The creation of nativity scenes is an ancient and global phenomenon. Some, like those made for Neapolitan royalty in the 18th century, are gorgeous; others are imaginative but not always in good taste. We will feature some of those over the next week.
Depicting the Holy Family as animals in apparently in vogue. Here they are as dogs, ducks, and cats.
“Broncho Billy and the Baby” was a short Christmas allegory by Peter B. Kayne which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1910 and which spawned seven motion pictures. The story is of three bandits who rob the bank at New Jerusalem and head out into the desert to escape. There they encounter a dying woman who extracts a promise from them that they will save her new-born baby. The outlaws battle thirst and the elements and finally one of them makes it back to New Jerusalem with the infant just in time for the Christmas Eve service.
The first cinematic version appeared in 1911, a one-reeler called The Outlaw and the Child; it was followed by three more silent films in 1913, 1916 and 1919. The first sound version (and Universal Studio’s first outdoor talkie) was Hell’s Heroes in 1930, filmed by William Wyler in the Mojave Desert. Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton, and Fred Kohler Sr play three genuinely hard men and the movie is uncompromising and harsh. Two more sentimental renditions both called Three Godfathers appeared in 1936 and, more memorably, in 1948. The latter was a John Ford western starring John Wayne, Harry Carey Jr. and Pedro Armendariz; it was the only one to dare a happy ending. In 1974 the made-for-television The Godchild moved the plot to three Civil War escapees played by Jack Palance, Jack Warden and Keith Carradine.
A type of Christmas tree in Bavaria on which a dozen special ornaments are hung in token of those things necessary for a good marriage. They include an angel (representing God’s guidance), a bird (joy), a fish (Christ’s blessing), a flower basket (good wishes), a fruit basket (generosity), a heart (true love), a house (protection), a pine cone (fruitfulness), a rabbit (hope), a rose (affection), a Santa figure (goodwill), and a teapot (hospitality).
Christmas in Honduras begins with the appearance of the Warini, the Christmas Herald — a masked dancer who goes house-to-house accompanied by singers and drummers. His dance on January 6 will signal an end to the season. In fact dancing is an integral part of Christmas celebrations in this Central American country. The aboriginal Garifuna people perform costumed dances such as Pijamanadi, Dona Amidi, Coreopatea and John Canoe. In early December the women of certain tribal groups will dance in groups door-to-door; neighbourhoods will stage tambakus; and on Christmas morning children and their families will dance rondas and play games.
As in most Latin American countries the manger scene or nacimiento is central to home devotions at Christmas. The entire family will take part in putting together the scene which can be quite ornate and detailed. Other activities during Advent include participating in or watching the pastorelas, costumed shepherd dramas whose rehearsals start in October and enjoying office parties where workers may be matched in cochombros, a kind of Secret Santa present exchange.
A major part of getting ready for Christmas is the preparation of holiday food and drink. The Christmas Eve meal is often centered on turkey or roast piglet but there are many other traditional Honduran dishes such as meat pie filled with vegetables, raisins, fried plantain and peppers, nactamales, or sartén, green peppers stuffed with sour cream, cottage cheese, milk and corn dough, slow-cooked in an earthenware pot. The seasonal Honduran Christmas drink is eggnog, made from milk, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and guaro liquor.
With much of the Honduran population living in the United States it is no surprise that American Christmas customs have penetrated the country. Presents are often exchanged on December 25 instead of on January 6 and Santa Claus has been edging out the Magi as gift-bringer. But most traditions linger. The nine days of the posadas processions are still observed and Christmas mass is still a major attraction in this intensely Catholic land. Christmas trees have still not displaced the nacimiento and Three Kings Day will still see festive parades and the burning of Mr Old Year as the Christmas season comes to a close.
Every year on Old Christmas Day, January 6, a strange game is played in Haxey, Lincolnshire. A Fool, dressed in red rags with a faced smeared with soot and ochre, opens the proceedings by welcoming all present and declaring that the order of the day is
Hoose agin hoose, town agin town, /And if you meet a man knock him down, /But don’t hurt him.
While he is pronouncing this speech he is being ritually fumigated by a bonfire (see below). He then leads his team of red-clad Boggans and their King Boggan, or Lord of the Hood, to a nearby field where the next several hours the men of the parish will contest for the possession of a a series of “hoods” or rolls of canvas, rope and leather. Visits to local pubs are part of the struggle. The game is said to have links to pre-Christian ritual combats performed as a fertility rite.
Yule was the time amongst the pagan Teutons for the sacrifice of a white horse. Christmas too has ceremonies that focus on horses, though not in such a fatal fashion.
For reasons that remain unclear St Stephen has come to be regarded as the patron saint of horses and therefore his day, December 26, is given over to horse parades, races and special treatment for the animals.
In Wales the Mari Llwyd (“Grey Mare”, pictured above) ceremony involves a man under a white sheet carrying a pole topped by a horse’s head with snapping jaws — it capers, ringing the bells on its sheet, and bites people who have to pay a forfeit to be released. According to legend, the Mari Lwyd is the animal turned out of its stable to make room for the Holy Family; it has been looking for shelter ever since. Accompanied by a group of men, often in mummers’ costumes or bearing bells the Mari Lwyd will approach a house during the Christmas season and the group will beg admittance. After a ritual negotiation that may involve the exchange of humourous verses they will be let inside where the horse will dart about while hospitality is shared.
In England similar horse figures are Old Hob, who went about with a group of men singing and ringing hand bells for a gratuity, and the Hodening Horse of Kent. On the Isle of Man it is the Laare Vane or White Mare which appeared on New Year’s Eve.
In Germany the hobby-horse is called Schimmel (or in some places Schimmelreiter to emphasize the rider). Like the Mari Lwyd it takes part in house visits; jumping about to entertain the children and dancing with pretty girls.
Though Arthur Conan Doyle sold his first Sherlock Holmes story in 1887 to Beeton’s Christmas Annual, “Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” is the only account of the great detective which deals with Christmas. We learn, in this short piece written for the January 1892 edition of the Strand Magazine, how a battered hat and a Christmas goose lead Holmes to the solution of a mystery, the freeing of an innocent man and the recovery of a giant blue jewel.
In 567 the Council of Tours proclaimed the twelve days between Christmas and Epihany to be a sacred and festive season. Since then it has been widely accepted as a time of holiday and merriment; in many times and places all non-essential work was forbidden. In German-speaking territories the time is Die Zwölf Raunächte, the Twelve Rough Nights, a time to take precautions against the evil spirits (especially the sky-borne Wild Hunt) with noise, masks and smoke.
The Twelve Days are not calculated in the same way everywhere. In some places Christmas is counted making Epiphany the thirteenth day. In England it is particularly confusing because January 6 is Twelfth Day but January 5 is Twelfth Night.
The most widely-served Christmas entrée today is the turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, a bird first domesticated in Mexico by the Aztecs and exported to Europe in the sixteenth century by the Spanish. It derives its English name from confusion with the guinea fowl which was imported about the same time by merchants trading with Turkey. William Strickland, a Yorkshireman, introduced the bird into England and, in recognition, was granted a turkey cock on his family coat of arms in 1550. Before too long it was accepted as a seasonal dish: Thomas Tusser in 1573 speaks of it as “Christmas husbandlie fare” but for centuries the goose remained the primary Christmas bird. The bird was raised in great numbers on farms in Norfolk and East Anglia with huge flocks driven to market in London every Christmas — walking on the roads was difficult for the birds who were fitted with special shoes for the journey which could last as long as three months. It was not until the nineteenth century with the advent of rail travel and refrigeration that these drives ceased and were replaced by slaughtering on the farm. In 1851 the British royal family ate their first Christmas turkey which from that time on replaced swan as the seasonal dish.
Americans are the world’s greatest consumers of turkeys since the two great end-of-year festivals, Thanksgiving and Christmas, both feature the fowl whom Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the national bird of the United States — he deplored the bald eagle’s “bad moral character” and claimed the turkey was a “much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.” Since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has presented the President of the United States with a live turkey and two dressed birds at Thanksgiving. The annual presentation signals the unofficial beginning of the “holiday season”; after the ceremony, the National Thanksgiving Turkey retires to a historical farm to spend its declining years in comfort.
The bird is eaten all around the world. In Portugal poultry farmers walk the streets of Lisbon with their their flocks. When a buyer has chosen the turkey he wants, the farmer catches the bird, forces alcohol into it, and briefly releases it. The inebriated turkey soon collapses; its throat is then slit; it is plucked and eviscerated, before being soaked in salt water, perfumed with lemon and bay leaves, for twelve hours. The bird is then hung for twelve hours before being cooked. The Brazilians have a similar love of turkey tenderized from within: they feed the bird a kind of rum called cachaça on Christmas Eve. In the southern United States the custom of deep-frying the bird is growing while in Mexico they eat the bird with a sauce made of chocolate and chili peppers. In Spain they stuff the bird with truffles; in Burgundy they stuff it with chestnuts. In 1969 the Apollo astronauts’ first meal on the moon was roast turkey.
In many parts of the world Christmas is associated with gunpowder: fireworks and firearms have been “shooting in” the holiday for centuries.
One reason for this is the belief that demonic forces can be driven away with loud noises. The ringing of bells, snapping of whips and shouting are all very well but for for real devil-dispersing noise many Germans rely on rifles. In southern Germany marksmen’s clubs in traditional costume gather on Christmas Eve to fire off antique rifles at midnight. In Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps before midnight mass, 60,000 shots are fired in the space of one hour. In the southwestern United States the parishioners of the Church of San Geronimo at Taos Pueblo carry the statue of the Virgin in a procession accompanied by an honour guard of men in ceremonial dress who periodically fire into the air in order to protect the Virgin and chase away evil spirits. In rural areas of Norway shooting in Christmas takes the form of young men sneaking up to farm houses and discharging their guns to give the inhabitants a shock before being invited in for a drink. Every December 8 in Torrejoncillo, Caceres, Spain the youth of the town wrap themselves in sheets, carry the banner of the Virgin and ride through the streets shooting off shotguns to the cheers of the populace. In Ireland it was once the custom to fire a salute from a shotgun at noon on Christmas Eve
An account of Labrador in 1770 reads: “At sunset the people ushered in Christmas, according to the Newfoundland custom. In the first place, they built up a prodigious large fire in their house; all hands then assembled before the door, and one of them fired a gun, loaded with powder; afterwards, each of them drank a dram of rum; concluding the ceremony with three cheers. These formalities being performed with great solemnity, they retired into their house, got drunk as fast as they could, and spent the whole night in drinking, quarrelling, and fighting.” A similar Newfoundland custom was Blowing the Pudding.
Christmas in the southern United States is a more popular time for fireworks than July 4 as can be seen from the numerous displays south of the Mason-Dixon line. The most spectacular are probably in Louisiana where the feux de joie (fires of joy) are a traditional part of Cajun Christmas Eve. Huge wooden structures in the form of riverboats, houses and teepees are set on fire, ostensibly to light Papa Noël’s way to the bayous. During the days of slave-owning, slaves would inflate a pig bladder and then explode it in lieu of fire-crackers.
Fireworks are a part of Christmas celebrations all through Latin America but who would have thought they were once a part of the holiday in Switzerland? One worshipper complained in the nineteenth century about a church service where the Christmas tree was decorated with “serpent squibs” and where it was “difficult for the minister to conduct the service, for at all times, except during the prayers, the people were letting off fireworks.”