Christmas Every Day

There is nothing like being immersed in medieval splendour to remind one that people have been doing Christmassy things for a very long time.

In Prague’s Old Town Square, the first of my stops to investigate Central European Christmas markets, I am surrounded by the town hall, the site of two famous instances of throwing politicians out the window (1419 and 1618); the wonderful astronomical clock (built in 1410); the baroque Church of St. Nicholas (1704); and the Gothic spires of the Church of Our Lady Before Týn (1380).

Historians argue about the date of the first Christmas market. Some say Vienna’s December fair of 1296 was the earliest, others say it was Bautzen, in Saxony, in 1384, while still others point to Dresden in 1434. There is no doubt, however, that shopping in outdoor venues for seasonal food, toys, and gifts has been going on for centuries, spreading from the German-speaking lands to the rest of Europe and, now, around the world.

Such markets reached a peak of popularity in the 19th century, but were hit by the rise of department stores whose mass-produced goods were cheaper than hand-made items and which offered what seemed to be a more elegant setting for consumption than outdoor booths.

By the early 20th century, Christmas markets were seen as scruffy, rowdy, and lower-class. Astonishingly, what saved them, at least in Germany, was the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s—the Nazis disliked department stores, which they believed were Jewish-owned, and encouraged citizens to patronize local merchants. They revived and glamourized the Berlin and Nuremberg Christmas markets, making them experiential sites for nostalgia, community feelings, and sentiment rather than mere commercial exchanges.

After World War II the popularity of Christmas markets spread, and today they serve as major tourist attractions, some in dramatic settings such as Vienna’s Rathausplatz or the Schönbrunn Palace, with stalls selling regional food and drink, ornaments, clothing, toys, and souvenirs. Visitors can also experience light shows, listen to Christmas music, go ice skating, watch Christmas tree lightings, see artisans at work at forges or looms, and ride Ferris wheels.

Most European cities will hold multiple markets, some large and impressive, some on a smaller scale meant for local shoppers. To travel, as I did recently, from one country’s offerings to another is to see both the national and regional differences on display and the international appeal of Christmas.

Every visitor to a Christmas market is going to be assaulted by waves of wonderful aromas emanating from vats of soup, spits of roasting pork, and ovens full of gingerbread. Every eye will be caught by the pans of toasted chestnuts, rows of chocolates, heaps of dumplings (sweet and savoury), and stacks of giant pretzels.

In Prague you will be enticed by the sight of trdelniki (variously translated as funnel cake, chimney cake, or spit cake), a delicious sugary confection which can be filled with ice cream, Nutella, chocolate or nuts. You can taste them, as well, in Bratislava, Vienna, and Budapest—and everywhere you will be assured that this treat was invented locally and copied by jealous neighbouring countries.

Everywhere, you will be tempted by flatbread and potato pancakes but the toppings will intriguingly vary—try them with pulled pork, sour cream, cheeses of various sorts, or bacon and onion. Central Europe is heaven for sausage-lovers, and those who go for the barbecued klobása in Czechia will find the zatocená pikantná klobása, the twisted spicy sausage of Slovakia, the Käsekreiner of Austria, and the paprika-flavoured Hungarian gyulai equally alluring.

In Prague try the carp soup, in Bratislava sample the goose, in Vienna the Christstollen, and in Budapest, don’t miss the goulash. Mulled wine is going to be delightfully different from market to market and it is often served in souvenir mugs which can be retained. (There is a commitment to sustainability on display in all of these markets. Emphasis is placed on the local sourcing of food and goods on sale, and on using recyclable material for wrapping or utensils.)

If the visitor is looking to bring home a unique but inexpensive reminder of a Central European Christmas market, look for oplátky in Prague (called oblátky in Bratislava). These are unleavened wafers in a variety of sweet flavours, stamped with images of the Nativity or some other Christmas scene. It is traditional at the Christmas Eve meal for the father of the family to break off the first piece and then to pass it around the table while prayers are said and good wishes expressed.

In Budapest, don’t pass by the szaloncukor, chocolates filled with jelly or fondant wrapped in shiny coloured foil and used to decorate the Christmas tree. Collectors of snow globes will appreciate the fact that they were invented in Vienna and are plentiful at Christmas markets in that city. Those with larger budgets might wish to come away with handmade wooden Czech nativity scenes, embroidered ethnic table cloths from Slovakia, Austrian glass ornaments, or Hungarian ceramics.

Despite the term Christkindlmarket—the Christ Child Market—do not expect to be overwhelmed by any Christian religiosity in these places. There will be an obligatory life-size replica of the Bethlehem manger scene somewhere on the premises (and the largest of the Vienna markets has some modern takes on the Nativity by Austrian artists) but these are largely secular venues. A visitor is more likely to hear Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby” over the loudspeakers than “Silent Night.”

And do not expect to see much evidence of Santa Claus, either. The Christmas gift-bringer in Central Europe is usually St. Nicholas or the Baby Jesus and his angels, so local carvers have little time for the North American Santa. They are more likely to produce Nutcracker figures or images of the Russian-inspired Grandfather Frost as tokens of the season.

So what are they selling, these purveyors of food and drink and tokens of Christmas past? Hope, that the crowds will come, that hearts will be a little lighter, and wallets too. And that treasure may still be found.

From E.B. White (1899-1985), American author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little:

The only way the American Christmas could be simplified would be to change the date from December 25 to February 29. Then it would come every four years. I’ve advocated this for a long time but nobody pays attention to me.

E. B. White, Letter to Mrs. Cushman, 17th January 1984

An account of two French soldiers, who killed themselves at St. Denis on Christmas-day, 1773.

A very tragical event has just happened near us. On Friday last (Dec. 24, 1773) about eleven o’clock, two soldiers came to an inn at St. Denis and bespoke a dinner for the afternoon. Bourdeaux, one of these soldiers, went out to buy some gunpowder and two bullets. While making the purchase he observed, that St. Denis seemed to him to be so pleasantly situated, that he was determined to pass the remainder of his life in it. He then returned to the inn, and they spent the rest of the day together in great cheerfulness. On Saturday also (being Christmas-day) they were in good spirits, and seemed very merry at their dinner. They called for more wine, and about five o’clock in the evening they were both sound dead near the fire, with a table between them, on which were three empty bottles, the will, a letter, and half-a-crown (having previously discharged their bill). They were both shot through the head and the pistols were lying on the floor. The people of the house being alarmed at report of fire-arms, rushed into the room. Monsieur de Rouilliere [Rulhière], Commandant of the Maréchaussée of St. Denis, who dined with us yesterday, gave us the whole account, and showed us the will from which the following was copied:

Tuesday 25th December 1792 was the first Christmas of the new French Republic.  At the Temple prison, Louis XVI spent the day writing his will, prior to his appearance at the bar of the Convention on the 26th.  Paris was in a state of security crisis and simmering uprest.  The religious policies of the Convention were wracked by indecision, with rationalists like  Pierre-Louis Manuel moving towards policies hostile to Christianity without declaring them openly.  In the Paris Commune, the ascendancy of would-be dechristianisers was assured by the election  on 12th December of  Pierre Chaumette as  procurateur with Hébert as his substitute.

On 23rd December 1792 the Commune prohibited the celebration of Midnight Mass on the pretext of public order. Crowds gathered in many of the poorer parishes and parish priests were obliged to officiate in open defiance of the commissioners sent by the Hôtel de Ville to enforce the order. The surviving accounts emphasise the role of agitators in orchestrating the movement. The Girondin Patriote française identified them as radical rabble-raisers, whereas Prudhomme’s Révolutions de Paris blames royalist intervention. However, reading between the lines, there seems to have been strong component of spontaneous popular demonstration. The Sections were clearly divided on the prohibition.  It is recorded that at Saint-Eustache,  the women of Les Halles gathered together with the intention of hunting down and hanging Manuel.  A municipal officer Beugnon, a master-mason by trade, who had been set upon by the women, appeared with on guard next morning at the Temple with his face scratched and bruised. 

(From “Rodama: a blog of 18th-century and Revolutionary France”, 2016)

David Goss is a member of that most valuable class: the local historian. His chronicles of life in New Brunswick, especially at Christmas time, preserve important memories that might otherwise be lost. Here he presents a seasonal tale from his childhood.

I am sure everyone, at every age, enjoys a tour of the Christmas lights that people put up around Saint John. Over the years have conducted bus coach tours so people who aren’t too mobile can sit back and take in the sometimes “over the top” electric displays our city has to offer. This year, with a knee that has gone wonky, have had some sitting and thinking time on this subject.

Among my memories I share with you here is the first time I saw Saint John lit up for Christmas. think it was 1953 – two years after festive lighting was first put up to adorn the route Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip took from Union Station to the Admiral Beatty Hotel. Bright red bulbs were strung between every power pole along Dock Street to King Street then up King Street and around King’s Square. They were such a hit, the Merchant’s Association asked they be left up for the seasonal shoppers to enjoy and every year since Saint John Energy has continued the tradition as a gift to the city.

With the birth of my little sister Barbara my darling mother was often overwhelmed at taking care of the now four of us. One solution was the suggestion that my brothers and I would be sent out once a week to catch dad’s last east-west city bus trip of the day. We would board on St. John Street and be relegated to the back seat – and told to behave. If there were standing passengers we were to offer them our seats. Most of the passengers would get off the bus before we reached the foot of King Street. At this point dad would invite us to come up to the front of the bus where we would have the best view. It was from this vantage point., my brothers and first saw all those beautiful red light bulbs.

As we drove up King Street dad pointed out the MRA Department Store in the first block and told us that was where we would be able to see Santa Claus when we all came Uptown to do our Christmas shopping. In the second block we were told that the Zellers had an escalator. The only one in Saint John! We were soon to find out that elevator led straight to childhood heaven Toyland. At the head of King Street, dad would amaze us tikes by appearing to start through the intersection while the light was still red. Miraculously it would turn green just as the wheels started rolling. How did he always know? Later, when we were learning to drive he revealed the trick behind this magical act. By watching the light turn orange in the other direction he knew exactly when to jump on the throttle.

Also at the head of King Street he would point out the decorations strung around the perimeter of King’s Square, the Christmas tree vendors and one special Christmas tree beautifully lit up. At that point, as he knew there were no more light displays or attractions to see, my brothers and I would be sent back to our back seats as the bus would now fill up with passengers and clerks heading to their homes in east Saint John.

At least once, dad was able to stop long enough at England’s Smoke Shop on the south side of Haymarket Square to buy a cup of his famous root beer, which dad always told us Mr. England made himself and stored it in an under-the-floor vat. He wasn’t pulling our leg that time, as he often did, because when was student painting the transit company’s bus stop banners on poles in the summer of 1959, that was where Jimmy Goudy introduced me to coffee. I thought it was a vile drink at the time, but I recalled dad’s root beer story and asked for some instead. Sure enough, behind the glass counter filled with candy and tobacco products there appeared an under-floor vat from which Mr. England produced the tasty beverage. I visited often after that, and would do so again, but all that is left of that magical Christmas light tour and England’s home-made root beer are the good memories.
 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the celebration of Christmas in the English-speaking world was in a state of disrepute. Observing the festival had been banned by Puritan governments in Scotland, England, and the New England colonies and even when it became legal again to mark the holiday, Christmas had become associated with the lower orders of society. Stripped of its religious significance by Calvinist Protestants and Enlightenment freethinkers, Christmas had come to be associated with drunkenness and disorder – noise in the streets, overindulgence in food and drink, and riotous behaviour directed against the middle class. In the cities of Great Britain and the United States, the Twelve Days were marked by vandalism, interruption of church services, attacks on religious and racial minorities, and urban gangs bent on mayhem. Groups of men parading about, banging on pot lids, blowing horns, and making rude noises produced what was termed “Callithumpian music”. It was the season for brazen demands by the riffraff for money from prosperous citizens either in public or in home invasions.

Even those who loved Christmas thought that the holiday had fallen on hard times. The American Episcopalian bishop Philander Chase complained to his wife that “the devil has stolen from us … Christmas, the day of our spiritual redemption and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and swearing.” The Industrial Revolution had drawn folk away from the countryside with its many quaint seasonal customs and forced them into a lifestyle in which there were no slack periods of agricultural inactivity that allowed for merrymaking. Old notions of Christmas as the season for charity seem to have been replaced by modern Malthusian ideas about denying aid to the needy lest it encourage idleness and overpopulation of useless mouths.

But just when Christmas seemed on its last legs, the first decades of the 1800s saw the festival almost miraculously revived by writers, poets, musicians, and thinkers in America and England.

In the United States we must thank, among others, the writer Washington Irving and members of the New-York Historical Society. It was these well-off gentlemen who looked to the history of Dutch settlement in New York and found the figure of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) who, they said, was a magical Christmas gift-bringer who brought treats for good little girls and boys and switches to paddle the bottoms of bad children. Two poets, the anonymous author of “A Children’s Friend” (1821) and Clement Clark Moore who wrote “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”, better known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (1822), popularized a fur-clad figure who arrived on Christmas Eve in a reindeer-pulled sleigh full of gifts. This invention of Santa Claus helped to remake the end of December into a time that focussed on the home and children and rescued it from outdoor, alcohol-fuelled disorder. Families (and merchants) were quick in spreading this new mythology and by mid-century America was exporting Santa to the rest of the world.

Meanwhile in England, Charles Dickens was refashioning ideas about the sacred season. In his A Christmas Carol of 1843, Dickens linked old notions of the holiday as a time of midwinter jollity and community to the idea of the festival as the feast of family togetherness and forgiveness. Secondly, Dickens accelerated the moral impact by reviving Christmas’s connection to charity, especially to the deserving poor, and to religion. His little book was wildly popular and joined a number of other contemporary impulses in English society at the time that helped to make Christmas respectable again.

One of these trends was the work of musicologists who were bent on rediscovering the lost Christmas music of the English countryside, wonderful carols and hymns that the city folk had forgotten about. Men such as William Sandys, Sir John Stainer, and John Mason Neale are responsible for preserving such beloved works as “The First Nowell,” “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In,” “Joseph Was an Old Man”, “Good King Wenceslas,” and “Good Christian Men Rejoice.”

The resurrection of Christmas also owes much to the example of Queen Victoria and the British royal family as celebrators of a family- centered (as opposed to a traditionally riotous) Christmas. The German background of her husband, Prince Albert, contributed greatly: his importation of the Christmas tree, their adoption of turkey as the seasonal meal, and their emphasis on domestic togetherness proved an enormously attractive model for middle-class folk who now sought to emulate their monarch.
In the twenty-first century we still observe Christmas in ways that Washington Irving, the New-York Historical Society, Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria would find familiar and approve of.

Sir Humphrey: I wonder if I might crave your momentary indulgence in order to discharge a by no means disagreeable obligation which has, over the years, become more or less established practice in government service as we approach the terminal period of the year — calendar, of course, not financial — in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, Week Fifty-One — and submit to you, with all appropriate deference, for your consideration at a convenient juncture, a sincere and sanguine expectation — indeed confidence — indeed one might go so far as to say hope — that the aforementioned period may be, at the end of the day, when all relevant factors have been taken into consideration, susceptible to being deemed to be such as to merit a final verdict of having been by no means unsatisfactory in its overall outcome and, in the final analysis, to give grounds for being judged, on mature reflection, to have been conducive to generating a degree of gratification which will be seen in retrospect to have been significantly higher than the general average.

Jim Hacker: Are you trying to say “Happy Christmas,” Humphrey?

Sir Humphrey: Yes, Minister.

A stave church is one of the architectural marvels of the world. Built in the Middle Ages as the Scandinavian peoples were being Christianized, they look like a Viking ship has landed to become a worship site.

Hundreds of these churches were erected a thousand years ago and despite the fact they are of all-wood construction, a few dozen still remain. In Moorehead, Minnesota, on the banks of the Red River, the descendants of Norwegian settlers built a replica of an original church in Vii, Norway. Inside, to my delight, I found that the paintings which decorate its ciborium are of a Christmas theme.

Here the angel announces to Mary that she has been chosen to give birth to the Messiah.

The Massacre of the Innocents, ordered by King Herod.

In some English-speaking countries St Stephen’s Day, or Boxing Day, is a time for sports, We have the Irish hunting the wren or riding to hounds in pursuit of the fox, and Australians racing yachts and playing cricket. In the New Forest area of England, it was customary to hunt the red squirrel, an outing known as “Squoyling”.

A diary entry from 1928 expresses disgust at the practice: 

A hateful thing is done here, done every Boxing Day, but I never happened to hear of it until this year. On Boxing Day the boys of the village go out in company to the woods to hunt the squirrel. Their game is to stone them to death. Squirrels are wary and shy and the hunters none too skilful, but they do take toll of them. I do not know the origin of this ugly sport. A forester who has known of it the last five-and-twenty years knew of a tradition that the squirrels eat the tops of the yews, and that this practice is a yearly punitive expedition, but I expect it has a more primitive source than that. Is there not some tradition that connects the red squirrel with Judas Iscariot? – something older still. The primitive hunting of the wren’, which Frazier includes among primitive agricultural or even pre-agricultural rites, used also to be practised here, but happily now has been discontinued. It was not confined in this place to any one day in the year. When will the squirrel hunt die out? While deer and fox and hare are hunted the village boys may say with reason ‘Why not the squirrel too?’

The squirrels were regarded as suitable for eating for those who could afford no more expensive meat and were also seen as a threat to healthy trees as this forester relates:

We looked forward to Boxing Days to go squirreling. Not after the grey tree rats we see in the New Forest today, but that gorgeous creature that we see here no more, the red squirrel. The red squirrel could never be described as vermin but their numbers had to be controlled otherwise the young bucks in June would tear about the trees, particularly the larch, and rind the top with the result that the tree died. We went after the red squirrels armed with snogs – lethal weapons made from pieces of wood with a lead weight wired on the end. These would be used to knock the red squirrels from the trees and when we had about a dozen we would take them home to be skinned and cooked in the turf oven. They made a very tasty meal.