Christmas past
Peter de Loriol celebrates with the ghosts of our ancestors
Above: .
The dark and cold days of winters followed by their wild and stormy nights may be a thing of the past what with electricity, central heating, supermarkets around the corner and global warming, but the only brightness that invaded the lives of our forefathers in these depressing months was a knees up around the Christmas period.
The weather played an enormous part in everyone’s lives, much more so than now. A good summer meant good crops, fat cattle and food during the cold months. Winter and its darkness was the time when evil spirits roamed the dark woods, sullied the hearths and hearts of good folk. Christmas was their antidote!
Our ancestors lit bonfires and decorated their buildings with evergreens in the belief that the dying sun could be revived by fires that imitated its light and evergreen branches that seemed to live even in the ‘dead’ season. The Romans would decorate little pine trees with masks of Bacchus, the god of revelry and wine. The feast of the ‘Dies Natalis Invicti Solis’, the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun became the birthday of yet another Sun, Christ. Woden, the Masked One, the god of Ecstasy, an aged wise man and a ragged wanderer, the bringer of gifts and the Lord of the Wild Hunt lashed his reindeers through the bleak midwinter until Christianity transmogrified him into St Nicholas, the patron saint of children. Little children would leave messages for him on his feast day, 6 December, asking him for gifts.
The Bavarian children called him Krishkinkle and his act of kindness brought his feast to 24 and 25 December, when the less Christian, almost wizened and elf like ‘Father Christmas’ appeared giving his bounty to all and sundry.
Yes, Christmas was and is, above all, a time to be merry. The Londoner filled his house and church with anything that remained green. The Holly was masculine as was the Crown of Thorns, its berries Christ’s blood; the ivy feminine and also Bacchus’s plant – mischievous to the end. Mistletoe, however, remained a pagan plant and was not allowed indoors.
In England, and only in England, until the Christmas tree arrived, children would bind evergreens together in a ball or in a frame of iron, osier or steel wire, fastening little presents, hanging it from the ceiling and finally placing a candle in the middle – this was the Kissing Bough or the Kissing Bunch. A ring of bright red apples hung from it. Sometimes it was shaped like a crown, a symbol of times past and to come. When the fir tree arrived more objects were hung from the Kissing Bough’s leafy frame: tinsel, ribbons, Bethlehem stars, oranges and pears, figures of rabbits, squirrels and robins.
The robin had once been sacred to the pagans. He was ferocious, but also friendly, very vocal when other birds remained silent. His puffed out breast held the spirit of absent life and of the summer to be.
On Christmas Eve the candle was lit in the Kissing Bough, and again on Christmas Day. It was the centre of the festival where couples would kiss under it. It remained there for the full twelve days.
The fir tree, long a symbol of renewal on the continent, revered by the Teutons, was eventually brought to England in the late 18th century. Prince Albert made the ‘German Tree’ popular in England in the 1840s and by the 1860s it was a staple diet in the Christmas pantheon. Christmas Day brought the ash to the fire. It burnt green and was sacred to the sun on whose birthday nature was reborn. Ash was believed, in Scandinavia, to be the wood of the world-tree, Yggdrasil, with its root knotted in Hell and its boughs supporting Heaven.
In England the boar’s head was the King, then the goose, now the turkey, introduced in 1542. The feast of the eternal sun in all its guises remains the most prized and valued in the year.
Sources; The Every Day book, 1606
RJ Campbell The Story of Christmas, 1935