Christmas Every Day

Four years ago I posted the following, with the caveat that I had only seen it in one source. Later, I had the source confirmed, so, in the hope that this is all true, I wish a Happy Buzzlewit Day to you all. Buzzlewit seems to me to be a more congenial creature than the creepy Elf on the Shelf.

Altoona, Pennsylvania, and a growing number of communities in the Boston area celebrate Buzzlewitz Day on November 11. According to the Lowther tradition, Buzzlewitz is the elf that is sent by Santa to collect children’s Christmas lists. On 11 November of each year at 11 pm, children leave their Christmas lists and a snickerdoodle cookie on the mantle or in the kitchen. Buzzlewitz comes in the night to collect the lists. In return, he leaves a mint and an acorn.

Here is a Santa Claus figure featured in an advertisement from the Canadian Illustrated News of 1883.

Being Canadian he is, of course, equipped with snowshoes and sled.

Here is a Santa from the same magazine in 1885.

You will note how distinctive this version of the Gift Bringer is. He is clean-shaven and wears no furs; instead he had a voyageur’s ceinture flechée sash, a floppy voyageur toque, and he is pulled by six reindeer. His sleigh has no runners (which would be useful on snowy roads) but is flat-bottomed like dog-powered sleds, good for deeper snow. Among the gifts he carries are a sword and a musket.

In 1819 the English town of Paignton produced a 900 lb. Christmas pudding in honour of the anniversary of their town charter. Despite being boiled in a brewer’s furnace for four days it remained uncooked, with the inside still raw. The townsfolk attempted an even more massive pudding in 1859 as part of a celebration of the arrival of the railway. This time it was cooked to perfection; made of 500 lbs of flour, 190 lbs of bread, 400 lbs of raisins, 184 lbs of currants, 400 lbs of suet, 96 lbs of sugar, 320 lemons, 150 nutmegs and 360 quarts of milk. The Monster Pudding (as newspapers referred to it) was over 13’ feet in circumference and rested on a wagon pulled by 8 horses. It was meant to feed 850 poor of the parish as well as 300 railway labourers but before that could happen a crowd of 18,000 sight-seers, well-lubricated by the local cider, rushed the pudding, swept aside its police escort and demolished the dessert in scenes of riotous disorder.

To this day residents of Paignton are called “Pudden Eaters” and pudding festivities are still observed with pride. In 1986 a giant casket containing 900 individual puddings on little pots was mounted on a wagon and pulled through the town by a steam-powered tractor. Mercifully, no rioting took place.

As monstrous as the Paington Pudding was, it would have been dwarfed by that giant Christmas pudding of over 3 tons made in Aughton, Lancashire in 1992. This confection was verified by the Guinness Book of World Records but there are stories of a 10-ton pudding created in 1931 in London.

The Feast of the Holy Innocents

December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorates the murder of the male babies of Bethlehem by King Herod. In England the day was known as Childermas (or Dyzemas) and was considered an ill-omened time; few would want, for example, to be married on that date. Not only was no business conducted on that day, but the day of the week on which it fell was deemed unlucky for the rest of the year. In Ireland it was Lá Crostna na Bliana, the “cross day of the year” when no new enterprise was begun. Many sailors would not sail on that day; on the Aran isles no one was buried on Childermas (or the day of the week on which it occurred); and in Cornwall to wash on that day was to doom one of your relatives to death. Childermas was also a day for ritual beatings. The seventeenth-century writer Gregorie notes the custom of whipping children in the morning of that day so that Herod’s murderousness “might stick the closer; and, in a moderate proportion, to act over the crueltie again in kind.”

In the Middle Ages the Shearmen and Tailors’ Guild of Coventry took their part in the famous cycle of mystery plays staged annually at the feast of Corpus Christi. The Bible stories they were responsible for portraying included the Massacre of the Innocents. It is this story for which the song known as “The Coventry Carol” was written, sung in the pageant by women of Bethlehem trying to keep their children quiet lest their crying betray them to the murderous soldiers of King Herod.

Lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

By, by, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do,

For to preserve this day?

This poor youngling for whom we sing,

“By, by, lully, lullay.”

Herod the king, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day.

His men of might, in his own sight,

All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child for Thee!

And ever morn and say,

For thy parting neither say nor sing,

“By, bye lully, lullay.”

The painting above by Pieter Brueghel sets the massacre in a Dutch village in the 16th century as if it were carried out by the occupying Spanish army.

The feast of Saints Adam and Eve

Adam and Eve, the ancestors of the human race, were first honoured as saints in the churches of Eastern Christianity and during the Middle Ages their cult spread into the West. Though the Catholic church never officially recognized them with a feast day, popular veneration of Adam and Eve was widespread, particularly on December 24 when it was thought fitting that those responsible for the Fall of mankind be linked with the birth of the Saviour who came to redeem humanity.

Medieval dramas which told the story of Adam and Eve had as a stage prop a tree representing the Garden of Eden and the Tree of the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This tree was decorated with apples or round wafers representing the host of the Mass and it is this “Paradise Tree” which some historians see as a precursor to the modern Christmas tree. This link is evident when we note that as late as the nineteenth century some American and German Christmas trees had images of Adam and Eve and the Serpent underneath them. Godey’s magazine claimed “an orthodox Christmas-Tree will have the figures of our first parents at its foot, and the serpent twining itself. The apples were placed on the table on Christmas Eve to recall those through whose sin mankind first fell as well as the Virgin Mary, the new Eve.”

The last of our Christmas in wartime excursions presents four out-of-the-ordinary glimpses of the sacred season in the midst of bloodshed.

The first is the cover of the Ustase Youth magazine. The Ustase was a pro-Nazi Croatian movement, ultranationalist, ultra-Catholic, and fascist, which allied its region of Yugoslavia to the Germans during the Second World War. 

You are not going to see too many images of the New Year’s baby, Stalin, Chiang Kai-she, Uncle Sam, and John Bull in together in a single illustration in your lifetime. Therefore, enjoy this version from the Canadian Home Journal, December 1943 edition. 

“Christmas Greetings” come from this Finnish cavalryman at a time in the war when that nation was allied to Germany and thus was, on paper at least, at war with Canada and the United States. 

“Happy Norwegian Christmas” cry this little nissen elves as they fly the flag of Nazi-occupied Norway. Both the flag and overtly patriotic cards were banned by the Germans so this would have been an underground production.

Wassail

The term wassail is derived from the Anglo-Saxon toast “waes hael”, or “good health” (the expected reply is “drinc-heil” or “drink well”). To wassail is to ceremonially drink someone’s health at Christmas, especially from a decorated bowl filled with a seasonal drink. The wassail bowl was traditionally filled with mulled ale or “lamb’s wool” and was adorned with ribbons. “Wassailers” often referred to those who went door-to-door at Christmas with a wassail bowl expecting a gratuity for a drink or those who expected the householder to fill the bowl at each stop.

The tradition of wassailing the apple trees or livestock is a vernerable one. In the seventeenth century the poet Robert Herrick noted: Wassail the trees, that they may bear/ You many a plum, and many a pear:/ For more or less fruits they will bring,/ As you do give them wassailing.

In order to ensure fertility for the coming year English farmers developed a number of variations on the wassail. In Devonshire, on Twelfth Night, men got out their weapons and went to the orchard. Selecting the oldest tree, they would form a circle and chant:  Here’s to thee, old apple tree/ Whence thou mayst bud and whence thou mayst blow/ And whence thou mayst bear apples enow:/ Hats full, caps full,/ Bushels, bushels, sacks full,/ And my pockets full too!/ Huzza! Huzza!

After drinking some cider the men would discharge their (unloaded) weapons at the tree and head home. Traditionally the women of the house were to deny the men entrance until they had guessed what sort of roast was being prepared for them. The man with the correct guess presided over the evening’s entertainment.  In other  parts of England fruit trees were wassailed by being sprinkled with cider, beaten with sticks and bidden in rhyme to bear well. In Cornwall the song was sung with a cider jug in one jug in one hand and a branch in the other. In south Hampshire they threatened the fruit tree: Apple tree, apple tree/ Bear good fruit,/ or down with your top/ And up with your root.

This threatening of the orchard is reminiscent of a custom in Romania. The farm husband and wife will go through the orchard at Christmas, she with her hands covered in dough and he with an axe. The man will go from one barren tree to another, each time threatening to cut it down. Each time, the wife will plead for the tree by saying:  “Oh no, I am sure that this tree will be as heavy with fruit next spring as my fingers are with dough this day.”

In the West Country it was also customary to wassail the oxen: on Twelfth Night men and women went into the stalls. They drank from the wassail bowl and took a cake from a basket decorated with greenery and placed it the ox’s horns. If the ox remained quite it was considered good luck. In Hereford, a cake was stuck on the horns of the ox while the oldest person present chanted: Here’s to thy pretty face , and to thy white horn,/ God send thy master a good crop of corn,/ Both wheat, rye and barley, of grains of all sort,/ And next year if we live we’ll drink to thee again. The rhyme was repeated in chorus, then the oldest threw a pint of cider in the beast’s face. If he tossed the cake forward it was a good sign.

In Sussex and Hertfordshire we also have mention of wassailing the bee-hives.

Beatings at Christmas

There are a number of different types of thrashings connected with the Christmas season in many countries over the centuries. The first is a threat of chastisement and is connected with the switches and rods carried by gift-bringers and their helpers. In the sixteenth-century Germany the Christmas bundle of presents included: “things that belong to teaching, obedience, chastisement and discipline, as A.B.C tablets, Bibles and handsome books, writing materials, paper, etc. and the Christ-rod”. The first book in the United States to include a picture of Santa Claus, the 1821 Children’s Friend, has the gift-giver state that he was happy to reward good girls and boys but “[W]here I found the children naughty,/In manners rude, in temper haughty,/ Thankless to parents, liars, swearers,/ Boxers, or cheats, or base tale-bearers, I left a long, black birchen rod,/ Such as the dread command of God/ Directs a parent’s hand to use/ When virtue’s path his sons refuse. The threat of corporal punishment was inherent in the role played by such figures as Black Pete, Krampus, Cert or Père Fouettard (Father Switch) who accompany the gift-giver.

 On Childermas, December 28, which commemorates the Massacre of the Innocents by King Herod it was once customary in England to beat children. The explanation given in the seventeenth century was that that the memory of Herod’s crime “might stick the closer; and, in a moderate proportion, to act over the crueltie again in kind” but anthropologists have noted that ritual beatings are more likely descended from pagan rituals of good luck than punishment. An old German custom called “peppering” saw children beating their parents and servants beating their masters with sticks while asking in verse form for a treat. An equally venerable tradition in Normandy allowed children to give a thrashing to those who stayed too long in bed on December 28. In Wales on St Stephen’s Day, the practice was called “holming” or “holly-beating” — the last person to get out of bed was hit with holly sprigs and made to act as servant to the rest of the family. Sometimes the purpose of the holming was to draw blood. In parts of Scotland on New Year’s Eve boys beat each other with holly branches in the belief that for every drop of blood shed a year of life was saved for the victim. In Sweden it was once customary for the first-riser on Christmas Eve to give other family members small bundles of twigs which they would use to beat each other in the spirit of imparting vitality.

It is worth noting that fruit trees also came in for ritual beatings at Christmas. See tomorrow’s post on“Wassailing”.