CHAPTER VI.
CHRISTMAS.
The next and last of these popular festivities that I shall notice at any length, is jolly old Christmas,—the festival of the fireside; the most domestic and heartfelt carnival of the year. It has changed its features with the change of national manners and notions, but still it is a time of gladness, of home re-union and rejoicing; a precious time, and one so thoroughly suited to the grave yet cheerful spirit of Englishmen, that it will not soon lose its hold on our affections. Its old usages are so well known; they have been so repeatedly of late years brought to our notice by Washington Irving, Walter Scott, Leigh Hunt in his most graphic and cordial-spirited Months, Indicator, and London Journal, and by many other lovers of the olden time, that I shall not now particularly describe them. We have already seen how, in all our religious festivals, the most ancient customs and rites have been interwoven with Catholicism. Who does not recognise in the decoration of our houses and churches with ivy, holly, and other evergreens, the decorations of the altars of Greece and Rome with laurels and bays as the symbols of the renewal of the year and the immortality of Nature? In our mistletoe branches the practice of Druidical times? Who does not see in the Abbot of Unreason, and his jolly crew, the Saturnalia of ancient times? Those who do not, may find in Brand’s Antiquities, the various volumes of Time’s Telescope, collected by my worthy friend John Millard, and in Hone’s Everyday Table, and Year Books, matter on these subjects, and on the Christmas pageants, rites, and processions of Rome, that would of itself fill a large volume. In old times it was from Christmas to Candlemas a period of general jollification; for the first twelve days—a general carnival. The churches were decorated with evergreens; midnight mass was celebrated with great pomp; according to Aubrey, they danced in the church after prayers, crying Yole, Yole, Yole, etc. For a fortnight before Christmas, and during its continuance, the mummers, or guisers, in their grotesque array, went from house to house, acting George and the Dragon, having the Princess Saba, the Doctor, and other characters all playing and saying their parts in verse. Others acted Alexander the Great, and the King of Egypt. Bands of carollers went about singing; and all the great gentry had
A good old fashion when Christmas was come,
To call in their old neighbours with bagpipe and drum.
And then in those good old halls, what a feasting, and a sporting, and a clamour was there! The Yule block on the fire, the plum-porridge and mince-pies on the table, with mighty rounds of beef, plum-pudding, turkeys, capons, geese, goose-pies, herons, and sundry other game and good things. Ale of twelve months old circling round, and the old butler and his serving-men carrying up the boar’s head, singing in chorus the accustomed chant, as they set it before the lord of the feast:
Caput Apri defero
Reddens laudes domino.
The boar’s head in hand bring I,
With garlands gay and rosemary;
I pray you all sing merrily,
Qui estis in convivio, etc.
Then, as Burton in his Anatomie of Melancholie, tells us,—“what cards, tables, dice, shovel-board, chesse-play, the philosopher’s game, small trunkes, billiards, musicke, singing, dancing, ale-games, catches, purposes, questions, merry tales of arrant knights, kings, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, thieves, fairies, goblins, friars, witches, and the rest. Then what kissing under the mistletoe! roaring of storms without, and blazing hearths and merry catches within!”
With all this rude happiness we cannot now linger; let us be thankful that our ancestors, rich and poor, enjoyed it so thoroughly, enjoyed it together, as became Christians, on the feast of the nativity of their common Saviour. We will just review this state of things as it existed in the time of old Wither, two hundred years ago; and the remembrance of it, as it glanced on the imagination of Scott, and then turn to it as it exists amongst us now.
CHRISTMAS.
So now is come our joyful’st feast;
Let every man be jolly;
Each room with ivy leaves is dressed,
And every post with holly.