Ring Out the Old

In Victorian times, Scotland was still celebrating the turn of the year far more than Christmas. This was probably a result of the Reformation when the Scottish Protestants attacked the heathenish festivities of Christmas even more than the English did. But the Scots simply delayed the party for a week and turned the New Year into Hogmanay.

Hogmanay
There is much speculation about the origins of the word ‘Hogmanay’, possibilities include it deriving from the:

- Greek words for ‘holy month’ or ‘holy moon’
- Corruption of the French ‘Homme est né, trois rois là’ (‘Man is born, three kings are there’) – the popular song which begins ‘Hogmanay, Trollolay’
- Ancient Scandinavian name Hoggu-nott or Hogenat for the night before the feast of Yule, the ancient Scandinavian feast of the winter solstice
- Words ‘to the mistletoe go’ or ‘to the mistletoe this New Year’ from the French Touraine patois au gui menez or au gui l’an neuf respectively – Both an allusion to the ancient Druidical practice of gathering mistletoe for the midwinter ceremonies.

Hogmanay also refers to the practice, still very much current in Victorian times, that involved, rather like gooding and wassailing, people asking for treats – in this case they were children and they were hoping for cheese and oatcakes. Chambers wrote:

In country places in Scotland, and also in the more retired and primitive towns, it is still customary on the morning of the last day of the year, or Hogmanay, for the children of the poorer class of people to get themselves swaddled in a great sheet, doubled up in front, so as to form a vast pocket, and then to go along the streets in little bands, calling at the doors of the wealthier classes for an expected dole of oaten-bread. Each child gets one quadrant section of oat-cake (sometimes, in the case of particular favourites, improved by an addition of cheese), and this is called their hogmanay. In expectation of the large demands thus made upon them, the housewives busy themselves for several days before hand preparing a suitable quantity of cakes. The children on coming to the door cry ‘Hogmanay!’ which is in itself a sufficient announcement of their demands.

Songs were also sung, ranging from the traditional song beginning ‘Hogmanay, Trollolay’ to the raucous:

My feet’s cauld, my shoon’s thin;
Gie’s my cakes, and let me rin!

Guisers and Guizards
All over Scotland, local celebrations to celebrate the end of the old year and the start of the new had their own particular charm. In Deerness, in Orkney, the town formed a huge band that went around the district, knocking at each door and singing. After singing, food and ale was shared with the band who would then go on to the next house. Hogmanay was the favourite time for the mummers to do their rounds in Scotland, though they also sometimes did them at Christmas, too. North of the border, however, they were known as ‘guisers’ or ‘guizards’ and they performed very similar plays to the mummers. Chambers, as with most forms of drama, was not overly impressed, referring to them as a ‘rude and grotesque drama’.

~Anna Selby, The Victorian Christmas

The Twelve Days of Christmas

The twelve days of Christmas last until 6th January so, though the excitement of Christmas Day itself was gone, Christmas was far from over. The Church explains it thus: Advent, the weeks before Christmas, symbolises the coming of God to man; the Twelve Days of Christmas symbolise the coming of man to God, the last day, Epiphany, being the day that the Magi, or Three Kings, arrived in Bethlehem, bringing gifts for the infant Jesus. The other twelve days have less significance than the first and last but they all are counted as part of the Christmas festival.

- 26th December – St Stephen’s Day
- 27th December – St John’s Day
- 28th December – Holy Innocents’ Day/Childermas
- 29th December – St Thomas à Becket’s Day
- 30th December – St Sabinus’ Day, St Anysia’s Day and St Maximus’ Day
- 31st December – New Year’s Eve or Hogmanay and saints’ day of Saints Sylvester, Columba and Melania the Younger
- 1st January – New Year’s Day and the saints’ day of Saints Fulgentius, Almachus, Eugendus, Mochina, Odilo, Faine and Medina
- 2nd January – St Macarius’ Day
- 3rd January – St Genevieve’s Day, the patron saint of Paris
- 4th January – Saints’ Day of Saints Titus (a disciple of St Paul), Gregory, Rigobert and Ramon
- 5th January – Old Christmas Eve
- 6th January – Twelfth Night

Did you know?
Holy Innocents’ Day (28th December) takes its name from the slaughter by Herod of the children of Bethlehem in his attempt to murder the infant Jesus. It was traditionally the unluckiest day of the year and any project – especially a marriage or a new business venture – begun on 28 December was generally reckoned to be doomed to failure.

Thomas à Becket was murdered on 29th December 1170 by four of King Henry II’s knights in response to the king asking, in a fit of rage, if no one would rid him of the troublesome priest causing him so many problems.

The 30th December marks the saints’ days of a number of saints who are now (and indeed in Victorian times were) little known. They are St Sabinus, bishop of Assisium, and his companions, martyred in 304; St Anysia, martyred in 304, and St Maximus, confessor, martyred about 662.

St Macarius had the unlikely start in life of a confectioner in Alexandria in Egypt. He became, however, a hermit and such an extreme ascetic that he went down in the annals of self-denial and self-torment as one of the holiest anchorites (recluse).

Before the calendar was reformed in 1582 by Pope Gregory, the old Julian Calendar (introduced by Julius Caesar) was universally used but it was based on 365 and a quarter days. It overestimated the length of the year by just over eleven minutes which, by the Sixteenth Century, meant the calendar was ten days out. The Gregorian Calendar was not adopted in England until 1751, by which time the English were eleven days out, celebrating Christmas on 6 January, so the 5th became known as Old Christmas Eve.

Twelfth Night, 6th January, known as Epiphany, marked the arrival of the Three Kings at the birthplace of Jesus and was the official ending of Christmas.

~Anna Selby, The Victorian Christmas

It’s Panto Time!

The pantomime has a long and varied ancestry, though it became in Victorian times and remains to this day, uniquely English. It dates back to the medieval masque, a form of entertainment that was to reach its peak during the Elizabethan and Stuart eras. In the Eighteenth Century, the masque began to develop into something closer to the pantomime we would recognise today.

Stock Characters
Often they would have characters taken from the Italian commedia dell’arte, such as:
- Harlequin
- Scaramouche
- Pantaloon
- Columbine
- Characters from classical legends

John Rich produced one such pantomime, Harlequin Executed, at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in 1717 and this is generally credited as being the first English pantomime. His classical story was Perseus and Andromeda, which he somehow wove in with the commedia dell’arte characters. As if this were not enough of a feat, he produced the first transformation scene.

Mixed Reception
Chambers was, on the whole, not impressed. ‘Pantomimic acting,’ he opines, ‘had its place in the ancient drama, but the grotesque performances associated with our English Christmas are peculiar to this country.’ Cibber says that they originated in an attempt to make stage-dancing something more than motion without meaning. Rich seems to have grafted the scenic and mechanical features of the old masque upon the pantomimic ballet. Davies, in his Dramatic Miscellanies, describes Rich’s pantomimes as ‘consisting of two parts – one serious, the other comic. By the help of gay scenes, fine habits, grand dances, appropriate music, and other decorations, he exhibited a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or some other mythological work. Between the pauses or acts of this serious representation, he interwove a comic fable, consisting chiefly of the courtship of Harlequin and Columbine, with a variety of surprising adventures and tricks, which were produced by the magic wand of Harlequin; such as the sudden transformation of palaces and temples to huts and cottages; of men and women into wheel-barrows and joint-stools; of trees turned to houses; colonnades to beds of tulips; and mechanics shops into serpents and ostriches.’

Clowning Around
Shortly before Victoria acceded to the throne, the pantomime was given an entirely new emphasis by one man, the clown Grimaldi. Born in London of Italian parents in 1778, he made his first appearance on the stage of Sadlers Wells at the age of three. ‘His genius,’ says Chambers in his Book of Days, ‘elevated the Clown into the principal personage of the pantomime.’

The clown took over and the transformation scene became a permanent fixture of the panto, but the Victorians gradually lost all the earlier stock characters and replaced them with children’s stories such as Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella. The music hall, the Victorians’ most popular form of theatre, also influenced the pantomime, so singing and other popular ‘turns’ from juggling to fire-eating were all incorporated as part of the entertainment.

~Anna Selby, The Victorian Christmas

Boxing Day

There are a number of possible origins of the name ‘Boxing Day’. In his Book of Days, Chambers traces it to the Romans: ‘who, at the season of the Saturnalia, practised universally the custom of giving and receiving presents … In process of time, the custom of Christmas-boxes and New Year’s gifts, like others adopted from the heathen, attained the position of a universally recognised institution. The church herself has even got the credit of originating the practice of Christmas-boxes.’

Other theories credit the Church with the idea in the first place, with the placing of alms boxes around each church during the approach to the Christmas season, the contents of which would be distributed to the poor on 26th December. Or from the practice of apprentices, servants and all sorts of workers asking their masters for small amounts of money – collected in little boxes that they broke open as soon as Christmas proper was finished – Boxing Day.

Christmas Tips
Chambers was well accustomed to the practice of Christmas boxes or tips as we know them today:

Christmas-boxes are still regularly expected by the postman, the lamplighter, the dustman, and generally by all those functionaries who render services to the public at large, without receiving payment therefore from any particular individual… St Stephen’s Day, or the 26th of December, being the customary day for the claimants of Christmas-boxes going their rounds it has received popularly the designation of Boxing-day. In the evening, the new Christmas pantomime for the season is generally produced for the first time; and as the pockets of the working-classes, from the causes which we have above stated, have commonly received an extra supply of funds, the theatres are almost universally crowded to the ceiling on Boxing night; whilst the ‘gods’ or upper gallery, exercise even more than their usual authority. In conclusion, we must not be too hard on Christmas-boxes… That many abuses did and still do cling to them, we readily admit; but there is also intermingled with them a spirit of kindliness and benevolence, which it would be very undesirable to extirpate.

Christmas Boxes – Another View
In 1849, Punch magazine took a rather less benevolent view than Chambers towards the giving of Christmas boxes:

The Christmas Box system is, in fact, a piece of horribly internecine strife between cooks and butchers’ boys, lamp-lighters, beadles, and all classes of society, tugging at each other’s pockets for the sake of what can be got under the pretext of seasonable benevolence. Our cooks bully our butchers for the annual box, and our butchers take it out of us in the course of the year by tacking false tails on to our saddles of mutton, adding false feet to our legs of lamb, and chousing us with large lumps of chump in our chops, for the purpose of adding to our bills by giving undue weight to our viands. Punch has resolved on the overthrow of the Boxing system, and down it will go before 1849 has expired.

Needless to say, they did not succeed.

~Anna Selby, The Victorian Christmas

Christmas at Sea

The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand;
The wind was a nor’-wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the suff a-roaring before the break of day;
But ’twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops’l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide-race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard.
So’s we saw the cliff and houses and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every longshore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it’s just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessèd Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard’s was the house where I was born.

O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother’s silver spectacles, my father’s silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.

And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessèd Christmas Day.

They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
“All hands to loose topgallant sails,” I heard the captain call.
“By the Lord, she’ll never stand it,” our first mate, Jackson, cried.
. . . .”It’s the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,” he replied.

She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood;
As the winter’s day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

~Robert Louis Stevenson

Christmas

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain.
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hooker’s Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that villagers can say
‘The Church looks nice’ on Christmas Day.

Provincial public houses blaze
And Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says ‘Merry Christmas to you all’.

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children’s hearts are glad,
And Christmas morning bells say ‘Come!’
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true? and is it true?
The 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 to-day in Bread and Wine.

~John Betjeman

The Night Before Christmas [Senior Humour]

‘Twas the night before Christmas at Rock-Away Rest,
And all of us seniors were looking our best.
Our glasses, how sparkly, our wrinkles, how merry;
Our punch bowl held prune juice plus three drops of sherry.

A bed sock was taped to each walker; in hope
That Santa would bring us soft candy and soap.
We surely were lucky to be there with friends,
Secure in this residence and in our Depends.

Our grandkids had sent us some Christmassy crafts,
Like angels in snowsuits and penguins on rafts.
The dental assistant had borrowed our teeth,
And from them she’d crafted a holiday wreath.

The bedpans, so shiny, all stood in a row,
Reflecting our candle’s magnificent glow.
Our supper so festive–the joy wouldn’t stop–
Was creamy warm oatmeal with sprinkles on top.

Our salad was Jell-O, so jiggly and great,
Then puree of fruitcake was spooned on each plate.
The social director then had us play games,
Like “Where Are You Living?” And “What Are Your Names?”

Old Grandfather Looper was feeling his oats,
Proclaiming that reindeer were nothing but goats.
Our resident wanderer was tied to her chair,
In hopes that at bedtime she still would be there.

Security lights on the new fallen snow
Made outdoors seem noon to the old folks below.
Then out on the porch there arose quite a clatter
But we were so deaf that it just didn’t matter.

A strange little fellow flew in through the door,
Then tripped on the sill and fell flat on the floor.
‘Twas just our director, all togged out in red.
He jiggled and chuckled and patted each head.

We knew from the way that he strutted and jived
Our social security checks had surely arrived.
We sang–how we sang–in our monotone croak,
Till the clock tinkled out its soft eight-p.m. stroke.

And soon we were snuggling deep in our beds.
While nurses distributed nocturnal meds.
And so ends our Christmas at Rock-Away Rest.
‘fore long you’ll be with us, we wish you the best.