Yule

From the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore:

Yule.
This word, in various spellings, means a loosely defined midwinter period (not a single day) in the early languages of most Germanic and Scandinavian countries. Bede, writing of pagan England, mentions two months, ‘early Yule’ and ‘later Yule’, corresponding to Roman December and January; after the Conversion, ‘Yule’ was narrowed to mean either the Nativity (25 December), or the twelve days of festivity beginning on this date. The word Christmas replaced ‘Yule’ in most of England in the 11th century, but not in north-eastern areas of Danish settlement, where it survived strongly till modern times as the normal dialect term for Christmas. Nineteenth-century writers took up the word as a way of denoting the ‘Christmas of olden times’, with its lavish food and secular jollity, situated in a largely invented ‘Merrie England’.

The medieval liking for pageantry and symbolism sometimes led to Yule being impersonated (cf. Father Christmas). In 1572 the Archbishop of York ordered the Mayor and Aldermen to suppress an annual parade on St Thomas’s Day (21 December) called ‘The Riding of Yule and his Wife’, because it drew ‘great concourses of people’ away from church-going, and involved disguising. The man representing Yule carried a shoulder of lamb and a large cake of fine bread; he was accompanied by his ‘wife’, carrying a distaff, and by attendants who threw nuts to the crowd.

The Yule Log (or Clog, or Christmas Block) is mentioned in folklore collections from most parts of England, but especially the West Country and the North. It would be the largest piece of wood which could fit on the family hearth, and was usually brought in on Christmas Eve with some ceremony, and put on the fire that evening; many writers, including Herrick, say it was kindled with a fragment kept from the previous year’s log. It was also generally believed that it would be very unlucky for the family if the log was allowed to go out on Christmas Day. It is not clear when the custom arose, since the first definite references are only from the 17th century, for example Aubrey’s “In the West-riding of Yorkshire on Christmas Eve at night they bring in a large Yule-log, or Christmas block, and set it on fire and lap their Christmas ale and sing ‘Yule, Yule, a pack of new cards and a Christmas stool’”.

Victorian illustrations of a medieval Christmas often show several men hauling huge trees or stumps in with ropes, but the antiquity of the word ‘Yule’ cannot prove the custom’s age. Less well known is the custom of lighting a Yule candle on Christmas Eve, first recorded by this name in 1817. These were taller than usual candles (‘half a yard in length’), and there was a tradition of chandlers and grocers giving them to their regular customers. The custom is reported chiefly from the north of the country, but its wider range is indicated by Parson Woodeforde’s diary entries, in Norfolk, such as: ‘I lighted my large wax-candle being Xmas day during tea-time this afternoon for abt. an hour’ (25 December 1790). The pre-Reformation Church made a particular feature of candles at Christmas, and strong connections between the season and candles persist to this day. It was thought unlucky to light the Yule candle before dusk on Christmas Eve, and once alight it was not moved. As with the log, a small piece was kept ‘for luck’ in the coming year.

From ‘Cider with Rosie’

by Laurie Lee:

The week before Christmas, when snow seemed to lie thickest, was the moment for carol-singing; and when I think back to those nights it is to the crunch of snow and to the lights of the lanterns on it. Carol-singing in my village was a special tithe for the boys, the girls had little to do with it. Like hay-making, blackberrying, stone-clearing, and wishing-people-a-happy-Easter, it was one of our seasonal perks.

By instinct we knew just when to begin; a day too soon and we should have been unwelcome, a day too late and we should have received lean looks from people whose bounty was already exhausted. When the true moment came, exactly balanced, we recognized it and were ready.

So as soon as the wood had been stacked in the oven to dry for the morning fire, we put on our scarves and went out through the streets, calling loudly between our hands, till the various boys who knew the signal ran out from their houses to join us.

One by one they came stumbling over the snow, swinging their lanterns’ around their heads, shouting and coughing horribly.

‘Come carol-barking then?’

We were the Church Choir, so no answer was necessary. For a year we had praised the Lord out of key, and as a reward for this service - on top of the Outing - we now had the right to visit all the big houses, to sing our carols and collect our tribute.

To work them all in meant a five-mile foot journey over wild and generally snowed-up country. So the first thing we did was to plan our route; a formality, as the route never changed. All the same, we blew on our fingers and argued; and then we chose our Leader. This was not binding, for we all fancied ourselves as Leaders, and he who started the night in that position usually trailed home with a bloody nose.

Eight of us set out that night. There was Sixpence the Tanner, who had never sung in his life (he just worked his mouth in church); the brothers Horace and Boney, who were always fighting everybody and always getting the worst of it; Clergy Green, the preaching maniac; Wait the bully, and my two brothers. As we went down the lane other boys, from other villages, were already about the hills, bawling ‘Kingwenslush’, and shouting through keyholes ‘Knock on the knocker! Ring at the Bell! Give us a penny for singing so well!’ They weren’t an approved charity as we were, the Choir; but competition was in the air.

Our first call as usual was the house of the Squire, and we trouped nervously down his drive. For light we had candles in marmalade-jars suspended on loops of string, an d they threw pale gleams on the towering snowdrifts that stood on each side of the drive. A blizzard was blowing, but we were well wrapped up, with Army puttees on our legs, woollen hats on our heads, and several scarves around our ears.

As we approached the Big House across its white silent lawns, we too grew respectfully silent. The lake near by was stiff and black, the waterfall frozen and still. We arranged ourselves shuffling around the big front door, then knocked and announced the Choir.

A maid bore the tidings of our arrival away into the echoing distances of the house, and while we waited we cleared our throats noisily. Then she came back, and the door was left ajar for us, and we were bidden to begin. We brought no music, the carols were in our heads. ‘Let’s give ’em “Wild Shepherds”,’ said Jack. We began in confusion, plunging into a wreckage of keys, of different words and tempo; but we gathered our strength; he who sang loudest took the rest of us with him, and the carol took shape if not sweetness.

This huge stone house, with its ivied walls, was always a mystery to us. What were those gables, those rooms and attics, those narrow windows veiled by the cedar trees. As we sang Wild Shepherds’ we craned our necks, gaping into that lamplit hall which we had never entered; staring at the muskets and untenanted chairs, the great tapestries furred by dust - until suddenly, on the stairs, we saw the old Squire himself standing and listening with his head on one side.

He didn’t move until we’d finished; then slowly he tottered towards us, dropped two coins in our box with a trembling hand, scratched his name in the book we carried, gave us each a long look with his moist blind eyes, then turned away in silence.

As though released from a spell, we took a few sedate steps, then broke into a run for the gate. We didn’t stop till we were out of the grounds. Impatient, at last, to discover the extent of his bounty, we squatted by the cowsheds, held our lanterns over the book, and saw that he had written ‘Two Shillings’. This was quite a good start. No one of any worth in the district would dare to give us less than the Squire.

Steadily we worked through the length of the valley, going from house to house, visiting the lesser and the greater gentry - the farmers, the doctors, the merchants, the majors, and other exalted persons. It was freezing hard and blowing too; yet not for a moment did we feel the cold. The snow blew into our faces, into our eyes and mouths, soaked through our puttees, got into our boots, and dripped from our woollen caps. But we did not care. The collecting-box grew heavier, and the list of names in the book longer and more extravagant, each trying to outdo the other.

Mile after mile we went, fighting against the wind, falling into snowdrifts, and navigating by the lights of the houses. And yet we never saw our audience. We called at house after house; we sang in courtyards and porches, outside windows, or in the damp gloom of hallways; we heard voices from hidden rooms; we smelt rich clothes and strange hot food; we saw maids bearing in dishes or carrying away coffee-cups; we received nuts, cakes, figs, preserved ginger, dates, cough-drops, and money; but we never once saw our patrons. We sang as it were at the castle walls, and apart from the Squire, who had shown himself to prove that he was still alive, we never expected it otherwise.

We approached our last house high up on the hill, the place of Joseph the farmer. For him we had chosen a special carol. which was about the other Joseph, so that we always felt that singing it added a spicy cheek to the night. The last stretch of country to reach his farm was perhaps the most difficult of all. In these rough bare lanes, open to all winds, sheep were buried and wagons lost. Huddled together, we tramped in one another’s footsteps, powdered snow blew into our screwed-up eyes, the candles burnt low, some blew out altogether, and we talked loudly above the gale.

Crossing, at last, the frozen mill-stream - whose wheel in summer still turned a barren mechanism - we climbed up to Joseph’s farm. Sheltered by trees, warm on its bed of snow, it seemed always to be like this. As always it was late; as always this was our final call. The snow had a fine crust upon it, and the old trees sparkled like tinsel.

We grouped ourselves round the farmhouse porch. The sky cleared, and broad streams of stars ran down over the valley and away to Wales. On Slad’s white slopes, seen through the black sticks of its woods, some red lamps still burned in the windows.

Everything was quiet; everywhere there was the faint crackling silence of the winter night. We started singing, and we were all moved by the words and the sudden trueness of our voices. Pure, very dear, and breathless we sang:

As Joseph was a walking
He heard an angel sing;
‘This night shall be the birth-time
Of Christ the Heavenly King.
He neither shall be bornèd
In Housen nor in hall,
Nor in a place of paradise
But in an ox’s stall …’

And two thousand Christmases became real to us then; the houses, the halls, the places of paradise had all been visited; the stars were bright to guide the Kings through the snow; and across the farmyard we could hear the beasts in their stalls. We were given roast apples and hot mince-pies, in our nostrils were spices like myrrh, and in our wooden box, as we headed back for the village, there were golden gifts for all.

Christmas in America: European Inheritances

From Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996):

"Shall we have Christmas?" was the way one Pennsylvanian asked the question in 1810. Throughout their colonial history and well into nationhood, not only the matter of "shall" but of "how shall" Christmas be celebrated challenged Americans. Their search for answers to these two difficult and sometimes divisive issues can be found in a chronicle of evolving customs, cultural discord, and striking invention. It begins with the first European emigres, who brought to America an ambiguous legacy concerning the holiday that was almost as old as the Christian Church itself.

Christians had wrestled for centuries with questions of if, when, and how to celebrate Jesus' birth. As a commemoration of the miracle that established the Godly paternity of Jesus, Christmas was a celebration of the event upon which the existence of Christianity depended. At the same time, the festival functioned from its inception as an end-of-year substitute for pagan rites and quickly absorbed many profane elements, ones that remain among its most attractive features. As the observance of Christmas spread, the details of its celebration became as varied as the cultures that kept it and as changeable as the history of those cultures. But the radically paradoxical mix of both the sacred and the profane remained.

The earliest Christians gave little attention to Jesus' birth. They expected the Second Coming any day, and in any case viewed birthday celebrations as heathen. As the possibility of his imminent return faded, the faithful

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took a more historical perspective and began to search for evidence of the day or even season of Jesus' birth. They found no clues in the Gospels. Nor could they locate any other reliable sources to pinpoint his nativity. Undeterred, some placed his birth on May 20 and others on April 19 or 20. Clement, Bishop of Alexandria (died c. 215), nominated November 18. Hippolytus (died c. 236) calculated that Christ must have been born on Wednesday, the same day God created the sun. The De Pascba Computus, written anonymously in North Africa about 243, posited that the first day of creation coincided with the first day of spring, on March 25, and contended that Jesus' birthday fell four days later, on March 28.

Sometime in the fourth century of the Common Era, the Roman Church began to celebrate a Feast of the Nativity and to do so on December 25. A variety of issues influenced the decision. Internally, heresies plagued Church authority. Arianism, one of the most threatening, regarded Jesus as a solely human agent of God. The Church insisted on his divinity. By assigning him one human quality -- a birthday -- it appropriated some of Arianism's appeal, but sustained Jesus' place in the Holy Trinity.

The Church had also grown concerned about the increasing popularity of pagan religions and mystery cults in Rome. Each year beginning on December 17, the first day of Saturnalia, and continuing through Kalends, the first day of January, most Romans feasted, gamed, reveled, paraded, and joined in other festivities as they paid homage to their deities. The Church's alarm deepened when Emperor Aurelian, noticing that the pagan rituals had begun to converge around Mithras, the solar god, decreed in 274 C.E. that December 25, the winter solstice on the Julian Calendar, be kept as a public festival in honor of the Invincible Sun. Rome's Christians challenged paganism directly by specifying December 25, rather than some other date, as the day for their Nativity Feast.

Exactly when the Church of Rome began to keep Christmas, however, is not known. The first extant reference to the Feast of the Nativity may be as old as 336, in the earliest list of martyrs of the Roman Church. Perhaps Christmas was celebrated even earlier. Some scholars believe that Emperor Constantine (ruled 312-337 C.E.), who had converted to Christianity and built the Vatican atop the hill where the Mithras cult worshipped the sun, may have instituted the festival.

In any case, by the middle of the fourth century, the Church had boldly declared its Nativity holy day to be observed on the same day as the winter solstice. The concurrence of the two celebrations gave the Church an opportunity to turn elements of the Saturnalia itself to Christian ends. For

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example, it used the creation of the sun, the center of the Saturnalia, to reinforce and symbolize frequent scriptural and doctrinal imagery of God as the sun, and of Jesus' role as Son of God. The creation of Christmas was thus a measure of Christianity's growing power, challenging the crowds enjoying Saturnalian revelry to join the once secretive Christians in a celebration not of the birth of the sun, but rather the birth of Jesus, the Son of God.

The overlapping of Saturnalia and the Feast of the Nativity set the terms of all future debate over the Christmas festival. Its Christian aspects, at least in their most intense form, emphasized heavenly afterlife. The heathen elements absorbed into the festival affirmed life and exalted its annual renewal. The Church made no clear separations between the two perspectives. Instead, it layered profane activities with sacred ends to answer the needs, spiritual and physical, of the total person. This combination of sacred and profane made some religious leaders uncomfortable. For example, Gregory of Nazianzen (died 389) urged that "the celebration of the [Christmas] festival [be conducted] after an heavenly and not after an earthly manner" and cautioned against "feasting to excess, dancing and crowning the doors." Indeed, the paradox of purpose forged an enduring Christmas reality. As one historian succinctly characterized it: "The pagan Romans became Christians -- but the Saturnalia remained."

The custom of honoring Jesus' birth on December 25 quickly spread to the Eastern Church. By 380, Christians in Constantinople honored it as "Theophany or the Birthday." These Christians had once observed Epiphany, January 6, as a joint Feast of the Nativity and Baptism. This was the same date that popular legends held pagan gods made themselves known to humans. "Deep in the tradition of the Church's spirituality," writes John Gunstone, "was the idea that Christ's appearance in flesh was the consummation of all epiphanies." During the Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the celebration of Epiphany spread westward, but the Roman Church, with its celebration of the Nativity set in late December and its emphasis on Jesus' incarnation and divinity, recast it to commemorate the adoration of the Magi. In Constantinople, Epiphany continued to consecrate Jesus' baptism, but the Eastern Church began to mark December 25 as the day of his birth. The dual celebration, that of birth and baptism, that had defined the old holy day ceased to exist.

Over the next thousand years, the observance of Christmas followed the expanding community of Christianity. By 432, Egyptians kept it. By the end of the sixth century, Christianity had taken the holiday far northward

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and into England. During the next two hundred years in Scandinavia it became fused with the pagan Norse feast season known as Yule, the time of year also known as the Teutonic "Midwinter." Sometime around the Norman incursion in 1050, the Old English word Christes maesse (festival of Christ) entered the English language, and as early as the twelfth century "Xmas" had come into use. From the thirteenth century on, nearly all Europe kept Jesus' birth.

The tension between the folk and ecclesiastical qualities of the holy day did not ease with the advance of Christmas-keeping. Documents of the Middle Ages, Tristram Coffin has noted, were "fat with decrees against the abuses of Christmas merriment," an indication "that people at large [were] doing just what they ha[d] always done and paying little attention to the debates of the moralists." Some clergy stressed that fallen humankind needed a season of abandon and excess, as long as it was carried on under the umbrella of Christian supervision. Others argued that all vestiges of paganism must be removed from the holiday. Less fervent Christians complained about the unreasonableness of Church law and its attempts to change custom. Yet the Church sustained the hope that sacred would eventually overtake profane as pagans gave up their revels and turned to Christianity.

These conflicts continued during the Protestant Reformation, but with little promise of resolution. In England, the Anglican Church repeatedly, but with little success, tried to gain control over the day. Its custom had been to begin Christmas on December 16 (known as "O Sapientia") and celebrate for nine days. But during King Alfred's reign (871-899 C.E.), a law passed extending the celebration to twelve days, ending on Epiphany.

Celebrants devoted much of the season to pagan pleasures that were discouraged during the remainder of the year. The annual indulgence in eating, dancing, singing, sporting, card playing, and gambling escalated to magnificent proportions. By the seventeenth century, under the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts, the Christmas season featured elaborate masques, mummeries, and pageants. In 1607, King James I insisted that a play be acted on Christmas night and that the court indulge in games. One account of an evening's "moderate dinner" noted a first course of sixteen dishes. In 1626, the Duke of Buckingham found that the captains, masters, boatswains, gunners, and carpenters of three ships had abandoned their service in favor of Christmas revels, leaving their vessels prey to any enemy. In

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1633, the four Inns of Court presented a masque, The Triumph of Peace," at a cost of £20,000.

It fell to Puritan reformers to put a stop to the unholy merriment and to bend arguments over the proper keeping of Christmas into an older and more basic one -- whether there should even be an observance of the day. Defying the decision of the Anglican Convocation of 1562 to maintain the church calendar, the Puritans struck Christmas, along with all saints' days, from their own list of holy days. The Bible, they held, expressly commanded keeping only the Sabbath. That would be their practice as well.

In taking the offensive against Christmas-keeping, Puritans distributed colorful diatribes against the excesses of the holiday. Philip Stubbes's Anatomy of Abuses (1583) condemned revelous celebrants as "hel hounds" in a "Deville's daunce" of merriment. William Prynne's Histriomastix (1633) inveighed against plays, masques, balls, and the decking of houses with greens. "Into what a stupendous height of more than pagan impiety. . . have we not now degenerated!" he lamented. Christmas, he thought, ought to be "rather a day of mourning than rejoicing," not a time spent in "amorous mixt, voluptuous, unchristian, that I say not pagan, dancing, to God's, to Christ's dishonour, religion's scandal, chastities' shipwracke and sinne's advantage."

Even as Puritan condemnation of Christmas intensified, the economic and social upheaval of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had begun to alter English life. The standing social order, along with the paternalism of its manor system, was crumbling. Christmas, in its role as a part of the old structure, could not escape unscathed. In some years, the lavish celebrations lapsed. In many cases, the emphases of the holiday changed. It transformed, in the words of J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue, into "a symbol for hospitality towards the poor, an understanding between the different levels of society, and happier and more prosperous times in now neglected villages." King Charles I (1625-1649) went so far as to direct his noblemen and gentry to return to their landed estates in midwinter in order to keep up their old style of Christmas generosity.

The rise of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Commonwealth dealt another staggering blow to England's Christmas celebrations. Parliament outlawed seasonal plays in 1642. It ordered that the monthly fast, which coincidentally fell on Christmas in 1644, be kept. Parliament purposely met on every Christmas from 1644 to 1652. In 1647, it declared Christmas a day of penance, not feasting, and in 1652 "strongly prohibited" its observance.

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Ministers who preached on the Nativity risked imprisonment. Churchwardens faced fines for decorating their churches. By law, shops stayed open on Christmas as if it were any regular business day.

Yet resistance was not uncommon. One year, protesting Londoners decorated churches and shops with swags of bay, rosemary, box, holly, privit, and ivy, only to watch the Lord Mayor and City Marshal ride about setting fire to their handiwork. The populace "so roughly used" the merchants who ventured to open shop in 1646 that the shopkeepers petitioned Parliament for protection. In Canterbury, when the Lord Mayor ordered that the markets be kept open that Christmas, a "serious disturbance ensued . . . wherein many were severly hurt."

It was within this particularly turbulent era that English Christmas customs entered early Virginia and New England. Most settlers and adventurers arriving in the New World welcomed Christmas as a day of respite from the routines of work and hardship. Some observed it, at least in part, as a holy day. Others attempted to feast. On Christmas, 1608, Captain John Smith and his men, having endured for "six or seven dayes the extreame winde, rayne, frost and snow" as they traveled among the Indians of Virginia colony, "were never more merry, nor fed on more plentie of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-foule, and good bread; nor never had better fires in England." Maryland-bound passengers aboard the Ark in 1633 "so immoderately" drank wine on Christmas that "the next day 30 sickened of feve[r]s and whereof about a dozen died afterward."

Only Dissenters tried to ignore the holiday. The Mayflower Pilgrims, who arrived at Plymouth in December 1620, spent Christmas building "the first house for commone use to receive them and their goods." Within a year, however, the Pilgrims themselves had to face dissent. On the morning of December 25, 1621, less reform-minded newcomers to the colony "excused them selves and said it wente against their consciences to work on that day." Governor William Bradford allowed the "lusty yonge" Englishmen to rest, saying he "would spare them till they were better informed." But at noon he found them playing games in the street. Angered, Bradford told the frolickers that it ran against bis conscience that they should play while others worked. If they desired to keep Christmas as a matter of devotion they should stay in their houses, he said, "but ther should be no gameing or revelling in the streets." Nor did the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony observe Christmas. Governor John Winthrop

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entered nothing in his diary on his first Christmas in America in 1630, and in succeeding years he attempted to suppress the holiday.

In the early non-English settlements, sparse evidence points to a more traditional attitude toward the holiday. In 1604, for instance, French settlers of St. Croix Island, off the coast of Maine, held religious services and spent the remainder of Christmas Day playing games. In 1686 LaSalle's French colony on Garcita Creek celebrated what was probably the first Christmas in Texas. "[W]e first kept the Christmas Holy-Days. The Midnight Mass was sung, and on Twelve-Day, we cry'd The king drinks . . . tho' we had only Water...."

As the first settlements grew into more established communities, patterns of Christmas celebration peculiar to the colonies began to appear. Geographic separation from European homelands, the proximity of disparate religious and ethnic groups to each other, and the hardship of new beginnings disrupted old habits and holidays. In Dutch New Amsterdam, early in the seventeenth century, eighteen languages could be heard among the 500 or so inhabitants. Numerous Christmases abounded, persisting as an expression of individual heritages. In large towns, where various groups lived close together, the common ground for celebration could often be found in public and secular rather than in potentially divisive religious areas. Thus, Christmas, although widely celebrated, retained little importance in society as a whole precisely because of religious and cultural diversity.

Particularly in the middle colonies, a wide range of ethnicities and religions prevented a shared ecclesiastic and religious holiday. Pennsylvania Quakers scorned Christmas as adamantly as Puritans did. Huguenots, Moravians, Dutch Reformed, and Anglicans, who also lived in the colony, all kept Christmas in their own way. Shortly after Americans had won their independence, Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker herself, divided Philadelphians into three categories. There were Quakers, who "make no more account of it [Christmas] than another day," those who were religious, and the rest who "spend it in riot and dissipation."

"Frolicking," the name many gave to this sort of boisterous Christmas and New Year's fun, could be found throughout the colonies. In the New England countryside, revelous intruders entered houses with a speech and swords at Christmas time. Far into the eighteenth century, masked merrymakers roved Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley "making sport for everyone." Southerners shot guns, a custom similar to one practiced in northern England.

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The antecedents to this seasonal phenomenon have been traced to Roman times, when early Christians, seeking to ridicule pagan superstition and the Roman custom of masquerading, masked themselves on New Year's Day. Many, however, flagged in their intent and joined in the heathens' frolics. Church officials attempted to persuade members to desist, but failed. In time, even clergy could be found in full disguise, taking part in miracle and mystery plays performed during the Christmas season.

The convention of disguising, or mumming, and performing plays and skits dispersed throughout nearly all European countries. In England, beginning under the reign of Edward III (1327-1377), it became a form of royal entertainment. It peaked in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when elaborate dress and formal presentations, such as Ben Johnson's Masque of Christmas and that in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, were the order of the season. Enthusiasm for court masques diminished thereafter, dampened by the Puritan Directory. But the tradition of masquerading and mumming continued to thrive in more rustic forms. In parts of England, householders, family, guests, and servants donned masks and painted their faces or darkened them with soot to become "guisers," "geese-dancers," or "morris dancers." Often they dressed as animals. Sometimes men and women exchanged clothes with each other. Disguised, they played crude tricks on one another, or went from house to house and entered without permission. There they might dance, sing, feast, and act "a rude drama," mocking propriety and challenging the social order.

American colonists engaged in similar antics, though usually without the performance of even a rudimentary play. They concentrated instead on disguises, noisy good humor, and chaotic peregrinations through neighborhoods. Across the land, revelers, almost always males, gathered to shoot off firecrackers and guns, paraded with musical instruments, call from house to house in garish disguise, and beg for food and drink on December 25 and, in some places, on New Year's.

Such frolics, drawn from the custom of English Anglicans, as well as those of Swedish, German, and other settlers, were especially prominent in New York and Pennsylvania. Samuel Breck remembered maskers from his Pennsylvania childhood in the late eighteenth century. "They were a set of the lowest blackguards," he wrote, "who, disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces, went from house to house in large companies, . . . obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms that were occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen, [and] would demean themselves with great insolence." As the elder Breck and his friends

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played cards, Samuel had watched the mummers "take possession of a table, seat themselves on rich furniture and proceed to handle the cards, to the great annoyance of the company." He could only get rid of them by "giv[ing] them money, and listening) patiently to a foolish dialogue between two or more of them . . ."

Usually an informal code regulated the mummers' reception. According to one set of rules, "the proper custom" had been to ask the uninvited guests "into the house and regale them with mulled cider, or small beer, and home-made cakes," or "give the leading mummers a few pence as a dole, which . . . they would 'pool,' and buy cakes and beer." One never "address[ed] or otherwise recognize[d] the mummer by any other name than the name of the character he was assuming.

In New York, the calling ritual varied slightly. Men had gone from house to house, firing their guns, on New Year's Day since "time immemorial." At each place, after being invited in for food and drink, the men of the household joined them. "[T]hus they went on increasing their numbers until the whole neighborhood had been saluted and visited. . . . " The remainder of the day the shooters engaged in contests of marksmanship and other sports. At least one, the "very barbarous amusement" of "Shooting Turkeys," required a keen eye and sharp betting skills.

The southern colonies, largely rural and unhampered by Quaker and Puritan dissenters and whose white population was comparatively less diverse, cultivated Christmases of a very different sort. Decentralized living, a dearth of women, and a high death rate kept the holiday at bay during the first decades of settlement. As social and political conditions stabilized, southerners began to look to England for models of dress, manner, and social behavior. Their Christmas, like that of the English manor, evolved as an interval of leisure rather than a set of rituals assigned to one particular day. During the season, Virginians, Carolinians, and Marylanders especially enjoyed dancing, but also engaged in card playing, cock fighting, nine-pins, and horse racing. Anglicanism, the established religion in most of the planting colonies, did not pressure its members into sacred observance.

While southerners may have aspired to recreate a sense of the English Christmas, its authentic reproduction eluded them. No pre-Revolutionary account mentions boars' heads or wassail bowls, mummers or waits. In England those traditions had been on the wane when John Smith first ventured through Virginia, and by the 1650s had been mortally threatened

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by Cromwell's Parliament. A French traveler, who along with his entourage of nearly twenty stopped unannounced at the Virginia home of Colonel William Fitzhugh in 1680, left one of the few accounts from the seventeenth century. "[T]here was good wine and all kinds of beverages, so there was a great deal of carousing," the visitor wrote. For entertainment, Fitzhugh provided "three fiddlers, a jester, a tight-rope walker, and an acrobat who tumbled around." When the travelers left the next day, Fitzhugh sent wine and punch to the river's edge for them and then lent them his boat.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, tales of Virginia Christmases had spread back to England and began to create an aura of romance around the South. "All over the Colony, a universal Hospitality reigns," London Magazine reported in 1746; "full Tables and open Doors, the kind salute, the generous Detention, speak somewhat like the old Roast-beef Ages of our Fore-fathers. ... Strangers are fought after with Greediness, as they pass the Country, to be invited."

Evidence of eighteenth-century Christmas celebrations is nearly as scarce as for the seventeenth. Best known is the Christmas chronicled by Philip Vickers Fithian, a Presbyterian tutor from New Jersey. Fithian spent a single Christmas season, in 1773, at Nomini Hall, a plantation owned by Robert Carter, one of the wealthiest Tidewater planters. The first sign of the season he recorded occurred on Monday, December 18; students barred one of Fithian's colleagues from teaching school until "twelfth-day" (January 6), a custom known throughout the British Commonwealth. However, Fithian continued to teach, noting proudly that his "scholars are a more quiet nature, and have consented to have four or five Days now, and to have their full Holiday in May next. . . . "

Excitement built as the holiday approached. "Nothing is now to be heard of in conversation, but the Balls, the Fox-hunts, the fine entertainments, and the good fellowship . . . ," Fithian wrote on the 18th. His entry for Christmas Day began, "Guns fired all round the House," after which the various "Servants" who regularly attended him greeted him with "Joyful Christmas." He rewarded them with the expected small change and a donation to a "Christmas Box." As for Christmas dinner, Fithian noted that it "was no otherwise than common yet as elegant" as any he had ever attended. Not until the following Sunday, December 26, did he and the Carters go to church. The minister "preach'd from Isaiah 9.6 For unto us a child is Born &c. his sermon was fifteen Minutes long! very fashion-

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able—," but few attended. Fithian reopened his school the following Wednesday, December 29. The holidays at Nomini Hall had ended.

Not all southerners partook of the sumptuous Christmases reported in London or witnessed by Fithian. Neither ritually exacting nor regularly held, the holiday on each plantation seemed to have its own style of celebration. In 1709, William Byrd began Christmas by attending church, where he "received the sacrament with great devoutness." Afterward, he dined on roast beef with friends and "in the evening we were merry with nonsense and so were my servants. . . . " The following year he spent Christmas quite differently, reading a sermon and dining alone. Thomas Jefferson rarely mentioned Christmas. George Washington frequently spent his holiday hunting and settling such year-end financial matters as renewing the terms of indenture for his servants, and attending church.

Perhaps, as Julian Boyd has suggested, the Enlightenment, which uprooted superstitions and redefined social classes, prevented a precise duplication of an English Christmas. Indeed, there may even have been some attempt to rationalize the Christmas festival. In December 1739, the Virginia Gazette briefly recounted a history of the holiday, noting that some Christians "celebrate this Season in a Mixture of Piety and Licentiousness," others "in a pious Way only," others "behave themselves profusely and extravagantly alone." The last category was comprised of the many who "pass over the Holy Time, without paying any Regard to it at all." The writer concluded that "On the whole, they who will be over-religious at this Time, must be pardoned and pitied; they who are falsely religious, censured; they who are downright criminal, condemned; and the Little Liberties of the old Roman December, which are taken by the Multitude, ought to be overlooked and excused, for an Hundred Reasons. . . . "

This broadly permissive approach to Christmas contrasted sharply with prevailing attitudes in New England. Like their forebears in England, the Puritan leaders of New England sought to expunge the holiday altogether. Their struggle betokened a broader battle against growing numbers of non-Puritans in the region and periodic intervention in religious affairs on the part of the Crown.

The entry of non-Puritans began at the founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and increasingly presented a problem as displaced English workers, many of them Anglican, bolstered the labor-short economies. At first, Puritans relied on what one historian called the "infor-

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mal pressure of like minded co-religionists" to quell the observance of Jesus' birth. But this strategy proved inadequate. In 1659, in an atmosphere of tension over Anglicanism, other heresies, new trade, and general disarray, the Massachusetts Bay General Court banned the keeping of Christmas by "forebearing of labour, feasting, or any other way." The law aimed to prevent the recurrence of further, unspecified "disorders" which had apparently arisen in "seurerall places ... by reason of some still observing such Festiualls," and provided that "whosoeuer shall be found observing any such day as Xmas or the like . . . " would be fined.

Pressure from England contributed to the troubled atmosphere. All of the once forbidden holiday rites had begun to be practiced once again during the Restoration in Britain, in forms more extreme than before. As early as 1665, Charles II demanded that Massachusetts rescind its anti-Christmas law to reflect these changes. Finally in 1681, Massachusetts issued a repeal, citing as a reason that a ban on Christmas would be a derogation of the King's honor. Still, in 1686, Puritan militants barred newly appointed English Governor Andros from holding his Christmas services in their meeting house and forced him to move to the Boston Town Hall.

The renewed English fervor for the raucous excesses of Christmas began to wane almost as rapidly as it had revived, while New England's Puritan leadership gave little indication that it had gained much tolerance for the holiday. "[M]en dishonour Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides," wrote Increase Mather in his diary. He reiterated the case against Christmas in A Testimony Against Several Profane and Superstitious Customs Now Practiced by Some in New England, a tract published in England in 1687. "In the Apostolical times," Mather wrote, "the Feast of the Nativity was not observed. ... It can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25. ... The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day. ... It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonourable to the Name of Christ."

Increase's son Cotton escalated the rhetoric against the holiday by making more explicit the fearful connection between Christmas and sin. He even linked it to Salem's witchcraft. "On the twenty-fifth of December it was," he wrote, "that Mercy [Short] said, They were going to have a Dance; and immediately those that were attending her, most plainly Heard and Felt a Dance, as of Barefooted People, upon the Floor. . . . " Mather

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later denounced the holiday in more general terms. "I hear a Number of people of both Sexes, belonging, many of them to my Flock, who have had on Christmas-night, this last Week, a Frolick, a revelling Feast, and Ball, which discovers their Corruption, and has a Tendency to corrupt them yett more, and provoke the Holy One to give them up into eternal Hardness of Heart."

Despite his strong tone, Cotton Mather did not forthrightly condemn Christmas itself. Like Bradford, who in 1621 had stopped the newcomers' street revelry, he expressed more concern for the liberties taken during the celebration of Christmas than for the fact of celebration. Calling the merrymaking an "affront unto the grace of God," he tacitly turned the question of "should" to one of "how" to hallow Jesus' birth. "Can you in your consciences think that our holy saviour is honored by mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude revelling, by a mass fit for none but a Saturn or a Bacchus, or the light of Mahametan Romandon?" he asked. "Shall it be said that at the birth of our Saviour ... we take the time to please the hellish legions and to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?"

In all, Christmas became a point at which Puritan piety and autonomy grated against English custom, British authority, and Anglican influence. Bostonians, for example, openly repudiated Anglicanism by refusing to close their businesses on Christmas. "Carts come to Town and Shops open as is usual," Judge Samuel Sewall noted on December 24, 1685 (and nearly every year after). That same year Sewall smugly noted that he thought the British colonial officials were "vexed . . . that the Body of the People profane it [Christmas]," and thanked God that there was "no Authority yet to compell them [i.e. Puritans] to keep it." The Crown-appointed governor twice took Sewall aside in 1722 to discuss recessing the General Court on Christmas. Sewall opposed adjournment, but suggested (after a discussion with Cotton Mather) that the matter be voted on by the Council and Representatives. The governor took the opposite side, arguing that "All kept Christmas" except the Puritans. Provoked, Sewall responded: "the Dissenters came a great way for their/Liberties and now the [Anglican] Church had theirs, yet they could not be contented, except they might Tread all others down." Ultimately, the governor ignored Sewall's entreaty and closed the court on Saturday until the following Wednesday, December 26.

Others besides the British government challenged the Puritans on Christmas. Holiday rituals in observing churches attracted a fair number of

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putative Calvinists at Christmastide. Ebenezer Miller, graduate of Harvard but recently ordained an Anglican, Sewall noted in 1727, "keeps the day in his New church at Braintrey: people flock thither." On another occasion he spoke to a Mr. Newman "about his partaking with the French church on the 25th of December, on account of its being Christmas, as they abusively call it." Congregational ministers countered by ordering fasts on Christmas Day and tried in other ways to show their disregard for the festival. One spent the Sunday preceding Christmas outlining his proof that the celebration of Jesus' birth was "Popery and prelatic tyranny, a destroyer of consciences."

In the end, whether slowly in New England or more rapidly in the middle colonies and the South, the forces of pluralism and the need for social harmony shaped and encouraged Christmas celebration. Yet its status as a holiday remained haphazard and varied widely. Like the colonies in general on the eve of the Revolution, regions and communities were as notable for their different approaches to the holiday as for their commonalities. It would take the project of nation-building in the wake of the Revolution to begin to define an American conception of Christmas.

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Christmas in England: Another View

Also see this history by John Storey.

From A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2000):

Christmas has a complex and much debated history. There is no scriptural clue to the date of Christ’s birth; the Early Church celebrated it (if at all) on 6 January, and the first document setting it on 25 December is a Roman calendar of AD 354. Possibly it was a conscious takeover of a Roman festival, ‘The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun’, honouring Mithras and other sun-gods. This dating had become standard throughout Western Europe well before Augustine’s mission to England; it was not devised to match Anglo-Saxon midwinter festivals. The Council of Tours (AD 567) ruled that the twelve days from the Nativity to the Epiphany would be a work-free period of religious celebration, and this became English law in AD 877. The word ‘Christmas’ itself only appears in 1038; previously the festival period had been called Yule, a native word for the midwinter season.

Medieval manorial records show villeins were not required to work during the Twelve Days; the lord of the manor provided a communal feast, and his tenants and subjects gave him gifts, normally farm produce. The pattern was varied; some wealthy landowners apparently kept open house, feeding and entertaining all comers, while others concentrated on their own local people. By Tudor times, Christmas at court and on the estates of the nobility was characterized by increasingly splendid banquets, balls, plays, masques, and mummings, often co-ordinated by a ‘Lord of Misrule’.

This official (also found at Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, the Inns of Court, and some civic corporations, such as the City of London) combined the roles of planning committee, master of ceremonies, jester, and mock king; sometimes he was accompanied (or replaced) by an Abbot of Unreason, who parodied the Church in the same way as the Lord parodied the court. They are first mentioned (under various titles) in the 15th century, and were conspicuous at the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI; at the accession of Mary (1553) they vanished from the court, and rapidly went out of fashion elsewhere, except among young men at the universities and Inns of Court. A far less expensive domestic equivalent, the ‘King of the Bean’ chosen by lot on Twelfth Night, remained popular. To Victorians, the Lord of Misrule, despite his relatively brief and socially exclusive existence, came to symbolize a jovial role-reversal for which there is little or no evidence.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries Puritans waged a well-documented campaign against saints’ days and other religious festivals, as unscriptural and as encouraging gluttony, drunkenness, sexual licence, and public disorder. In the 1640s Christmas became a major target; in June 1647 Parliament finally banned Easter, Whitsun, and Christmas, but each successive year of the Puritan reign saw major disturbances in various parts of the country, and increasingly draconian enforcement. John Evelyn’s Diary for 25 December 1657 records his own arrest for attending a Communion service in London: ‘. . . the Chapell was surrounded with souldiers; all the communicants and assembly surpriz’d & kept prisoners by them . . . These wretched miscreants held their muskets against us as we came up to receive the Sacred Elements, as if they would have shot us at the altar . . .’ This policy proved counter-productive; the fate of Christmas became a rallying-point for anti-Puritan feeling, and a symbol of lost freedoms. After the Restoration most aspects of the celebration were revived, though with wide variations in the degree of lavishness even by the wealthy. As the festival was now no longer a bone of contention, documentary sources become fewer.

The diaries of 18th- and early 19th-century rural clergy take little notice of Christmas, though regularly noting money distributed to the poor around this time. Bell-ringing is sometimes mentioned, and drunkenness complained of. The tradition of charitable hospitality was still strong; thus William Holland, a Somerset parson, on 25 December 1799, had:

dinner by myself on spratts and fine woodcock. The kitchen was tolerably well lined with my poor neighbours, workmen, &c. Many of them staid till past ten o’clock and sang very melodiously. Sent half-a-crown to our Church Musicians who had serenaded the family this cold morning at five o’clock. (Holland, ed. Jack Ayres, 1984)

Many traditional visiting customs occurred at this season: mumming of various kinds, sword dancing, Hooden Horses, Old Tup, Plough Stots, wassailing, and waits. This concentration may reflect the importance of midwinter festivals in the remote past, but practical factors were important too; there was a lull in farmwork, potential audiences had gathered in gentry households, and the tradition of Christmas hospitality and generosity ensured a good welcome for performers. At least one custom, thomasing, was specifically aimed at soliciting alms.

What is regarded as the archetypal Christmas was forged in the second half of the 19th century by popular writers such as Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, using a combination of indigenous elements, imported ones, and new ones, in response to a widespread opinion that Christmas was no longer what it had once been, and something should be done. Their reinvention harked back to a romantic ideal of the lost golden age of ‘Merrie England’ -- perhaps specifically to Walter Scott’s description of a medieval baron’s Christmas in his best-selling poem Marmion (1808). Key elements in their vision were the Lord of Misrule, Boar’s Head, Yule Log, and the squire’s lavish display of hospitality in his ‘baronial hall’. Models for more homely celebration were sometimes sought abroad. As early as 1821 a correspondent in the Gentleman’s Magazine (pp. 505–8) praised a Christmas custom in the north of Germany ‘which cannot be too strongly recommended and encouraged in our own country’: children make or buy little presents for their parents and each other, which they lay out on Christmas Eve under ‘a great yew bough’ in the parlour, decked with tapers and streamers; next day the parents bring presents for the children. Written twelve years before Victoria married Albert, this shows court influence was not the only route by which German models impinged on English customs.

This ‘new’ Christmas evolved gradually by an astute combination of existing elements (e.g. carols, mince-pies, holly and mistletoe, candles, ample food and drink, hospitality to neighbours) with recent importations and inventions (presents, crackers, turkey, greetings cards, the tree, Father Christmas/Santa Claus as gift-bringer), each of which has its own history. [...] But many of these took a long time to filter down to the poorer sections of society; it can be argued that the ‘Victorian’ Christmas only became truly the norm after the Second World War.

Some commentators describe this reinvention as if it had been consciously aimed at taming the working classes and imposing ‘respectability’ on their boisterous and drunken traditions. Concern for public morals was certainly one factor, but commercialism was powerful too; cheap illustrated periodicals spread the fashion, and industry was eager to supply cards, toys, and other presents. It is significant that the new elements are conspicuously secular; the stress on charity was the only one with real religious underpinnings.

‘The Invention of the English Christmas’

From John Storey, ‘The Invention of the English Christmas’ in Sheila Whiteley (ed.) Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), notes on request:

The ‘traditional’ English Christmas was invented between the 1830s and 1880s. Its invention was directly connected to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation and only indirectly connected to religion. To claim that the English Christmas was invented in the nineteenth century is to raise the objection that the Nativity was then almost two thousand years old. Although the Nativity may well have been two thousand years old, it and Christmas are not really the same thing.

Constantine the Great, who was Roman Emperor between AD 285 and 337, established Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire in AD 325. In AD 336 the new Christian Church of Rome established 25 December as the date of the Nativity, the central event in the developing Christian calendar. There is absolutely no scriptural evidence for this date. Moreover, ‘historical’ evidence suggested other dates, including 1 January, 6 January, 21, 28 and 29 March, 9, 19 and 20 April, 20 May, 29 September and 18 November (Harrison 1951: 15; Restad 1995: 4). So why 25 December? The answer is a rival religion called Mithraism. At the centre of this religion is Mithras, the god of light, whose birthday, the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun (Dies Solis Invicti Nati), is 25 December. Mithraism, like Christianity, spread throughout the Roman Empire in the first three centuries AD and competed with Christianity as a potential state religion. As Payam Nabarz explains:

The Roman Mithraic practice was one of the greatest rivals to early Christianity for many reasons. As well as being a popular pagan religion practised by the Roman Army, it had many similarities to Christianity. These similarities frightened the Christian forefathers, as it meant that years before the arrival of Christ, all the Christian mysteries were already known. To combat

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this, certain Christian writers said that the Devil, knowing of the coming of Christ in advance, had imitated them before they existed in order to denigrate them. As Christianity gained in strength and became the formal religion of the Roman Empire, the cult of Mithras was one of the first pagan cults to come under attack. (2005: 12–13)

The attack on Mithraism launched by the Christian Church consisted of three strategies. First, Christians should separate themselves from the rival religion. When this strategy did not work, they adopted a second. As Manfred Clauss observes, ‘When such evasions seemed impossible, they effected a take-over, as in the case of the observance of Sunday and the festival of the god’s birth on 25 December’ (2000: 169). An account from the fourth century makes clear the reason for the fixing of the Nativity as 25 December: ‘But when the teachers of the Church realised that Christians were allowing themselves to take part [in the celebrations of the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun], they decided to observe the Feast of the true Birth on the same day’ (quoted in Clauss 2000: 66). Therefore, it seems quite clear that the intention of the Christian Church was to overlay Mithraic rituals and ceremonies with Christian significance. This became a common strategy. In the sixth century Augustine was sent as a missionary to Britain. During the course of his work he received a letter from Pope Gregory advising him to ‘accommodate the ceremonies of the Christian worship as much as possible to those of the heathen, that the people might not be much startled at the change’ (quoted in Harrison 1951: 28). The third strategy was bloody persecution: what Clauss calls ‘the Christians’ fanatical intolerance’ (2000: 170). As Nabarz points out, ‘In the fifth century of the Common Era, temples of Mithras – like most other pagan temples – were destroyed, and in some places churches were built on top of them’ (2005: 13). A letter written around the year 400 provides an example: ‘Did not your kinsman Gracchus . . . destroy a cave of Mithras a few years ago when he was prefect of Rome? Did he not break up and burn all the monstrous images there? . . . Did he not send them before him as hostages, and gain for himself a baptism in Christ?’ (quoted in Clauss 2000: 170).

Although it is clear that 25 December is not the actual date of the Nativity, it is possible to acknowledge this and to claim that it does not matter, as the date was chosen to celebrate the Nativity without any corresponding claim that this is the factual date of Christ’s birth. In other words, we do not know when he was born but we have chosen a date to celebrate his birth. Whatever the argument, the fact remains that the fixing of the Nativity by the Roman state was as much a political act as a theological one.

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The circumstances of its origins have made it a problematic festival for some Christians. The Puritans, for example, the ideological engine behind the defeat of the army of Charles I, were literal readers of the Bible. Finding no evidence there for Christmas Day, they argued for its removal from the Christian calendar. Following the conclusion of the English Civil War, which established the Commonwealth or English Republic, Christmas was banned by Act of Parliament on 3 July 1647. On 24 December 1652 Parliament proclaimed, perhaps in the face of some ongoing resistance, that ‘no observance shall be had of the five and twentieth of December, commonly called Christmas day; nor any solemnity used or exercised in churches upon that day in respect thereof ’ (quoted in Hearn 2004: 15). The ban remained in place until 1660. Parliament sat on Christmas Day, churches remained closed and soldiers were instructed to ensure that shops were open. Christmas was decriminalised as a religious holiday with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 but it did not return as popular festival. As Michael Harrison observes:

Christmas came back . . . but he came back wearing something of the sober manner of the men who had temporarily driven him out. Old Christmas, in the twenty years [sic] that he had been officially outlawed, had lost much of his former jauntiness. It was a quieter Christmas who came back. (1951: 146)

By the first decades of the nineteenth century, what is now our major annual festival had almost disappeared. As J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue point out:

Christmas, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was neither a major event in the Christian calendar nor a popular festival. Few magazines or newspapers referred to the festal day in any detail and many ignored it completely. In 1790 the leader writer in The Times had asserted that, ‘within the half century this annual time of festivity has lost much of its original mirth and hospitality’ and that newspaper’s attention to the festival over the next half century bears witness to its general decline; in twenty of the years between 1790 and 1835 The Times did not mention Christmas at all, and for the remaining years its reports were extremely brief and uninformative. (2000: 40)

On 26 December 1826 The Times carried the following report: ‘The due observance of Christmas-day was strictly enforced in the City yesterday, the Lord Mayor having given positive orders to the city officers, not to permit any shops to be open for the transaction of business . . . The order was strictly complied with in general.’ The fact that the Lord Mayor of London felt obliged to enforce due observance clearly suggests that

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Christmas was not really being observed. Further evidence of its decline is provided by responses to the Factory Act of 1833, which granted workers 8.5 days’ holiday a year, plus Good Friday and Christmas Day. More enlightened factory owners allowed their workers to vote on which days they might have as holidays. Here is an example of the outcome of one such vote in 1833:

[T]hey put it to the vote who were for Good Friday and who were for Easter Monday . . . the same with regard to Christmas-Day; in our part of the country Christmas-Day is not esteemed a workman’s holiday, but New Year’s day is, and the same process has been gone through of informing them that they were entitled to a holiday on Christmas-Day, and they have uniformly expressed a desire to take New Year’s day in lieu of it. (Quoted in Cunningham 1980: 61–2)

The Bolton Chronicle reports a very similar attitude almost twenty years later in 1851:

Not long ago the natal day of the Redeemer was pretty generally disregarded in this town, and a holiday was generally observed on New Year’s Day. Now, though a holiday takes place on Christmas Day, the beginning of the New Year is looked upon as the Christmas season, and the inhabitants betake themselves to their festivities accordingly. (Quoted in Hudson 1997: 115)

In some rural areas it took even longer for the new invention to take hold. As late as 1867, a book on Lancashire folklore observed: ‘In some rural parts of Lancashire it [Christmas Day] is now little regarded, and many of its customs are observed a week later – on the eve and day of the New Year’ (quoted in Golby and Purdue 1981: 16).

Inventing Christmas

Commerce

Christmas was invented first and foremost as a commercial event. Everything that was revived or invented – decorations, cards, crackers, collections of carols, going to a pantomime, visiting Santa Claus and buying presents – all had one thing in common: they could be sold for profit. Therefore, it does not make historical sense to bemoan the fact that Christmas is too commercial; it was invented as a commercial festival. It was commercial from the very start. Part of what was being celebrated was the achievements of industrial capitalism – conspicuous consumption in a market economy.

Carol singing, for example, has a long history but it is only in the 1830s and 1840s that collections began to be made of old songs and new songs written with a specific focus on Christmas. Significant collections include William Sandys’s Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833) and H. R. Bramley and John Stainer’s Christmas Carols Old and New (1871). In these and other collections, recently composed carols easily outnumber the ancient or the old. Although the Christmas tree had been introduced into England by German migrants in the late eighteenth century, it is generally accepted that it was the London Illustrated News’s depiction of Queen Victoria’s tree in December 1848 which popularised the practice. The first Christmas card was produced in 1843. Within forty years, helped by the introduction of the 1⁄2d postage stamp, Christmas cards were in mass circulation. As The Times made clear in 1883 and applicable to the invention as a whole:

This wholesome custom has been . . . frequently the happy means of ending strifes, cementing broken friendships and strengthening family and neighbourhood ties in all conditions of life. In this respect the Christmas card undoubtedly fulfils a high end, for cheap postage has constituted it almost exclusively the modern method of conveying Christmas wishes, and the increasing popularity of the custom is for this reason, if no other, a matter for congratulations. (Quoted in Golby and Purdue 2000: 70)

By the 1890s the Post Office was already finding it difficult to deal with the annual increase in mail. Significantly, like the first Christmas card, most cards ignored the Nativity and depicted instead evergreens, snowscapes, children playing, Father Christmas and robin redbreasts, providing further evidence of the decentred position of Christianity in the new Christmas celebrations.

Christmas crackers were invented by Tom Smith in 1846. Around the same period the pantomime first became associated with Christmas, its content becoming based on nursery tales. By the 1870s music hall stars were beginning to play the leading roles, anticipating the practice of contemporary pantomimes featuring pop and soap stars. Again, it is in the 1840s that Christmas presents first begin to be given at Christmas rather than at New Year. It is also at around this time that giving Christmas presents begins to lose its links to patronage: that is, giving as a confirmation of social status, giving without expectation of reciprocation. What is gradually established instead is an economy of giving amongst equals.

Father Christmas/Santa Claus is a latecomer to the new festivities. Significantly, he does not feature in the key ideological text of the new invention, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). He gradually

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emerges, mostly from the USA, between the 1860s and 1930s, most significantly in the drawings of Thomas Nast and the illustrations of Haddon H. Sundblom. The evolution of his image finally stops with Sundblom’s Coca-Cola advertisements, which first appeared in 1931. Before then he might appear dressed in green, purple, blue or white. Moreover, he may appear human or as an elf. Although Coca-Cola did not invent Father Christmas/Santa Claus, it can claim to have finally fixed his identity. By the 1880s his presence is an important addition to the new department stores, where it is now possible to buy Christmas decorations.

By this time Christmas shopping, undoubtedly the central event in the new invention, is taking place a month or six weeks before Christmas Day. Two accounts from 1885 make this very clear:

The presentation of ‘boxes’ and souvenirs is the same in America as in England . . . everybody expects to give and receive. A month before the event the fancy stores are crowded all day long with old and young in search of suitable presents, and every object is purchased . . . If the weather is fine, the principal streets are thronged. (Quoted in Miall 1978: 11)

The note of preparation for the great festival . . . was sounded early in November when the windows of the stationers, the bookshops, and the railway stalls became suddenly gay with the coloured plates of Christmas numbers innumerable, has increased in volume as time went on. Now, on the eve of the great day, there is not a street in the capital containing a shop, from its broadest thoroughfare to its narrowest by-way, that has not decked its windows for the Christmas market. (11–12)

What the new urban middle class invented was a Christmas with a firm emphasis on commercialism. Its central organising figure was Santa Claus/Father Christmas and not Jesus Christ. If a nativity was being celebrated, it was the birth of a market economy underpinned by the new power of industrialisation. The profoundly commercial-secular nature of the invention has made possible its incredible international success. Even an officially atheist society like the People’s Republic of China has no difficulty in embracing the festival.

‘God Bless Us, Every One’: The Politics of Charity

Charity is central to the Christmas invented by the new urban middle class. If what was invented was commercial out of instinct, it was charitable out of a sense of fear and guilt. The 1840s in England were known as the ‘hungry forties’, a period of economic slump, political unrest and

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intense suffering and misery among the working class (Cole and Postgate 1976).

The first Christmas card, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole and designed by J. C. Horsley, has at its centre not the Nativity but a representation of a typical middle-class family sitting down to Christmas dinner. On one side of the card we see the poor being given food, while on the other side they are being given clothes. The implication is quite clear; the celebration of the middle-class Christmas must include a consideration of the less fortunate. This argument is even more explicit in the text which is at the very heart of the invention of Christmas as an event organised around charity, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, first published on 19 December 1843. The enormous popularity of the story of Scrooge’s social redemption, not just as a novel (in its tenth edition by December 1844) but

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in theatre productions and public readings, made this the central text in the invention of Christmas. But to be clear, A Christmas Carol did not invent Christmas, as has been claimed by the Sunday Telegraph (18 December 1988), when it described Dickens as ‘the man who invented Christmas’. His most recent biographer has made the same claim in slightly more guarded phrasing: ‘Dickens can be said to have almost singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas’ (Ackroyd 1990: 34). But what Dickens did do was to popularise what was being invented; in particular, he made material its organising ideology of charity. As Golby and Purdue say of Dickens’s novel: ‘in it Christmas becomes a bridge between the world as it is and the world as it should be’ (2000: 45). The novel points ‘to the social problems of the present and anxieties about the future’ (45). When Dickens gave a reading of the novel in Boston on Christmas Eve 1867, it produced among his American audience what we might call the novel’s ideal reader:

Among the multitude that surged out of the building came a Mr and Mrs Fairbanks (the former was the head of a large-scale factory), who had journeyed from Johnsburg, Vermont, for the occasion. Returning to their apartments in Boston, Mrs Fairbanks observed that her husband was particularly silent and absorbed in thought, while his face bore an expression of unusual seriousness. She ventured some remark which he did not appear to notice. Later, as he continued to gaze into the fire, she inquired the cause of his

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reverie, to which he replied: ‘I feel that after listening to Mr Dickens’s reading of A Christmas Carol tonight I should break the custom we have hitherto observed of opening the works on Christmas Day’. Upon the morrow they were closed. The following year a further custom was established, when not only were the works closed on Christmas Day, but each and every factory hand received the gift of a turkey. (Quoted in Golby and Purdue 2000: 48)

[p.25]

[...] Scrooge has to learn what his former partner Marley had learned too late: ‘The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’ (Dickens 1985: 62). Scrooge is, to use a phrase from Matthew Arnold, ‘drugged with business’ (quoted in Storey 1985: 224). As if speaking directly to Scrooge, Arnold argued: ‘Money-making is not enough by itself. Industry is not enough by itself . . . The need in man for intellect and knowledge, his desire for beauty, his instinct for society, and for pleasurable and graceful forms of society, require to have their stimulus felt also, felt and satisfied’ (ibid.).

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Tin Can Band / Rough Musicking

The Northants Evening Telegraph, 11 December 2009, gave a decidedly minimalist account of the tradition:

Residents in Broughton will take to the streets banging saucepan lids and blowing whistles this weekend to keep up a 200-year-old tradition.

Villagers meet at Broughton Parish Church at midnight on the second Sunday of December to be part of the Tin Can Band, a group of people who march through the village making as much noise as possible.

The origins of the ancient tradition are unknown, but many think it began as a way of warding off evil spirits.

John Stamper, of Broughton, who has taken part many times, said: "There is no organiser, no secretary, it is simply a case that people know the date and will amble up to the church to take part."

The Tin Can Band will march along Church Street, Gate Lane, High Street, Wellingborough Road and Glebe Avenue and back to the church.

The following from the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000):

Tin Can Band.
Young people in Broughton, Northamptonshire, gather at midnight on the second Sunday in December for an hour’s worth of procession round the village making as much raucous noise as possible. To this end they bring tins with stones in, dustbin lids, old metal containers with sticks to bang them, and so on. They do not know why, or for how long the custom has existed, but the villagers have successfully fought off attempts to suppress it. There are one or two stories to explain the custom — it was done to frighten off Gypsies, or it was done to express disapproval of the birth of an illegitimate baby, and the latter is possible because of the similarity between the Tin Can Band and rough musicking. However, most writers point to the fact that this is the eve of the town’s feast day (Old St Andrew’s Day) and may simply be a way of starting the festivities attached to that celebration.

rough music.
Under a variety of local names and differing methods, rough music was the main customary way in which members of a community expressed displeasure at transgressions of societal norms, usually, but not exclusively, concerned with sexual and marital matters such as wife- or husband-beating, adultery, co-habitation, and so on. The term ‘rough music’ and other local names such as ‘ran-tanning’, reflect the almost universal element of noise—participants would bang on old kettles, saucepans, or shovels, blow on whistles, cow-horns, wave rattles, shout and bawl—anything to make a loud and discordant noise. Other names, such as ‘Riding the Stang’ and ‘Skimmington Riding’ encapsulate the other regular feature—the parading of effigies of the guilty parties, or sometimes neighbours impersonating them. The effigies would be mounted on a pole, a cart, or a donkey—often with the man placed backwards facing the tail. After processing the neighbourhood, these effigies would usually be burnt in front of the victims’ house.

Examples are recorded regularly from the 16th century onwards, including Henry Machyn’s Diary (22 Feb. 1562/3), Stow (1598/1994: 200), Samuel Pepys, Diary (10 June 1667), the engraving (above -- fellist) by William Hogarth entitled Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington (1726), and a well-known literary example is in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1884), chapters 36, 39. The proceedings were ‘regulated’ by locally understood rules and expectations. In earlier examples, it seems to be accepted that the next-door neighbour of the offending party should take the place of the effigy, and the occasion would provide the opportunity for much ribald humour. As with all such vigilante behaviour, these proceedings could be seen as great fun or highly frightening mob behaviour, depending on whether you were on the performing side or receiving end. It is clear that the authorities, such as the local police, whilst not condoning such behaviour, would often make sure to be ‘out of the way’ while it was going on and nobody would be willing to testify even if charges were brought. The victims would usually move away, or at least keep a low profile and appear to mend their ways, but in extreme cases the stress or shame could lead to suicide. Rough music is clearly related to continental customs, of which the French Charivari is probably the best known.

Explains the minimalism.

Google turns up no news or blog reports from this weekend. Perhaps someone involved might see this and give us a report?

St. Nicholas in England

From A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000):

St Nicholas (4th century).
Little is known of the real life of this Bishop of Myra in Turkey, but he was very popular in the Middle Ages. Legend says he once resuscitated three little boys whom an innkeeper had murdered and salted down to make into pies, and on another occasion secretly threw three bags of gold through the window of a poor man’s house, as dowries for his three daughters, who would otherwise have been sold into prostitution. He is therefore regarded as a patron saint of children, who, in many Catholic countries, get presents during the night of his feast (6 December).

His feast was once linked to children in England too; merrymaking and unruliness were allowed in some schools. Aubrey wrote in the 1680s:

And the Schoole-boies in the west still religiously observe St Nicholas day (Decemb. 6th), he was the Patron of the Schoole-boies. At Currey-Yeoville in Somersetshire, where there is a Howschole (or schole) in the Church, they have annually at that time a Barrell of good Ale brought into the church; and that night they have the priviledge to breake open their Masters Cellar-dore.

[John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (1686–7), ed. James Britten (London: The Folklore Society, 1880), 40-1]

It was the date for choosing boy bishops, who were actually called ‘St Nicholas’; the church historian John Strype noted that in 1554, in London, ‘the Nicholases’ were going about the streets as usual, though this had been forbidden, since the citizens liked the show so much (Annals of the Reformation (1709–31) ). So they did two years later, according to Henry Machyn’s Diary, ‘and had mych good cheer as ever they had, in mony places’. These customs died out in England but their continental equivalents are important in the development of Santa Claus. St Nicholas and his gifts reached America through German and Dutch settlers, and became famous there in a poem by Clement Clark Moore, ‘The Visit of Saint Nicholas’ (1822). In Moore’s account he is no longer a bishop but a chubby, pipesmoking, cheerful old man ‘dressed all in fur from his head to his foot’, driving a reindeer sledge and carrying a sack of toys—details that have North European parallels. Forty years later, in the 1860s, illustrations to this poem by Thomas Nast were captioned as Santa Claus, no longer as St Nicholas.

Also from the Dictionary of English Folklore:

boy bishops.
In medieval times, most English cathedrals and abbeys, collegiate churches, and schools, used to reverse the structures of hierarchy at midwinter by selecting a young choirboy to act as ‘bishop’ or ‘abbot’. Wearing appropriate robes, he would preside at services, preach a sermon, and lead a procession through the streets blessing the people -- during which money would be collected for the upkeep of the institution he represented.

His term of office began on St Nicholas’s Day (6 December) and ended on Holy Innocents Day (28 December); in London and some other towns, he was actually referred to as ‘St Nicholas’. The last known example in England was at Gloucester Cathedral in 1558.

Bizarre.

Today is Lammas Day

This was one of the four great pagan festivals of Britain, the others being on the 1st November, 1st February, and 1st May. The festival of the Gule of August, as it was called, probably recognised the realisation of the first-fruits of the earth, and more particularly that of the grain-harvest. When Christianity was introduced, the day continued to be observed as a festival on these grounds, and, from a loaf being the usual offering at church, the service, and consequently the day, came to be called Hlaf-mass, subsequently shortened into Lammas, just as half-dig (bread-dispenser), applicable to the mistress of the house, came to be softened into the familiar and extensively used term, lady. This we would call the rational definition of Lammas. There is another, but in our opinion utterly inadmissible derivation, pointing to the custom of bringing a lamb on this day, as an offering to the cathedral church of York. Without doubt, this custom, which was purely local, would take its rise with reference to the term Lammas, after the true original signification of that word had been forgotten.

~ Chambers Book of Days (1864).

In Anglo-Saxon times, the bread consecrated at the service was believed to possess a special potency against evil forces. A charm that has survived from the era advises people to “take from the hallowed bread which is hallowed on Lammas Day, four pieces, and crumble them on the four corners of the barn.”

Later, Lammas was the day upon which the fences that had been erected around ‘Lammas Meadows’ at Candlemas (February 2nd) were taken down to permit common grazing. Lammas Fairs, which grew up around the re-opened hay meadows became a feature of English life for centuries. All kinds of livestock were sold, especially sheep, and every variety of entertainment and games were enjoyed.


Sadly, the observation of Lammas day and the festivities associated with it have declined greatly in the last two centuries. Harvest festivals have tended to be celebrated later in the year in September or October when all the crops are in, and few Lammas Fairs are still held in England.


In Exeter some of the traditions of the Lammas Fair continue unbroken, although moved to early July to allow the participation of local schools and inclusion in the larger Exeter Summer Festival.

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From Dorothy Gladys Spicer, The Yearbook of English Festivals (H. W. Wilson, 1954):

Lammas Fair, Exeter, Devonshire


The Tuesday before the third Wednesday in July


Lammas Fair, now scarcely more than a formality, always opens at noon of the Tuesday before the third Wednesday in July. The ceremonies which accompany the opening predate the Norman conquest.


Two sergeants-at-mace, starting from the guildhall, proceed down High Street, accompanied by two men playing the fife and drum. The sergeants carry a long pole, from which is suspended a large stuffed white glove, decorated with flowers and ribbons. The sergeants proclaim the fair at the four ancient gates of the city, before returning to the guildhall, where the mayor announces the event. According to the words of the historic Proclamation, ". . . Lammas Fair taketh its beginning from Twelve of the clock of this present day and cloth continue until Friday next Twelve of the clock at noon of the same day (that is to say) two whole days and two half days, making in the whole three days."


The glove, ancient symbol of the Crown's protection of the peace, is hoisted up before the guildhall, where it remains for the fair's duration.


The Lammas Fair proclamation contains many quaint clauses regarding the rights and powers of persons who come to buy or sell. Such persons are guaranteed against ". . . any molestation, arrests, attachments or other troubles whatsoever within the City of Exeter," save for ". . . Treason, Murder, Felony, Routs, Riots . . . or any acts whatsoever against His Majesty's peace, Crown and dignity." Persons are prohibited from selling goods except within the Fair and its precincts, or from placing ". . . any wares open in their shops out of the said Fair within the length and reach of any man's arm upon pain of the forfeiture of all such goods, wares and merchandizes so sold or set to sale or hanging in any house or shop within the reach of any man's arm as aforesaid." Furthermore, a Court of Pie Powder originally was arranged at the guildhall. Both the mayor and the city officials were prohibited from dealing with any misdemeanors which could be handled by this court.


Once Exeter's Lammas Fair ranked as one of the West Country's most important fairs. Today it remains simply a historic link between the Exeter of Saxon and of modern times.

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The Tuesday before the third Wednesday...? :)