Christmas Every Day

Two sorts of divination, or telling the future, were popular at Christmas: predicting the weather and discerning one’s intended spouse.

 One way of determining the weather in the year to come was based on the day of the week on which Christmas fell. Should it fall on a Sunday it meant a year of peace and good weather, a good year for sheep and beans, and the speedy capture of thieves.  Christmas Day on Monday produces a stormy and windy year; the sick will survive, although many beasts will die, and thieves be taken. Bad luck when Christmas Day falls on a Tuesday: women, sheep, lords, kings and thieves will die, yet the sick will recover. Wednesday presages a harsh winter with danger to the young and sailors. Thursday gives mixed predictions, but when when Christmas falls on a Friday, “you may sow in ashes”: i.e., crops will be so good they will spring up anywhere. Saturday’s indications are dire: “What woman that day of childe travaille / They shall bothe be in gret peraile”. Another means of weather prediction was to assign the Twelve Days of Christmas to a particular month; whatever the conditions on that day would prevail in the corresponding month. In New Zealand the Maoris say that if the pohutukawa flowers before Christmas, it will be a long hot summer; if it doesn’t, then a sultry, wet Christmas season is in store. A Scottish proverb that a “black Christmas makes a fat kirkyard” means that a snowless Christmas will result in may people dying in the coming year — a common saying all across Europe. The Romanian proverbs: “Christmas in mud, Easter in snow”; “Green Christmas brings white Easter” are similarly widespread. German farmers say: “If the crow is standing in clover at Christmas, she’ll be sitting in snow at Easter.”  A windy Christmas, however, and a calm Candlemas are signs of a good year.

There are countless ways for a young woman to determine the identity or character of her future husband. The girl might tap on the henhouse door on Christmas Eve: if a hen cackles her marital prospects are bad; cock crows are good. She might place her name and those of her friends on the bands of the ashen faggot; the first to burn through will be the first to marry. In Germany it was the custom to form a circle of girls and trust in the powers of a blinfolded goose —  the first to be touched by the bird will be the tnext to be wed. In Denmark young women could induce dreams of their future mates by reciting just before bedtime on St Lucia’s Eve:

Sweet St. Lucy, let me know

Whose cloth I shall lay,

Whose bed I shall make,

Whose child I shall bear,

Whose darling I shall be,

Whose arms I shall lie in.

St Nicholas Eve

I have hundreds of German and Austro-Hungarian Christmas cards from World War I but this is the sole example I have of one that employs St Nicholas. Though the saint was a popular gift-bringer in German-speaking Catholic territories, he seems to have had no place on such cards. It is the Christ Child (Christkindl) or a Santa Claus (der Weihnachtsmann) figure who appears as the bearer of supernatural bounty.

Accompanying St Nicholas is Krampus, a beloved figure in Austria and some neighbouring areas. Krampus is portrayed as a demon who will threaten kids with chains, switches, or a pack into which he will throw bad children. Between the two is the Christmas angel. In Hungarian and German is the wish “Merry Christmas”

General Lee and Santa Claus was a children’s book of 1867 written by Louise Clack. It is set in the post-Civil War American South where three little girls, Lutie, Birdie and Minnie (the latter still a hardened rebel because of the memory of her father who died in the Confederate army) wonder at the absence of Santa Claus during the war years. They write to General Robert E. Lee as “the goodest man who ever lived” to ask him “whether Santa Claus loves the little rebel children, for we think that he don’t; because he has not come to see us for four Christmas Eves.” General Lee favours them with the following reply: in fact Santa Claus does love the children of the South but in 1861 Lee himself stopped Santa from delivering any toys to the Confederacy. He said: “Santa Claus, take every one of the toys you have back as far as Baltimore, sell them, and with the money you get buy medicines, bandages, ointments and delicacies for our sick and wounded men; do it and do it quickly — it will be all right with the children.” And Santa did so for the duration of the war.

General Lee and Santa Claus is remarkable for its very early connection of American politics and Christmas and as a Southern counterpoint to the Civl War cartoons of Thomas Nast who had made Santa Claus into a firm supporter of the Union. Clack’s depiction of little rebel girls desolate at their desertion by Santa Claus shows how important a figure he had become in the imaginations of American children. The American Civil War did much to accelerate the reception of Christmas in the U.S.A. as a holiday representing homecoming and family

Italians were not enthusiasts of the Christmas card craze early in the 20th century but I do have two examples from their country as it participated in World War I.

The first is a rather harmless attempt to evoke seasonal jollity by pairing children and a piece of artillery.

The second is more heart-felt. It shows an Italian woman in chains, presumably a metaphor for those of Italian stock languishing under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and a charge by the famous feather-helmed Bersaglieri infantry. Above them an angel signals divine approval of the war effort and the caption reads “Christmas of glory”.

One day away from Advent, our look at Christmas in wartime takes us to Nazi Germany. If Hitler’s National Socialists (and especially the SS) had had their way Christmas would have been replaced by a pagan Julfest with festivities on the winter solstice instead of December 25. However, Christmas was too firmly rooted in German culture to be attacked so directly. Instead the Nazi state tried a campaign of bait and switch, offering material and ceremonies that looked like Christmas but which were really subversive of its Christian essence.

This is mostly clearly in evidence in an Advent calendar sent out to German families to use in the run-up to Christmas Day. There were no stories of the baby Jesus; rather, a forest-born Golden Child was featured. No angels on the tree but swastika-shaped ornaments; St Nicholas was replaced by Knecht Ruprecht who was linked in the text to Nordic mythology.

Note the whirling sun which evokes the solstice and the swastika.

The caption says “Soon Ruprecht will enter the house and empty his sack for me. I gave his white horse hay which he likes.”

The 1943 edition of the Advent calendar shows German soldiers mourning at the grave of a fallen comrade surrounding by vignettes of Nazi conquests: burning villages in Russia, sinking merchantmen in the Atlantic, grapes from France, etc. The next year, the last Christmas of the war, this advent calendar kept the image of the soldiers but removed the wreath of victories celebrating territories the Germans had been driven out of.

In today’s image a French soldier of World War I confronts the Hun with a piece of artillery. Its resemblance to the traditional Yule log-shaped Christmas dessert, gives us the caption “la buche de noël”.

The “75” on the cannon tells us this is the justly-famous “French 75”, a rapid-firing, highly-accurate weapon with a hydro-pneumatic recoil device.

So famous was the gun that a cocktail was named after it. To make a “French 75” mix 2 ounces of gin with a half-ounce of simple syrup and a half-ounce of lemon juice. Shake, pour over ice and add 5 ounces of champagne. Serve in a highball glass.

Today’s wartime Christmas cards come to you from the Dominion of Canada. When Canada entered the Great War in 1914 it did so automatically as part of the British Empire. When Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939, Canada was able to come to a separate decision on whether to join the struggle. A week after the British declaration the Canadian Parliament voted to sign on.

The first two cards, both from early in the war, show that the Union flag was  still the one to wave in a patriotic fashion rather than the Canadian Ensign.

In both Canada and the USA Christmas cards were used to raise money for the war effort. Here is a French Canadian version.

The captions read “Gifts that will hasten victory” and “A Guarantee of Peace and Liberty. We must all contribute, so that is why I am sending you these War Savings stamps with my best wishes for the New Year. It is the best investment we can make to ensure a lasting peace.”

Today’s Christmas cards in wartime come to you from the Spanish Civil War, a nasty fratricidal struggle waged from 1936-1939, pitting the forces of right-wing rebels (backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy) against the left-wing republican government  (backed by the Soviet Union and an army of foreign volunteers called the International Brigades.)

Thousands of Marxist sympathizers from the United States (the Lincoln-Washington Battalion), Canada (the McKenzie-Papineau Battalion), Germany (the Ernst Thälmann Battalion), Italians (Garibaldi Battalion), etc., fought and died in battles against Francoist armies. Theirs is a tragic story, full of misunderstanding and hostility in their own countries and of betrayal by the Comintern, with moments of genuine heroism.