‘THE CONQUEROR’ when William I was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey. When the Norman contingent at the ceremony was asked by Ealdred, the Archbishop of York, if they welcomed William as king, the shouts of approval were so loud that the guards outside suspected treachery of some kind and immediately set about torching nearby buildings. Historian Orderic Vitalis records that the fire spread so fast that most of the congregation fled: Only the bishops and a few clergy and monks remained, terrified in the sanctuary, and with difficulty completed the consecration of the king who was trembling from head to foot. William’s funeral in Caen Abbey 21 years later was no less dramatic. William’s corpse, too fat for his coffin, burst midway through the service, filling the abbey with ‘an unbearable stench’, according to Vitalis.

CAROL SINGERS were generally shunned by medieval clergy and barred from most churches on the grounds that the practice was more pagan than Christian. The carollers, who danced in a circle as they sang, were forced to pursue their revelry out in the streets, moving from house to house.

28 DECEMBER IS ‘HOLY Innocents’ Day’ or ‘Childermass Day’, when the Church commemorates the children allegedly killed on the order of King Herod. It has been regarded as a day of ill omen from the Middle Ages onwards. Edward IV postponed his coronation to another day and Louis XI of France refused to conduct business on it, while superstitious people claim that no one should be married or start building a house on the dreaded day. Some records suggest that young English boys were beaten on Holy Innocents’ Day to remind them of Herod’s savagery.

‘WAITS’ (TOWN PIPERS) were a common sight and sound from medieval times until the early nineteenth century, when an Act of Parliament forced them to lay down their noisy wind instruments. Every city and town of significance had a band of waits and their duties included heralding the arrival of royal guests at the town gates, or leading the mayor’s parades. Their habit of wandering the streets in the dead of night and striking up a windy tune under people’s windows wasn’t universally appreciated, and there were few protests when the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 forced their abolition. Like a bad smell, however, the waits lingered in the air a while longer, turning up at Christmas time to sing and play carols for money until the early twentieth century.

The only music I have heard this week is waits; to sit up working until two or three in the morning, and then – just as I am losing myself in my first sleep – to hear ‘Venite Adoremus’ welling forth from a cornet English pitch, a saxhorn Society of Arts pitch (or thereabouts), and a trombone French pitch, is the sort of thing that breaks my peace and destroys my goodwill towards men!

Diaries of GEORGE BERNARD
SHAW (1856-1950),

Irish dramatist and essayist

THE EXPRESSION ‘HUMBLE PIE’ originates from a medieval Christmas practice whereby the rich gave the innards of their deer to the poor as a treat. The offal was known as the ‘umbles’, and the grateful peasants used it to make a pie. Christmas Day was not all unfettered joy in the hovels of the poor, as it happened to be one of the calendar’s four ‘quarter days’ when tenants were obliged to pay his lordship his rent and taxes.

DURING THE MIDDLE AGES, THE tables of the rich would have been filled with a sumptuous display of foods throughout the 12 days of Christmas. Goose was a common dish and the bird was often given a shiny, golden appearance by basting it in a mixture of butter and the highly coveted and expensive spice, saffron. Pork or wild boar often formed the pièce de résistance of the Christmas feast, and the roasts were carried into the dining halls amid great fanfare with lemons stuffed into the beasts’ mouths.

THE MURDER IN 1170 OF THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, as he prayed in his cathedral was considered all the more horrendous for its having occurred during the Christmas period. Taking King Henry II’s plea – ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ – to its logical conclusion, four knights of his court rode straight to Canterbury on 29 December and murdered Becket in the cathedral’s north transept.

IF YOUR CHILDREN MOAN AS YOU drag them away from their toys and off to church on Christmas Day, remind them of the experiences suffered by their youthful ancestors in the Middle Ages. ‘Christ’s Mass’, the celebration of the Nativity established in the seventh century, consisted of three services: one at midnight (the Angel’s Mass), one at dawn (the Shepherd’s Mass), and the third at some point during the day (the Mass of the Divine Word).

FROM WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR THROUGH TO THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH century, the feast of the Epiphany, on 6 January, was celebrated far more lavishly than Christmas Day owing to its associations with the notion of kingship. It is the day that the Church celebrated the showing of Christ ‘the King’ to the Three Kings, Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. For centuries and until modern times, in many countries, including Britain, it was customary to exchange gifts on the Epiphany, not on the Nativity.

IN THE LATE TWELFTH CENTURY, HENRY II HAD A FOOL CALLED Roland le Pettour (Roland the Farter), whose antics he enjoyed so much that he used to force him out of retirement on Christmas Day to perform his saltum, siffletum et pettum routine (a leap, a whistle and a fart). Two centuries on, William Langland wrote in Piers Plowman of minstrels farting in harmony with their pipes to amuse their noble patrons during the Christmas festivities.

THE ROYAL CHRISTMAS FEAST OF 1214 IS A SIGNIFICANT MOMENT IN British history, for it was then that England’s barons laid down their demands to King John for what became the Magna Carta.

CHAUCER’s only reference to Christmas, in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’

Canterbury Tales

WHEN RICHARD II ENTERTAINED KING LEON OF ARMENIA AT THE ROYAL Palace, Eltham, over Christmas 1386, he laid on a feast of great extravagance, feeding 10,000 guests over 12 days with 28 oxen, 300 sheep and thousands of game birds and fowl.

DURING HIS SIEGE OF ROUEN IN 1418, HENRY V SUSPENDED OPERATIONS on Christmas Day and delivered food for the hungry inhabitants.

UNTIL THE NINETEENTH CENTURY PEOPLE USED TO KEEP UP THEIR holly and ivy, and other evergreen decorations, until Candlemas on 2 February, which officially marks the end of the Christmas period according to the Christian calendar. Candlemas commemorates the ritual purification of Mary, 40 days after Christ’s birth, and evolved from an ancient Jewish belief that women were unclean after the birth of a child. Women weren’t allowed to worship in the temple for 40 days after giving birth to a boy and for 60 days if it was a girl, after which they had to be cleansed. It is known as Candlemas because it was on this day that all the church’s candles for the year were blessed, and many homes placed candles on their windowsills. Like many Christmas traditions, Candlemas was a bastardized Christian version of a pagan tradition. For centuries, millennia even, pagans had celebrated the festival of light at this time of year as it marked the halfway point of winter, between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE Tudor period, the English monarch traditionally invited dozens of the nobility to join the royal court in lavish and lengthy celebrations over the Christmas period. Great offence was given by those who declined the invitation, and the only acceptable excuses were war, childbirth and life-threatening illness. Queen Elizabeth I was especially insistent that her male courtiers left their wives at home and joined her for the full 12 days of festivities. A royal banquet could feature as many as 20 courses, and kitchens were obliged to cook far more than the guests could eat so that a generous surplus might be distributed to the poor when their lordships could eat or drink no more, and had moved on to tossing the court dwarves and throwing scraps to the minstrels. Often, the local townsfolk were allowed into the dining hall to put on a sort of variety performance for the King or Queen, featuring jugglers, magicians, mummers (mimers), musicians and bards.

THE FEAST OF FOOLS, LIKE THE TRADITION OF THE BOY BISHOP, was a bizarre medieval Christmas practice that can have done little to promote the dignity of the clergy. In an ecclesiastical version of an office party crossed with a pantomime, members of the lower clergy (usually peasants) dressed up as animals, women, bishops, and sometimes even the Pope, and set about mocking their higher-ranking colleagues and the Church’s most sacred institutions. There was much licence and buffoonery throughout the pageant, which usually took place on or about the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January). More often known by its Latin name, Festum Fatuorum, the festival, which was especially popular in France, was considered blasphemous by the more serious-minded within the Church. The pagan roots of the tradition, with their echoes of the raucous Roman Saturnalia, were a further cause of disquiet and the comic custom was finally forbidden, under pain of the harshest penalties, by the Council of Basle in 1435.

THE MEDIEVAL CHRISTMAS TRADITION OF ‘wassailing’ has all but died out in England. The word derives from the Old English words wæs and hæl, meaning ‘be healthy’ or ‘be whole’ (as in ‘hale and hearty’). Originally, a wassail ceremony, or toast, celebrated the new rising of the sun following the winter solstice, and encouraged a bountiful harvest of fruit in the coming year. By Tudor times, wassailing often took the form of bands of half-cut peasants staggering between the houses of richer folk, singing carols and refusing to leave until they had been rewarded for their efforts with a gift or a donation of hard cash. The wassailers’ demand for figgy pudding in the traditional English song ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas’ is followed by the menacing ‘We won’t go until we get some!’

THE TRADITIONAL ‘WASSAIL’ DRINK ENJOYED BY OUR FOREBEARS comprised a mixture of mulled ale, spices and the pulp of roasted apples – and, it seems, anything else that was lying around, including curdled cream and eggs. The frothiness of the concoction explains its alternative name of ‘lamb’s wool’. There are still odd pockets of die-hard wassailers to be found in the West Country, defiantly singing and dancing beneath apple trees, performing curious quasi-pagan rituals and drinking to the health of apple trees in the hope that they may produce a better cider crop. The custom often takes place on the old Twelfth Night, 17 January.

WASSAILING SONG

LIKE SO MANY MEDIEVAL CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS, WASSAILING WAS suppressed during the Puritan crackdown on fun in the seventeenth century. In 1644, Oliver Cromwell’s administration carried an Act of Parliament banning any form of celebration during the Twelve Days of Christmas, on the grounds that there is no mention of Christmas in the Bible. But it was the pagan elements and ‘Popish’ associations to which the Puritans took the most violent exception. The more extreme Puritans dubbed 25 December ‘Satan’s working day’ and the ‘Antichrist’s Mass’. They even banned mince pies and the traditional evergreen decorations such as holly and ivy, and ‘lust-inducing’ mistletoe. Christmas officially became a gloomy day of work and fasting until 1660, when, to the great relief of the drinking classes, the monarchy was restored and Charles II sat on the throne. But Christmas was never quite the same again and it wasn’t until the combined efforts of Prince Albert, Charles Dickens and a handful of Americans in the nineteenth century that the festive season rediscovered its medieval sense of joy.

THE PURITAN WRITER WILLIAM PRYNNE HAD THIS TO SAY ABOUT Christmas festivities in 1633: When our Saviour was borne into the world at first we hear of no feasting, drinking, healthing, carding, dicing, stage plays, mummeries, masques or heathenish Christmas pastimes; those puritanical angels, saints and shepherds knew no such pompous Christmas courtships which the devil and his accursed instruments have since appropriated to his most blessed Nativity.

THE DIARIST JOHN EVELYN, A PROTESTANT BUT NO PURITAN, WROTE this well-known account of his experiences when he went to observe the Nativity in a chapel off the Strand in 1657:

I went to London with my wife to celebrate Christmas Day. Sermon ended, the chapel was surrounded with soldiers. As we went up to receive the Sacrament, the miscreants held their muskets against us, as if they would have shot us at the altar: but yet suffering us to finish the office of Communion, as perhaps not having instructions what to do in case they found us in that action.

Evelyn was held for 24 hours for celebrating Christmas Day and reprimanded for his folly.

THE CALVINIST SCOTS OF THE sixteenth century were particularly severe in their denunciation of Christmas celebrations. Dourness had become a virtue north of the Tweed and never more so than when their frivolous, effete neighbours over the border were shaming themselves during December in wild, drunken revelry, lust and gluttony. Nearly a century before the Puritans took power in England after the Civil War, the Scots had stamped out any semblance of Christmas fun in their own land. Not that Christmas in Scotland had been a barrel of laughs beforehand. In 1575 magistrates in Aberdeen punished a group of girls for the ‘playing, dancing and singing of filthy carols on Yule Day’. It wasn’t until 1958 that Christmas became a national holiday in Scotland.

Perhaps no single circumstance more strongly illustrates the temper of the Precisians [Puritans] [than the suppression of Christmas].