With a Bang, not a Whimper

I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.  It’s Yule, the Winter Solstice, one of the main Wiccan sabbats, right at the top of the wheel of the year.  After Samhain – Halloween – it’s my personal favourite.  I have a party planned, all the better because mother and father are away in the country.  My close friends and associated hangers-on will be there.  I’m taking lots of trouble over the food and the drink.  For me it is the best or nothing.

Alas, I fear that I am wasting my money and my time.  As I pointed out here recently (Only Two Weeks Left), 21 December also marks the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar.  I do not know any Maya and I hadn’t anticipated any coming to my bash, but they apparently intend gate crashing!  Oh, well, I shall just have to be extra vigilant, making sure that things go with a bang, not a whimper.

Around the world there are people so much wiser than I am.  They are getting ready too.  But unlike me they are getting ready for the end, not for a party.  Actually I’m not quite sure what they are getting ready for.  The end it seems is the end for everyone but me, not meaning me but you, or whoever and so on and so forth.  The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling for you but not for me! 

I’m reminded here of Bob Dylan’s Talkin’ World War III Blues, which concerns a dream of personal survival.  Perhaps you know the words?  If not it concludes thus;

Well, the doctor interrupted me just about then
Sayin’, “Hey I’ve been havin’ the same old dreams
But mine was a little different you see
I dreamt that the only person left after the war was me
I didn’t see you around”

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody’s having them dreams
Everybody sees themselves
Walkin’ around with no one else
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
I said that.

That’s what the count to the Long Count comes down to – the survival of number one, which I personally think is a lot of number two.  Apparently there has been panic buying around the world of candles and survival kits, which suggest that some people have a highly relative view of just what the end means. As I say, the bells of hell and so on. 

In Russia people are sweeping up torches, thermos, kerosene and other supplies.  Some enterprising shopkeepers are taking advantage of the situation, advertising “Meet the End of the World” kits, which apparently include a tot of vodka along with a bar of soap and a piece of rope.  OK, I can understand the vodka, but the rope and the soap?!  The situation is so bad that Dmitry Medvedev, the Prime Minister, has tried to calm the panic, saying that he does not believe in the end of the world, “At least not this year”, he added reassuringly.

In America Ron Hubbard (that’s without the L), a manufacturer of hi-tech underground survival shelters, has seen sales explode.  Oh this is not a mere business opportunity on his part.  He’s taking the whole thing seriously himself, going underground on 21 December and not emerging until two days later.  I won’t bother sending him an invitation to my party. 

It gets worse.  In the French Pyrenees the mayor of the town of Bugarach has banned UFO watchers from climbing the nearby heights of the flat-topped Pic de Bugarach.  Apparently many consider the mountain to be a sort of alien highway.  There all the ETs among us will gather on the final day, taking the humans who happen to be around along with them as an act of charity.  It’s a fair return for past hospitality, one has to conclude.

On that very point I’m going ahead with my own hospitality regardless, no candles, no kerosene, no rope, no soap and obviously no aliens, since they will have previously decamped to the south of France.  Quite frankly I would rather share Yule with a lot of twenty-something loonies in Knightsbridge rather than lunatics underground or on bare mountainsides.  There is one thing I will never be accused of – not knowing how to party.  

Anyway, that’s it for the season or that’s it period.  I’ll see you all in the New Year or I won’t, whatever fate decrees.  If it comes I really hope you all have a great holiday, with or without the Maya.  Happy Solstice and happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.  Listen to this.  It's just so soothing.  

A Christmas Memory

  

I was a precocious child.  I have before me The Christmas Reader edited by Godfrey Smith, the paperback version published by Penguin Books in 1986.  On the flyleaf I see the following inscription, written in a bold, clear hand – “To mama from Anastasia, Christmas 1986.”  How could I not be precocious?  I was all of six months old!

This collection, at over three hundred pages, is an absolute delight, a treasure chest full of golden literary nuggets - poems, short stories, anecdotes, diary entries, extracts from novels, songs, recipes and menus, all on the common theme of Christmas. 

Smith, formerly a columnist with the Sunday Times, was asked for help by one John Simmons.  Mister Simmons, who belonged to a supper club, had read an extract from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol the previous December.  What could he read them this year, he asked the journalist, that was any near as good?  Smith duly put the question to his readers.  The answers came cascading as from a horn of plenty.  In the end, as he puts it in the anthology’s introduction, there was enough to keep the supper club entertained until the middle of the present century!

I first read my gift to mother when I was about twelve.  I’ve been reading it on and off ever since, always at this time of year, of course, as the days get shorter and Christmas draws near.  There are so many gems that I simply can’t possibly mention them all in a manageable blog article.  There were discoveries that took me, like an explorer, on different journeys.  It was in these pages that I came across American writers like Willa Cather, Truman Capote, O Henry and Damon Runyon for the very first time. 

Runyon is represented, guys and dolls, by Dancing Dan’s Christmas, an amusing tale set in Prohibition days and written in his own incomparable style.  Truman is also represented by a short story, the wonderfully poignant A Christmas Memory, a tale of an unusual friendship between a child and an elderly woman who thought like a child.  It moved me when I first read it; it moves me still, the pair of lost kites, rather like hearts, moving towards heaven.

In the same section – Now One Time it Comes on Christmas…- there is a piece by Alistair Cooke, a journalist based in the States who used to broadcast on life there to people in England.  It’s called Christmas in Vermont, not a short story but an account of the holiday he spent in 1976 with his daughter and her family, who live in a remote farm in the north of the State.  The prose is wonderful, limpid and shining.  Even more wonderful is his description of a Christmas feast where nothing, not even the wine, was ‘store boughten’, as they say in New England.  He concludes by writing of his grandson;

And here, at four, he’s skiing over the deep and crisp and even like a Disney doll.  And this is all the life that Adam knows.  One day he will grow up and, I’m afraid, taste of the forbidden fruit.  One day he will read the New York Times.  And Adam will be out of the Garden of Eden, out of Vermont, for ever. 

Do you heard of John Betjeman?  If not he was once the English Poet Laureate.  His poetry is neither clever nor sophisticated.  Rather it’s full of dry humour and simple sincerity, which made him all the more popular with people who normally take very little interest in poetry.  He is represented in this collection by a poem simply called Christmas.  The last three verses will give you something of the flavour;

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

It really does not matter if you believe or not.  The words are uplifiting enough.

There are other verses including the much-parodied Christmas Day in the Workhouse, parodied in such immortal lines as “Then up spoke one old pauper/With a face as bold as brass/We don’t want your Christmas pudding/You can stick it up….”  I don’t think I need continue, do I?  The original, though now laughable in its dripping melodrama, is evidence of just how dreaded this much-despised Victorian institution once was. 

In his introduction Smith touches on the criticisms of modern Christmases.  I’m sure you know the sort of thing - they are too commercial, too corrupted, too trivialised.  It was all so much better in the past.  But that’s just the point – Christmas is all about the past, all about nostalgia.  It brings a longing for things that have been, things that have passed, and things that never were.  Hilaire Belloc’s A Remaining Christmas, written in the 1920s, calls for Christmas Past.  Then we have Washington Irving’s The Christmas Dinner, written a century before, where the old English squire regrets the passing of traditions two centuries before that! 

There are some seriously funny pieces.  Here I give special mention to John Julius Norwich’s spin on The Twelve Days of Christmas, the traditional carol detailing a succession of increasingly unusual gifts sent by a true love to a true love.  By the end the true love remains true no longer.  In the form of a series of letters from the recipient, it’s better to hear it read aloud with the right pacing, but it’s still very funny on paper.  Here, for example, is letter five, received after the five gold rings:

Dearest Edward,

The postman has just delivered five most beautiful gold rings, one for each finger, and all fitting perfectly.  A really lovely present – lovelier in a way than birds, which do take rather a lot of looking after.  The four that arrived yesterday are still making a terrible row, and I’m afraid that none of us got much sleep last night.  Mummy says she wants to ‘wring’ their necks – she’s only joking, I think; though I know what she means.  But I love the rings.  Bless you.

Love, Emily.

She does not love what comes in the days after.  In the end the whole lot, the birds, the lords a-leaping, the ladies dancing, the pipers piping, the drummers drumming, the maids a-milking are sent back by a firm of solicitors, Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Run, who inform the true love that his true love has taken out an injunction against him! 

I could go on and on.  There is A Child in the Forest, an extract from Winifred Foley’s beautiful and poignant memoir, or the unbelievably sumptous Christmas Dinner at Mount Vernon, the menu George and Martha Washington placed before guests at their Virginia home.   But not wishing to try your patience any longer I must stop.  Let me just say that there is so much more, delights of all kinds.  This, as Mister Pickwick said, is indeed comfort. 

Papal Bull

The Pope has written a book.  There is probably nothing unusual in that.  I feel sure lots of past popes have written books, and the present pontiff is noted for his love of the pen, along with just a soupcon of theological controversy.

I rather thought Catholicism was all dogma.  “Oh, don’t be so dogmatic”, I can hear Pope Benedict say in my mind’s ear, “there is always room for a little flexibility in faith.”  There seems to be more than a little room when it comes to aspects of the Nativity. 

Christmas approaches with alarming speed.  But Christmas may not be Christmas at all, at least according to Jesus of Nazareth: the Infancy Narratives, a new addition to the Papal back catalogue published last week.  Never mind the season, never mind the month, never mind the day: Jesus was born years earlier than is commonly supposed.  The accepted date was based on a miscalculation by Dionysus Exiguus – also known as Dennis the Small –, a sixth century Eastern European monk. 

Dionysus is now best known for the concept of Anno Domini (AD) – in the year of our Lord.  I remember once in a religious studies class, after we had already established what BC meant, we were asked if any of us would care to hazard a guess at AD.  Without pause for thought I replied “After Death.”  “I’ll give you after death”, the teacher said.  I was a bit of a minx, you see. 

According to Benny, Dennis was a bit of a menace when it came to dating. We do not know how he calculated the year of Christ’s birth but he got it wrong, perhaps by as many as several years.  Jesus, you see, was born BC; born, in other words, before Christ!  The contention isn’t new; other scholars have made such a claim, now weighted with a papal imprimatur. 

My goodness, here is the head of the Catholic Church dealing in doubt.  What next, I wonder?  I’ll tell you what next: the Infancy Narratives has no room in the inn for cattle and donkeys.  The ox and ass did not keep time as the drummer boy played because they were not there.  It’s all a myth, the Pope says.  “There is no mention of animals in the Gospels”, he writes, in what is the third and last part of his biography of Jesus.  The inclusion of domestic animals in the Nativity scene was most likely inspired by pre-Christian traditions. 

Not to worry, boys and girls; there will be no Papal Bull ejecting the menagerie, even that set up every year in Saint Peter’s Square.  Even so, it’s as well to remember that it’s just a lot of bull.  So, too, apparently is the singing heavenly host greeting the birth of Christ.  His Holiness writes that the angels did not sing Hark!; they only spoke the words.  Maybe they were crooning. 

But when it comes to the really important stuff, when it comes to the Virgin Birth, there is no room for doubt or papal equivocation: this is the literal truth, the dogma upon which the faith stands or falls.  The Pope is insisting on the word of the Gospels and only the Gospels, which ironically aligns him with seventeenth century English Puritans, who, in their own literal way, literally dispensed with Christmas altogether, a pagan festival unsanctioned by scripture.

It seems to me that there is a kind of naïve purity or theological blindness here in an argument that is too subtle by half, and that half concerns the element of myth from which all belief takes succour.  When one removes the myth one removes the magic.  It is the need for this sort of primitive reassurance that moves mountains, not Papal monographs.  

Please, no more Jingle Bells!

There is a store on the west end of Edinburgh’s Princes Street near the Caledonian Hotel which sells Scottish-themed products, the sort of tartan tat that’s most likely made in China. I’ve never been in – I can’t stand this sort of thing – but I could not help but notice it on the two occasions when I walked past – it blares out pipe and drum music, horrible stuff really loud. It was bad enough for me, passing in moments; it must be intolerable for the staff, who have to listen to this ghastly racket all day long.

I have music in mind, or rather muzak, the sort of background noise that Wikipedia defines as elevator music, sounds on a cycle, an endless loop. In discussion recently I mentioned that one of the horrors of Christmas is that supermarkets (I have my local Tesco in mind) insist on pumping out seasonal noise, jolly tunes on the loop, tunes coming round time and time and time again.

I don’t know what they are attempting to do in this, put people in the mood, perhaps, for spending and happy times in Tesco. Well, it’s not working, at least so far as I’m concerned; I work on a different psychology. It makes me shop as quickly as I can, get what I need and get out before my ears are hammered by Frosty the Snowman yet one more time! It’s the people who work there I feel most sorry for, people who have no choice but to be beguiled by Frosty or Rudolf for as long as they are on shift. To my mind this constitutes the very acme of cruel and unusual punishment!

I had an experience of this once myself. I was in Havana over the Christmas and New Year period a few years ago, staying in the Hotel Parque Central, right in the heart of the city. The usual Christmas horrors were played from the bar by the roof-top swimming pool. I’m not much for sun-bathing (frying like a fry bores me!), which is just as well, as I would have gone quietly mad with that as a constant background. Swimming or lunching to this accompaniment was bad enough!

I finally cracked on 2 January. “Look”, I said to the barman in my broken Spanish, “Christmas is over. Can we please, please have some Cuban music, some salsa, anything but Jingle Bells?” And that was that, a sigh of universal relief.

I’m not Scrooge; I do enjoy some Christmas-themed music, just not the mass market stuff. What’s my favourite Christmas song, you may wonder? Why, it’s a fairy tale, a strangely poignant one. I do hope you all have the kind of holiday you most wish for yourself. :-)

Santa Wants a Ho

A few years ago an attempt was made in Australia to stop Santa Claus giving his jolly Ho, Ho, Ho greeting to children, substituting Ha, Ha, Ha in its place, anodyne and wholly (!) without any kind of character or provenance. Why? Because ho is slang in America for, well, a ho!

That’s just the sort of thing that would be bound to upset every Australian girl and boy, just as it annoyed every Australian parent, many of whom were discovering for the first time what a ho was and what the jolly old, red-nosed (possible alcohol problem?) fellow was calling for.

Generally speaking Santa is a disreputable old man, don’t you agree? All parents should be warned against this December interloper. After all, with school teachers being subject to levels of background scrutiny that was formerly reserved for candidates for senior office, with schools being turned into mini-prisons, we still give this unvetted stranger completely free range, to come, go and do as he will.

Every alarm bell should be ringing over the actions of this ho-monger. Every year he commits an act of mass breaking and entering unparalleled in the history of crime. More worrying still, he urges children to be ‘good for Santa’, to be good boys and girls, seduced by promises of gifts. What’s his motive here?

Here we have a stranger, coming silently in the night, creeping into the bedrooms of children with material inducements; just how much more of this are we prepared to take? Why are questions not being asked? Are social service departments not concerned? Do something, before it’s too late! Oops, sorry, it is too late; centuries too late.

Alas, we live in a humourless age. I’m tempted to write a journal message to the future, in the style of Winston Smith from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a greeting to a hoped for time, a time free from the absurdity of Big Nanny and Political Correctness. Will such a time ever come? I have a feeling that things will get worse before they get worse still.

The attack on Christmas and the traditions associated with Christmas is as predictable and relentless as the season itself. We’ve seen it all here in England, with one local authority substituting a ghastly ‘Winterval’, and another referring to Christmas lights as ‘Luminos’, all to avoid offending those capable of taking offence.

The disease is spreading by degrees. This year a school in Stockton, California is reported to have placed an interdict on classroom displays of Santas, Christmas Trees and even Poinsettia plants for fear of upsetting people of other faiths. Bah! Humbug!

I’m sure there lots of other tiresome examples, of initiatives thought up by tedious people, the thought police of the PC brigade who would treat us all as infants. I imagine these joyless, sour and literal-minded types were just bad girls and boys in the past, those who never, ever got presents from Santa. Christmas is in the winter of their discontent. They want the world to be like Narnia, a place where it is always winter and never Christmas.

Meanwhile the old fellow is going quietly mad, locked away in the North Pole, not much given to ho ho ho-ing or even ha ha ha-ing. Maybe he should have another look at his contract, to check if there really is a sanity clause.

Quot estis in convivio

Has a year really gone past? It seems no time at all since last Christmas. Time is relative, of course. I can still remember when the intervals between one festive season and another seemed like an eternity. Now the chariot of Chronos is speeding up, a sign, I take it, that I am getting older, now close to a quarter century!

Christmas, Yule Tide, the Winter Solstice, call it what you will, I love the whole season. It’s the time when I am at my most reactionary, when my love for continuity, tradition and the past becomes strongest. It’s a time when Christian and Pagan unite in greenery, mistletoe, holly, burning logs and ancient ritual; a time the dark closes around the celebration of light.

It’s a time for re-reading Hilaire Belloc’s wonderful essay A Remaining Christmas, given to me when I was a child by my much beloved grandfather, a treasured memory both of him and of times past. Belloc writes with such conviction, with such moving reverence of the setting of his own celebrations, now long gone;

This house where such good things are done year by year has suffered all the things that every age has suffered. It has known the sudden separation of wife and husband, the sudden fall of young men under arms who will never more come home, the scattering of the living, and their precarious return, the increase and the loss of fortune, all those terrors and all those lessenings and haltings and failures of hope which make up the life of man. But its Christmas binds it to its own past and promises its future; making the house an undying thing of which those subject to mortality within it are members, sharing in its continuous survival.

Tomorrow I will be joining family and friends at our old house in the country, away from all distractions; away from garish city lights and garish city people. Yes, there is a television, but on Christmas Day it only ever goes on for the Queen’s Speech. Otherwise our tradition is to ignore the dreadful idol, whose votaries sit around in dumb amazement, gaping at its even dumber antics. We have fun, a simple celebration of family, of close friends, of conversation, games and frolics aplenty; cocktails, good food, and always punch or mulled wine - or even a bowl of steaming bishop! - to see in Christmas Day. The Lord of Misrule still presides over our Feast of Fools!

On Saint Stephen’s Day mother, father and I will all be out on the local hunt, the first time in three years we have ridden together on this annual occasion. Last year the meet clashed with my skiing holiday; the year before that with a trip to Morocco with my former boyfriend. This year I will be there, in fulfilment of a promise, and I never break promises!

The day after I leave with a party of friends on another skiing trip, this time to Saint Anton in Austria, something I mentioned in a previous post (I love to ski). I’ve been so looking forward to this, something I started to plan almost as soon as I came back from Central America in the summer, which has a counter-aging effect: it slows time right down! Christmas in England; New Year in Austria, it could not be better.

I wish for you the Christmas I wish for myself: one of simple contentment, however it takes you. May the New Year bring us all the things we deserve. All hail Odin; all hail old Saturn; all hail good company; all hail the Boar’s Head!

The boar's head in hand bring I
Bedeck'd with bays and rosemary.
I pray you, my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio.
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino.

The boar's head, as I understand
Is the rarest dish in all this land
Which thus bedeck'd with a gay garland
Let us servire cantico.

Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino

Our steward hath provided this
In honour of the King of Bliss;
Which, on this day to be served is
In Reginensi atrio.

Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino

Excess, the true meaning of Christmas

Christmas fast approaches. Here we are, now in the second week of December. I’m slightly worried; I’m concerned that another tradition may be dying: I’ve yet to see a press article bemoaning the ‘commercialisation’ of the festival, or hear some finger-wagging moralist droning on about how we have all forgotten the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas, meaning the Christian meaning!

I’m sure that just about everyone who visits this page knows very well that there is no scriptural evidence for the date of Christ’s birth. December 25 was alighted on several centuries later because, by happy coincidence, it was a traditionally happy time in the Roman world, the height of Saturnalia and the birthday of Sol Invictus, the sun god. The festival was always about excess, so Christians have no cause for complaint!

The puritans, both in England and parts of the American colonies, recognised that Christmas, idolatrous anyway because of it’s popish overtones, was a holiday with pagan roots. So they banned it; they banned everything associated with it, all those things that add a little pleasure and warmth to the deep mid-winter.

This attitude did not die away with Cromwell and Cotton Mather. Edmund Gosse, the English poet and author, was brought up in the strict Plymouth Brethren sect; so absolutely no Christmas joy for him. There is a hilarious passage in Father and Son, his memoir published in 1907, where he details how the servants, feeling sorry for him, gave him some of their own hidden Christmas pudding. He ate it, only to be overtaken by a crisis of conscience. Father, on being informed of this dreadful sin, immediately threw the remainder of the “idolatrous confectionary” into the rubbish!

The Americans gave the world Santa Claus in his modern benign, jovial and anodyne guise. But England gave the world an older figure - Father Christmas, Old Christmas himself, who celebrates the coming of Christ in a boozy, self-indulgent fashion. He is not a gift-giver, simply the spirit of good cheer, yet another pagan intrusion. The most memorable depiction of the old boy is to be found in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. There he is, illustrated by John Leech, as the Ghost of Christmas Present, an Odin-like figure.

As for the supposed ‘commercialisation’ of Christmas that, too, is nothing new. It wasn’t the Bible that gave us Christmas; it was Charles Dickens. The central message of A Christmas Carol, once the moral homily is taken away, is that Christmas is about having a jolly good time among family and friends; and having a jolly good time meant buying things, lots of food and lots of drink. No, I’m wrong: it wasn’t Dickens at all – it was the Ghost of Christmas Present, who comes with clouds of plenty in his wake. Who comes, I suppose, with Christmas presents.

For the emerging middle class in general Christmas was really their festival: the more they celebrated the harder the workers had to work, the greater the incentive for spending, the greater the incentive for commercialisation in a new commercial world. The old tradition of simple good cheer, the tradition of Father Christmas himself, was drowned in a rising flood of consumerism. And as the festival expanded so, too, did consumer culture, which steadily worked its way through all classes as Christmas made its progress from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

So, let’s have no more nonsense about the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas. Christmas is about spending, eating and drinking to excess; in its modern form it always was. Charles Dickens would have understood as much. Waes Hail.

Ana’s Christmas Message

Since I’m now about to sign off for the season I just thought I would wish each and every one of you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Tomorrow I’m off to join the rest of my family in a beautiful old manor house in deepest Sussex for our traditional jollifications, a real English Christmas, the sort of thing that mother does so well. It’s not quite as Belloc describes it in his lovely essay A Remaining Christmas, but it’s not far off.

On the Feast of Stephen my boyfriend and I leave with some good friends for a spot of skiing in Val d'Isère, which will take me through the New Year, returning home on 4 January. So, I’ll leave you a seasonal offering from Loreena McKennitt, one of my favourite singers. Snow is a particularly lovely song. You may feel that you’ve had enough of the stuff lately but do listen. The lyrics are adapted from the poem of the same name by Archibald Lampman.

White are the far-off plains, and white
The fading forests grow;
The wind dies out along the height,
And denser still the snow,
A gathering weight on roof and tree,
Falls down scarce audibly.

The road before me smooths and fills
Apace, and all about
The fences dwindle, and the hills
Are blotted slowly out;
The naked trees loom spectrally
Into the dim white sky.

The meadows and far-sheeted streams
Lie still without a sound;
Like some soft minister of dreams
The snow-fall hoods me round;
In wood and water, earth and air,
A silence everywhere.

Save when at lonely intervals
Some farmer's sleigh, urged on,
With rustling runners and sharp bells,
Swings by me and is gone;
Or from the empty waste I hear
A sound remote and clear;

The barking of a dog, or call
To cattle, sharply pealed,
Borne echoing from some wayside stall
Or barnyard far a-field;
Then all is silent, and the snow
Falls, settling soft and slow.

The evening deepens, and the gray
Folds closer earth and sky;
The world seems shrouded far away;
Its noises sleep, and I,
As secret as yon buried stream,
Plod dumbly on, and dream.

Yule-when the Wild Things Come

In ancient calendars, including those of the Romans, the Celts, the Germans and the Slavs a gap of twelve days occurs in mid-winter, now the Twelve Days of Christmas, celebrated in the song. This was perceived in a sense as a kind of fracture in time, a fracture that allowed the boundaries between the living and the dead to dissolve.

In the German lands it was known as Zwolfen, a time when Woden and Frigg-or Odin and Freya-held forth. For witches it was a favoured time for the Wild Hunt and for ordinary mortals a time of wild merry-making, gift-giving, spell-casting and divination. In the English court prior to the Puritan revolution of the seventeenth century, when Christmas was banned, proceedings were governed by a kind of anti-king known as the Lord of Misrule. By the pagan calendar this was, of course, Yule.

Christmas continues to be rich with pagan residues and traditions. Father Christmas, or Santa Claus, though now generally identified with Saint Nicholas, on very insecure grounds, it has to be said, has a lineage going back to Odin, the centre of the evergreen cult among the Nordic peoples, and the Roman god Saturn, also depicted as father Time, whose midwinter festival, known as Saturnalia or the Feast of Ops, was a time of gift-giving, especially to children.

In general December was a time for dancing, singing and feasting. It was a time also of masquerade and mummery, when men dressed as animals and as the Horned God, the chief figure of the fertility cult. The Horned One travelled around carrying a small broom of birch twigs intended to confer greater fertility, his face blackened with soot to suggest that he had just come down the chimney, yet another link with Father Christmas! In the Dutch tradition Black Peter, who accompanies Saint Nicholas, is one obvious descendant of the Horned God.

There is so much more in Christmas that belongs to the pagan world, including decorated evergreen trees, the Yule Log, associated with Frigg, the wife of Odin, the boar as the Yule animal, an offering to the goddess and, of course, mistletoe, the golden bough.

Witches also have their part to play. In Italy Befana, who flies through the air on a broom, is the gift-giver to children, not Father Christmas. In Germany Lutzelfrau, who prefers to receive than to give, also flies through the air, causing havoc in households that have omitted to leave small offerings for her. In other parts of Germany and Austria children go from door-to-door often dressed as witches, begging small treats in the name of Perchta, the witch-goddess. Perchta is also joined by Hulda, Herta and Freya at this time of year in the aforementioned Wild Hunt, sometimes joined by Odin. Yes, wild times, wild things, wild creatures!

The Twelve Days of Christmas

I heard this performed last year at Christmas show, part song, part poetry, part performance. We were all in stitches. With the right reading, the right pacing and the right pausing it’s really priceless. The 'correspondence' was written by John Julius Norwich.

A Correspondence



25th December

My dearest darling
That partridge, in that lovely little pear tree! What an
enchanting, romantic, poetic present! Bless you and thank you.
Your deeply loving Emily


26th December

Mr dearest darling Edward
The two turtle doves arrived this morning and are cooing
away in the pear tree as I write. I'm so touched and
grateful.
With undying love, as always, Emily


27th December

My darling Edward

You do thinks of the most original presents: whoever
thought of sending anybody three French hens? Do they really
come all the way from France? It's a pity that we have no
chicken coops, but I expect we'll find some. Thank you,
anyway, they're lovely.
Your loving Emily


28th December

Dearest Edward

What a surprise - four calling birds arrived this morning.
They are very sweet, even if they do call rather loudly -
they make telephoning impossible. Bit I expect they'll calm
down when they get used to their new home. Anyway, I'm very
grateful - of course I am.
Love from Emily

29th December

Dearest Edward

The postman has just delivered five most beautiful gold
rings, one for each finger, and all fitting perfectly. A
really lovely present -lovelier in a way than birds, which do
take rather a lot of looking after. The four that arrived
yesterday are still making a terrible row, and I'm afraid
none of use got much sleep last night. Mummy says she wants
us to use the rings to 'wring' their necks - she's only
joking, I think; though I know what she means. But I love
the rings. Bless you
Love, Emily


30th December

Dear Edward

Whatever I expected to find when I opened the front door
this morning, it certainly wasn't six socking great geese
laying eggs all over the doorstep. Frankly, I rather hoped
you had stopped sending me birds - we have no room for them
and they have already ruined the croquet lawn. I know you
meant well, but - let's call a halt, shall we?
Love, Emily


31st December

Edward

I thought I said no more birds; but this morning I woke up
to find no less than seven swans all trying to get into our
tiny goldfish pond. I'd rather not thinks what happened to
the goldfish. The whole house seems to be full of birds - to
say nothing of what they leave behind them. Please, please
STOP
Your Emily


1st January

Frankly, I think I prefer the birds. What am I to do with
eight milkmaids - AND their cows? Is this some kind of a
joke? If so, I'm afraid I don't find it very amusing.
Emily


2nd January

Look here Edward, this has gone far enough. You say you're
sending me nine ladies dancing; all I can say is that judging
from the way they dance, they're certainly not ladies. The
village just isn't accustomed to seeing a regiment of
shameless hussies with nothing on but their lipstick
cavorting round the green - and it's Mummy and I who get
blamed. If you value our friendship - which I do less and
less - kindly stop this ridiculous behaviour at once.
Emily


3rd January

As I write this letter, ten disgusting old men are
prancing about all over what used to be the garden -before
the geese and the swans and the cows got at it; and several
of them, I notice, are taking inexcusable liberties with the
milkmaids. Meanwhile the neighbours are trying to have us
evicted. I shall never speak to you again.
Emily


4th January

This is the last straw. You know I detest bagpipes. The
place has now become something between a menagerie and a
madhouse and a man from the Council has just declared it
unfit for habitation. At least Mummy has been spared this
last outrage; they took her away yesterday afternoon in an
ambulance. I hope you're satisfied.


5th January

Sir
Our client, Miss Emily Wilbraham, instructs me to inform
you that with the arrival on her premises a half-past seven
this morning of the entire percussion section of the
Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and several of their friends
she has no course left open to her but to seek an injunction
to prevent your importuning her further. I am making
arrangements for the return of much assorted livestock.
I am, Sir, Yours faithfully,
G.CREEP
Solicitor-at-law

Christmas Died at Naseby Fight

The Battle of Naseby was, of course, the penultimate Puritan victory in the First English Civil War, a victory of the 'new' England over the 'old'; and Christmas, and all that was associated with it, was very much part of the old. The festival was hated, in the first place, because it was 'popish', and in the second, because it was 'pagan'; it had no authority in scripture and it was the occasion for unseemly and drunken revels, presided over by the Lord of Misrule.

In the 1580s Philip Stubbes had written in The Anatomie of Abuses that;

The more mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides, what masking and mumming, whereby robbery, whoredom, murder and what not is committed? What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used, more than in all the year besides, to the great dishonour of God and impoverising of the realm.

Ah, yes: robbery, whoredom, murder, dicing and carding. Just a typical family Christmas, then!

The festival had also become something of a political battleground between the stricter Protestant sects and Catholic recusants in England; for while it was condemned by the one it was growing in popularity with the other. Catholics, moreover, were quite happy to combine religious devotion with an attachment to the more profane aspects of Christmas celebration. Dorothy Lawson, a Catholic gentlewomam, was noted for celebrating "in both kinds...corporally and spiritually." Christmas thus became a prime target during the period of Puritan ascendency, both before and after Naseby.

The attack began with attempts to divorce the religious from the secular elements of the holiday, with Parliamentary ordinances from 1642 onwards calling for a more 'seemly' observation. The campaign was stepped up in early 1645 with the publication of the Directory of Public Worship, which plainly stated that "Festival days, vulgarly called Holy days, having no Warrent in the Word of God, are not to be continued."

The final victory over the King also saw the victory over Christmas. In June 1647 it was abolished outright. Neverthless, the festival remained popular with ordinary people, and fresh ordinances had to be issued throughout the period of both the Commonwealth and the Protectorate; even people attending church on 25 December were liable for arrest and interrogation by the army. The World is Turned Upside Down was part of a much wider popular and literary response to the whole Puritan campaign, including the wonderful satire The Arraignment, Conviction and Imprisioning of Christmas, printed by 'Simon Minced Pie' for 'Cicely Plum Pottage.'

Alas, England, ruled by Cromwell, in much the same fashion as Narnia was by the White Witch, was a land 'where it was always winter and never Christmas.' Old Father Christmas only returned with Summer and the King!