Christmas Read online

  James Woodforde, a generation younger, was a Norfolk vicar who recorded his daily doings for more than forty years in a diary that almost matches Walpole’s letters in extent. Unlike Walpole, Woodforde was a man of merely comfortable means, rather than of wealth. His income assured him a place in the upper middle classes, but his interests were entirely rural: he hunted, he visited the local squire and nearby clergymen. Rarely moving outside this limited ambit, he observed many of the Christmas customs Walpole disdained. Singers called at his vicarage annually, as had mummers in his youth in the West Country, although not after he moved to Norfolk in 1774. There were also the men who rang the church bells year round, who came to the vicarage for their seasonal handout, sometimes in cash, sometimes alcohol. From 1778 he was also visited by a man ‘with his 10. Bells [who] … played before my Company’. These bells were ‘of his own Construction’, not a traditional practice, but he gave ‘us his annual Musick’ every Christmas, for which he received 1s. 6d., and ‘Victuals & Drink’. Occasionally a single indigent individual, such as ‘a poor old singing Man’, also received sixpence.

  Meanwhile, Woodforde and his family and friends enjoyed parties and dinners over the twelve days, without laying any particular emphasis on Christmas Day itself. One year his niece Nancy, who kept house for him, went to Norwich, neither she nor Woodford seeming to be concerned that this left him alone on Christmas Day. He also recorded attending ‘Christmas dinner’ on 29 December. In his younger days, Woodforde went to parties around Twelfth Night or New Year, including one ‘where I spent the whole night and part of the morning till 4 o’clock a dancing’. However, that was a celebration for the local apothecary, who was coming out of his apprenticeship. On 11 January one year Woodforde sighed, ‘I am heartily weary of visiting so much as I have,’ but as a clergyman, ‘if I did not it would be taken amiss’. Other years he celebrated hard: ‘We were exceeding merry indeed all the Night’, playing cards until six in the morning, then ‘serenad[ing] the Folks that were a bed with our best on the Hautboy [an ancestor of the oboe]’.

  What Woodforde did observe, with great regularity, was St Thomas’s Day, 21 December. ‘Gooding’, sometimes called mumping, or ‘going a-corning’, when seasonal charity was begged from local households, went back to the sixteenth century. It was the eighteenth century, however, before it centred on St Thomas’s Day, when it also became going ‘a-Thomassing’.

  As open-house hospitality had narrower parameters than nostalgia would admit, so too did gooding. Throughout his four decades in Norfolk, Woodforde routinely gave sixpence each to the poor of his parish. But it was very specifically of his parish: ‘I had at my House fifty five, gave only to 53 – the other two not living in the Parish.’ It is also notable that when he began his charitable donations in 1764, each recipient got sixpence; thirty-six years later he was still giving sixpence, regardless of the economic hardships brought by the French wars: ‘Wheat very dear indeed’, ‘Flour very difficult to get at all’. In another seasonal custom, Woodforde gave six or seven men a ‘very fine Surloin of Beef rosted’ and ‘Plumb Puddings’ in his kitchen every 25 December. His clerk usually attended; otherwise the men (they were almost always men) tended to be the oldest in the parish. Occasionally a woman was included – once it was a maid who had worked for him for years; sometimes he sent ‘a dinner’ or, in later years, a shilling, home to the wives of the men in the kitchen.

  Other, more institutional, versions of this type of Christmas charity were becoming more common. Sunday schools and other organizations held mass dinners for those who might otherwise go without. One Sunday school served 350 dinners on Boxing Day, when, in a rare instance of surviving topsy-turvy, ‘The benefactors’ served the working classes.* The meal that was served up was not recorded, but it is likely that it was the same as Woodforde gave his ‘poor old men’: roast beef and plum pudding. In his early days as a young curate in Somerset, Woodforde had eaten the same for his own Christmas dinner, but at Oxford in the 1770s, his Christmas Day dining in hall became more elaborate: ‘two fine Codds boiled with Fryed Soals round them & Oyster Sauce, a fine Surloin of Beef rosted, some Peas Soup & an Orange Pudding for the first Cours, for the Second we had a Lease of Wild Ducks rosted, a fore-Q[r]. of Lamb & Sallad & Mince Pies … After … there was a fine Plumb Cake…’* Once he had moved to East Anglia, plum cake made no further appearances on his holiday table, although, living as he did in the region of English turkey-rearing, ‘a fine rost Turkey’ often did, and not only at Christmas.

  By now, the components of the Christmas meal that are still served in the twenty-first century were falling into place. In 1747, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, considered by many to be the first cookery book in English for the home cook, included relatively little that was specific to Christmas, and of that little, did not group it as holiday cooking. The pudding section contained a recipe for plum pudding, but with no mention of Christmas; there was a recipe for mince pies, which also made no reference to the holiday; and a recipe for Yorkshire Christmas pies, which did, because ‘These Pies are often sent to London in a Box as presents; therefore the Walls [the pastry] must be well built.’ Under ‘soops’, the housewife could learn ‘To make Plumb-Porridge for Christmas’: thicken beef stock with bread, strain it and boil it down, adding currants, raisins, prunes, mace, cloves, nutmeg, sugar, salt, sack, claret and lemon-juice.

  Robert Seymour, ‘The Norfolk Stage at Christmas’, from Thomas Hervey’s The Book of Christmas (1836).

  Barely forty years later, however, plum porridge was ‘old-fashioned’, sneered The Times, and ‘discarded from every family in the kingdom except for the Royal family’. Christmas pies, filled with fowl and game, survived, as Hannah Glasse had written, frequently sent from the country as a gift to city friends. Turkeys too were traditionally sent from the country, so much so that they were the subject of jokes: ‘Upwards of 30,000 Turkeys fell martyrs’ to the day, reported The Times in heavy-handed jest, and engravings of laden stagecoaches from Norfolk provided visual corroboration.*

  Holiday specialities, by the eighteenth century, still included Twelfth cakes, now mostly bought from pastry-cooks. These were for the rich, however, and references to them are almost entirely from London. We know less about the cakes of the middle classes, or those outside London – if indeed those outside London did celebrate Twelfth Night with any regularity.

  For it is possible that Twelfth Night was a London custom, one observed mainly by the fashionable and aristocratic; a custom that, simply because of the way history has primarily been drawn from the behaviour and records of the ruling classes, has been assumed by historians to have been marked by everyone, across the country. In London, certainly, it was an important day. Pastrycooks’ cards and broadsides were widely available. If Isaac Cruikshank’s print ‘Old Square Toes was Cuckold’ reflected reality, the evening might play to the more louche side of the holiday, depicting as it did a young woman pretending to draw her character from a hat held by a handsome young man, while he instead slips her a note from himself.

  Cakes being expensive, even in London, the less-well-off may have participated only by admiring, as the highly elaborate confections were placed in pastrycooks’ windows to enthral passers-by. Others amused themselves in less acceptable ways, like the boys who indulged in the Twelfth Night practice of ‘nailing’: they mingled with the crowds outside the pastrycooks in order to surreptitiously tack the coat-tails of unsuspecting men to an adjacent wall, or even pin them to the skirts of a nearby, equally unaware, woman.

  Robert Seymour, ‘Twelfth Night in the London Streets’, from Thomas Hervey’s The Book of Christmas (1836).

  Outside London, and the habits of aristocratic landed families, many allowed Twelfth Night to pass them by. The first English recipe to refer to a rich fruitcake as a Twelfth cake was published only in 1768, and says carefully: ‘This is called a twelfth cake at London.’ There is little evidence to suggest the day was celebrated outside
the capital, and by anyone other than the gentry classes. Parson Woodforde attended many parties on 5 January in Norfolk, but never called them Twelfth Night celebrations. As he entertained and was entertained year-round, there is no certainty that day meant anything to him. In the British Library’s collection of more than 200 local and national newspapers, there are a mere handful of references to Twelfth Night that do not in some way relate to London.*

  Yet such was the dominance of the capital that the customs associated there with the night gave rise to more than one figure of speech. As early as the sixteenth century, Tudor historian Polydore Virgil had recognized Twelfth Night’s disquieting inversion, when ‘all the household and family … must be obedient’ to one who was normally their social inferior. And so the Twelfth Night King or Queen became a synonym for falsity. Lady Jane Grey was dismissed as ‘nothing but a Twelfth-day Queen’ in the sixteenth century; a century later, Philip IV of Spain contemptuously labelled the Portuguese usurper ‘a king of the bean’. As the cakes became more elaborate, and sugar less expensive, the powdered sugar that dusted the cakes became a metaphor for grey hair, and thus age. A sermon on the revolutionary times in the 1770s refers to men ‘with their curled pates (frosted o’er like a twelfth-cake)’.

  That was published first in Britain, and exported to Philadelphia, where it was nothing but a phrase. In the colonial South, however, where the upper classes liked to claim close kinship to upper-class England, Twelfth Night was a great event. Planters from William Byrd in 1740 to Landon Carter in the 1770s held parties with Twelfth cakes. In Virginia, in 1775, among one group of friends at least, whomever was crowned king one year hosted the next year’s party, while that year’s queen had ‘the trouble of making the cake’.

  The holidays might not have been thought of as ‘trouble’, but they were definitely becoming more elaborate.

  Chapter Five

  As the eighteenth century progressed, new customs were established, especially among the middle classes, who were gradually transforming the holiday. In part this was owing to the spread of antiquarianism – the now fashionable enthusiasm for recording observations on the artefacts and customs of the people, which gave new life to many traditions previously practised only by the rural or the working-classes. As early as Pepys’s day, immediately following the Restoration of Charles II, and the return of Christmas after the Puritan interregnum, churches had returned to tradition, and were decorated with greenery again, Pepys finding his pew on 23 December 1660 ‘all covered with Rosemary and baize [bay]’. (As ever, not everyone approved. One congregant complained that his church had so much greenery heaped around the pulpit that it was like hearing ‘the Word out of a Bush, like Moses’.)

  As the poet Herrick had recorded, mistletoe had been part of the holiday from the seventeenth century, although the tradition of kissing underneath it appeared only in the early nineteenth century, for reasons that remain unknown. By that time, antiquarians had read their Roman history. Pliny had written that the Druids in Gaul – that is, France – had ceremonially harvested mistletoe when they found it growing on oak trees, which they revered. This was somehow reinterpreted to say that these ceremonies had been held in Britain too, and at Christmas, although Pliny had made no mention of either the country or the season. Despite that, it created a new custom with an ‘ancient’ history.

  In a similar fashion, in 1777 the antiquarian John Brand told his readers that ‘Our Fore-Fathers’ had customarily lit large candles on Christmas Eve. Certainly it had been recorded in 1633, at least proverbially, by the poet Francis Quarles, who compared a hypocrite to ‘a Christmas Candle, whose good name / Crowns his faire actions with a glorious flame … but … stinks at going out’. But between that date and Brand’s book lie nearly 150 years in which there is no surviving reference to the custom. Had it continued, and simply gone unmentioned in literature, diaries and letters? Or did Brand’s book revive a practice that had long been dead? Or perhaps his book gave life to what had previously been no more than a poetic metaphor? We cannot know, but by 1785, eight years after Brand’s book was published, Parson Woodforde was writing, ‘My large Wax Candle was lighted up this Evening for an Hour, being Christmas Day,’ as though it were an annual event, although in his previous quarter-century of diary-keeping he had never once mentioned it. It was another five years before he wrote of it again, and then he continued to do so until 1799, after which it vanished once more. Likewise, there were a number of references to the custom in Yorkshire in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, but whether these were traditions that had been handed down through generations, or were practices newly learned from books, there is no way of knowing.

  Other customs flowered more abundantly in the eighteenth century. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as reports of trees blossoming on Christmas Eve had become current in Germany, so had the tale of Joseph of Arimathea in England. In this local legend, Joseph of Arimathea, who in the Gospels gives his own tomb to be Christ’s resting place, was said to have travelled to Glastonbury with the Holy Grail; after his death there, a tree grew by his tomb ‘that on the 24 of December would be bare and naked … on the next day being Christmas Day, it would be full of blossoms, and flourishing…’ Sadly, the story concluded, it had been chopped down ‘by ignorant zeal in the late times of Rebellion’. Eighteenth-century tourism thus lacked a drawing-card, and so soon the tree, now usually a hawthorn, was reinstated, still annually flowering, as were many cuttings across the country that were said to have been taken from it. In 1752, when the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar meant that eleven days were lost, perhaps as many as two thousand people gathered in front of a hawthorn in Buckinghamshire, to see if it blossomed. (It didn’t.)* By the 1770s the Glastonbury thorn was legendary, and Horace Walpole’s ‘Glastonbury thorns [who] bloom at their Christmas’ is a whimsical way of referring to those who were still flourishing in the winter of their lives.

  By the beginning of the eighteenth century, greenery more generally, being so routine at Christmas, itself came to be called, simply, ‘Christmas’.* Kissing boughs arrived slightly later in the century, in the south and west, and were a rural, working-class decoration. These consisted of whatever greenery was available, or inexpensive. Measuring up to a metre and a half across, they were made of two to four crossed hoops of greenery decorated with apples and oranges, ‘bits of coloured ribbons and paper roses’, and other ‘various brightly coloured ornaments’. For the more prosperous, greenery on its own was sufficient. Parson Woodforde purchased holly every Christmas Eve to decorate the windows in his parlour, as well as more for his servants in the kitchen.

  Branches and the odd holly berry paled in comparison to the type of Christmas greenery that was seen across the German-speaking lands. Since that first decorated indoor Christmas tree in a private house in Strasbourg in 1605, the custom had continued to gain ground. Indoor, decorated, candle-lit trees appeared first in upper-class urban Protestant homes, and moved down the social scale and into rural areas as the century progressed. The names for the tree reflected religious allegiance. To Protestants the tree was a Weihnachtsbaum, or Tannenbaum, a Christmas or fir tree; Protestantism became ‘the Tannenbaum religion’, and the trees were sometimes Lutherbäume, [Martin] Luther trees. Where Catholic regions adopted the tree, it became a Christbaum, a Lichterbaum, or Lebensbaum, a tree of Christ, light, or life; Württemberg had Christkindleinsbäume, Christ child trees. Princess Liselotte von der Pfalz (b. 1652), later to marry the brother of Louis XIV of France, remembered the trees of her German childhood, either in her birthplace of Heidelberg, or in Saxony, where she lived for some years. Each child had their own small boxwood tree placed on a table, around which, ‘fixed up like altars’, were gifts: ‘new clothes, silver, dolls, sugar candy’. By whatever name, and however displayed, by the 1770s and 1780s, trees were an integral part of the German Christmas, whether a small tree in a pot placed on a table, a fir-tree tip hanging point downwards from the ceil
ing, a tree, point upwards, with the end sharpened and spearing an apple, or, among Pietist or evangelical communities, branches decorated with candles and sweets placed on wooden pyramid frames.

  This German tradition travelled to England in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was a sensational popular success in German in 1774, and was translated into English in the 1780s, including its description of a candle-lit Christmas tree decorated with sweets and apples. In 1789 the husband of a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, the German wife of George III, suggested putting up ‘an illuminated tree, according to the German fashion’, but she was doubtful – ‘I thought our children too young to be amused at so much expense and trouble’, and besides, she demurred, all their friends were away. It sounds as though she and her husband had seen such trees, although it was only in 1800, at Windsor, that Queen Charlotte erected the first tree that can be firmly dated in Britain. (This might not qualify as a tree in modern terms, however, sounding more like English greenery: a branch ‘fixed on a board’.)