The holly and the ivy should have all left us five days ago - but this year is different Lights keep twinkling away, evergreen door decorations still up. Many of us are managing to subtly suspend the closure of Christmas. This year there’s nothing ridiculous about a longer festive time. French delicatessen, Frederic’s opens every afternoon in the medieval riverside silver workshop on Magdalene Bridge- he has a window unashamedly ablaze with Gallic style festive fare. There are even some civic lights still on in the city streets, no one is keen to sweep the brightness away or close down the quiet celebrations for a few weeks yet.

All this is in keeping with Christmas Cambridge as it used to be- and it lasted far longer than the twelve days of the song. We are told Christmas is an Edwardian fantasy, a quasi- modern concept with little contact with our genuine past. But is it?

Two learned historians Alison Weir and Siobhan Clarke and their book ‘A Tudor Christmas’ have scotched that theory: Christmas is old, very old indeed. Almost all of our traditions stem from our deep past , when Britain was a wooded agrarian society with close connections to nature and the change of the seasons, the Winter Solstice the centre of Pagan rites , Viking customs and even Roman Saturnalia appear in the season today .

King Alfred the Great made Christmas official in the ninth century. He commanded there should be a holiday on Christmas day and twelve days after that. No one was expected to work or could be made to in that time – up until 6th , the Epiphany when the three kings or wise men arrived ( it was calculated it would have taken them 12 days to get from ‘the East’) ‘ having seen the star ‘ at the birth of Jesus on 25th December. Epiphany was the climax of the feast and Twelfth Night the riotous all night rollicking run up to it the night before. King Henry V111 and his Queen Jane went to Mass on Twelfth Night and at 11 p.m. sat down to a great feast that lasted the entire night- breaking up at dawn

No need to dream of a white Christmas it was a reality. -Winter, in the two hundred years beginning with Tudor times was very harsh – all of Britain endured a mini-ice age and rivers, including the Thames froze solid enough for fairs and festivals. For that epic feast in 1519, Henry and Jane spurred their horses across the Thames to reach the lighted loveliness of a lavishly decorated Greenwich Palace. By the way turkeys were a thing back then. The first six of them arrived in Bristol from the New World in 1526 and sold for 2d each.

Christmas itself got longer and stronger. It was already quite a stretch. It began it on Martinmas, the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, on 11th November, with forty days pre-Xmas preparation

On Christmas Eve, folk brought greenery into the house, holly ivy and the ancient Druid miseltoe, an custom recorded by the Roman historian Pliny as a plant sacred to the Druids. Under a branch enemies of all kinds kissed and made up, harvested by white clad priests with a golden sickle The idea of the house full of greenery itself is thousands of years old, ( bay branches and trees were a protection against spirits) and possibly the Yule log is the oldest. Our ancestors dragged it in from the forest -Yule logs fell gradually out of favour as fireplaces got smaller and rooms more intimate. A grand Yule log needs a communal dining hall.

Our helpful historians tell us Christmas was magical for all. Wealthy people ordered in French wine in vast quantities and further down the social scale, liked the imported Flemish beers – no change there then from today?

“Above everything else it was a religious festival. It began with the eve of Christmas Day when the church bells rang out to invite the people to Midnight Mass. They found the sanctuary lit up with tapers and the altar with many candles. . Voices sang ‘Adeste Fideles’ and Christmas came in with its mystery and wonder’. Followed by feasting and ‘merriment.’ After the Reformation during the persecution of the old religion, Adeste Fideles ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ was the code for London Catholics to gather in their covert church in Soho for the Midnight Mass.

Chaotic and fun -Christmas went on and on.

Intriguingly, Father Christmas was an important figure down the centuries. That he was an invention designed to sell Coca Cola is very misleading – the shrink wrapped pint sized elfin Santa was an American take on the often gigantic original. The Saxons welcomed King Winter around their hearth and the Norse Vikings celebrated the god Woden

- he rode down to the earth on his eight legged horse,( and doubtless a sleigh) left presents and in turn was always given offerings of bread and beer after everyone had disappeared to bed. The Christian saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra in the 6th century heard of of local girls whose family had been bankrupted and were about to be sold into prostitution As he passed by their house he saw stockings hung on the line to dry and popped money into each one. Honour and poverty solved in one secret gesture. Not really a story for the children but near the kindly Father Christmas of today - it certainly isn’t an imp with designs on your Coca Cola intake.

In the popular Mystery plays put on at Christmas, there was a character called Father Christmas. So many of these were destroyed at the time of the Reformation. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night saw it all coming when he mocked the Puritan Malvolio whose lugubrious kill joy presence comes to grief by the end of the revels. Ben Jonson’s Christmas his Masque also featured a Puritan who spends the play trying to close down all the songs, plays and feasting. Along with so much of Christmas its exuberance ,reverence and roistering the reformers hated. In the bitter end Christmas and all its fun and frolics was banned by law by the Cromwellian Parliament – instead of twelve days of feasting and holiday, Christmas Day became workday, and anyone found at Church on Christmas Day would be fined or even imprisoned. In Presbyterian Scotland Christmas was crushed and even the day itself only became a holiday in 1882.

Even though Christmas was re-instated in England by the returning Monarch Charles II, it never recovered its fun irreverent spirit. The Victorians straightened out carols like the ancient Good King Wenceslas but the epic scale of festivity for all was hard to revive.

So let’s us do it . Let’s keep the spirit going for another month, until Candlemas, the Feast of St. Blaise on Febuary 2nd the official end of medieval Christmas proper when the Our Lady went to the Temple for the Jewish ritual of Purification, six weeks after her child’s birth. We won’t be alone, plenty of people all over Europe have just got going with their celebrations and every Nordic country hangs on to their lights and candles for as long as the sun fails to shine and any warmth and cheer is welcome.

Next year we can match those medieval merry makers of yesteryear – with double does of the very traditional mince pies, puddings ,singing and inclusion of all classes of people celebrating together.

Meanwhile I am off to Frederic’s new Magdalene Bridge shop to stock up on a few sustaining treats

Bon Continuation as the French say.

A Tudor Christmas by Alison Weir and Siobhan Clarke.

ReplyForward