“round hose, long stockings, close doublet, high-crowned hat, with a brooch, long, thin beard, truncheon, little ruffs, white shoes, with his scarfs and garters tied cross, and his drum beaten before him,”
Father Christmas.
Drawn by Kenny Meadows.
From the Illustrated London News, December, 1847.
And now, to the sound of the drum, in troop all his merry family—sons and daughters and nephews and nieces. Among them are the Lord of Misrule, who in old days directed the Christmas revels; Roast Beef, “that English Champion bold,” who has saved many a sturdy Englishman from starvation; Plum Pudding, a blackamoor, with rich round face and rosemary cockade; and Minced Pie, and Baby Cake, and Mumming and Wassail and Offering and Carol, and New Year’s Gift, and others too numerous to mention.
Many members of this robust family will be recognized as contributors to the Christmas cheer of to-day. Others have disappeared forever.
The Lord of Misrule, for example, the “Grand Captain of Mischief,” as the Puritans called him, no longer summons around him all the madcap youths of town or village for a brief period of lawless revelry.
In Scotland this personage was known as the Abbot of Unreason, a name which clearly shows that he was a direct descendant from the chief performer in the mediæval Feast of Fools, and as such was a great-great-etc.-grandson of Silenus, the merrymaker in the Greek Bacchanalia.
King James I of England was succeeded by his son Charles I. During the reign of the latter unhappy monarch, the Puritan party in England gathered so much strength that, under the lead of Oliver Cromwell, they hurled Charles from his throne and cut off his head, sending his entire family into exile for a period of a dozen years. Father Christmas shared the exile of his royal patrons, or if he dared show his face in England at all, it was only here and there in remote country places or behind locked doors in the obscurer parts of the great cities. Meanwhile his absence was greatly deplored by that part of the English people who had remained loyal to the crown. One of these put forward a curious little book entitled “An Hue and Cry after Christmas.” The following paragraph shows the spirit in which the book was written:
“Any man or woman, that can give any knowledge, or tell any tidings of an old, old, very old grey-bearded gentleman, called Christmas, who was wont to be a very familiar guest and visit all sorts of people, both poor and rich, and used to appear in glittering gold, silk and silver, in the court, and in all shapes in the theatre in White Hall, and had ringing, feasts and jollity in all places, both in the city and the country, for his coming—whoever can tell what is become of him, or where he may be found, let him bring him back again into England.”
