Christmas Every Day

For centuries Hungary has been a cultural cross-road; situated between eastern and western Europe and the Balkans, rich in ethnic identity and a land where Protestantism and Catholicism can each claim many followers, Hungary shows its mixed heritage in the celebration of Christmas.

On December 6, St Nicholas Day, the saint (Mikolás to Hungarians) in his traditional bishop’s attire arrives to deliver small presents and candy to good girls and boys and switches to the bad ones. Children leave their neatly-polished shoes out for Nicholas to fill. On his travels to shopping areas and schools and in parades he is often accompanied by an angel and a devilish companion named Krampusz.

But the saint’s appearance is only a prelude to the Christmas celebrations which accelerate on December 24. Adults hurry home from work, children are sent off to play and the tree is decorated in their absence. After a visit from the gift-bringer (which on Christmas Eve is the baby Jesus or his angels) a bell is rung and children may view the tree and open their presents. Following supper the family might sing carols or attend midnight mass. The following two days are national holidays. Christmas itself tends to be reserved for immediate family and the large afternoon dinner, often of turkey; visiting friends and family takes place on December 26.

Seasonal delights include the szalon cukor, brightly wrapped chocolate candies with a marzipan or jelly centre, and baigli, traditional walnut and poppy-seed cakes.

This popular novelty tune written by Donald Yetter Gardner in 1946. Gardner was a music teacher who noticed that most of his young pupils were missing their baby teeth. With that observation as inspiration, Gardner went home and wrote the words and music in about half an hour. As a recording, it was a success in 1948 for Spike Jones (pictured above) and the City Slickers. The words were sung in a child’s voice by George Rock, one of the Slickers. Danny Kaye, the Andrews Sisters and Nat King Cole all recorded it and it was a Top Ten hit again in 1955 when it was sung by seven-year-old Barry Gordon.

Everybody stops and stares at me.
These two teeth are gone as you can see.
I don’t know just who to blame for this catastrophe,
But my one wish on Christmas Eve is as plain as can be

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth,
My two front teeth, see my two front teeth.
Gee, if I could only have my two front teeth,
Then I could wish you “Merry Christmas.”

It seems so long since I could say,
“Sister Susie sitting on a thistle.”
Gosh, oh gee, how happy I’d be
If I could only whistle.

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth,
My two front teeth, see my two front teeth
Gee, if I could only have my two front teeth,
Then I could wish you “Merry Christmas.”

The credit for the earliest published Christmas card has usually gone to Sir Henry Cole who in 1843 commissioned John Callcott Horsley to produce this image, a hand-coloured lithograph of a family party with the message, “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.” 1,000 of these were manufactured and sent out, causing a minor scandal because the family on the card appeared to be drinking.

Recently, however, Timothy Larsen (editor of the splendid Oxford Handbook of Christmas) has found a notice in the December 7, 1829 issue of the Hampshire Chronicle: “We learn that the ‘Olde Winchester’ Christmas and New Year’s Greetings, designed by Mr. A. Clements, of Northgate Studio, are receiving a most cordial welcome from Christmas card buyers, sales already nearing the 2000 mark. Large numbers have been sent abroad to friends interested in Winchester”.

Nothing says “Merry Christmas ” like murderous frogs, sporting chickens, gourmet mice, and a dead robin. What would a 21st-century psychiatrist have to say about the Victorian minds that produced such images?

Dinner for One (or The 90^th Birthday): this short British comedy film from 1963, virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, is one of Europe’s favourite holiday season movies. Starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden, it concerns an elderly lady and her butler celebrating her birthday with four imaginary friends. The butler becomes increasingly inebriated as he is forced to imitate each of the long-dead guests and drink toasts in their names. The recurring line “The same procedure as every year” has become a catch phrase across northern Europe.

For some reason this little slapstick farce has become a tradition in late December in many countries. It is broadcast every December 23 on Norwegian television and on New Year’s Eve in the rest of Scandinavia and Germany.

Similar curious broadcast traditions occur in Italy where the 1983 American comedy Trading Places has become a Christmas Eve staple, Britain where the animation of Brigg’s book The Snowman is shown every year over the holidays and in eastern Europe where a variation on the Cinderella story Tři oříšky pro Popelku is popular.

Quentin Blake (1932-) is a beloved English illustrator and author. In 1993 he was commissioned by the Post Office to create a set of stamps using characters from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

They past, they say is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Nowhere is this adage more true than in the contemplation of bizarre English Christmas cards from the Victorian era. What could have persuaded artists that these images were suitable for a Christmas greeting?

By the late i9th century American humour magazines were finding Santa a good source for their cartoons. Here are three from Puck  magazine.

By the end of the 19th century the Santa Claus story had embedded itself in Anglophone family culture. Parents had discovered that Santa offered their children not just gifts but magic and imagination as well. In an astonishing display of altruism millions of fathers and mothers deflected the gratitude due them to an imaginary midnight Gift-Bringer. But, as this poem from 1880 shows, not all parents were that way inclined.

In 1887 the Scottish poet and novelist Robert Louis Stevenson was recovering for a moment from the lung disorder that would eventually kill him. In his convalescence he wrote his “Christmas Sermon”, a melancholy reflection on human striving. Here are a few of the notable passages from it.

To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: myself.

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall arise: he is on duty here; he knows not how or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good; somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness to others.