Another Christmas Tradition is kisisng under the Mistletoe. So have fun this Christmas and find someone to kiss. The problem in hotter climates is to find the Mistletoe, of course. Darn!
Mistletoe was used by Druid priests 200 years before the birth of Christ in their winter celebrations. They revered the plant since it had no roots yet remained green during the cold months of winter. The ancient Celtics believed mistletoe to have magical healing powers and used it as an antidote for poison, infertility, and to ward of evil spirits. The plant was also seen as a symbol of peace, and it is said that among Romans, enemies who met under mistletoe would lay down their weapons and embrace.
Scandanavians associated the plant with Frigga, their goddess of love, and it may be from this that we derive the custom of kissing under the mistletoe. Those who kissed under the mistletoe had the promise of happiness and good luck in the following year. Mistletoe was associated with Christmas as both a decoration under which lovers kiss, as well as a protection from witches and demons. Sounds romantic, although mistletoe is actually a parasitic plant that grows on other trees or plants and comes in many varieties.
In Britain, mistletoe was mainly found in the western and southwestern parts, so the custom wasn’t even followed in all parts of England. But where the mistletoe custom was followed, it was hung in doorways and the greenery was watched by young gentlemen in hopes of catching a pretty girl to kiss, usually on the cheek.
Traditionally, a man was allowed to kiss a woman who was standing underneath mistletoe and bad luck would befall any woman who refused. In some places, it was the custom to pick a berry for each kiss and when all the berries were gone, no more kisses could be taken.
Christmas: Wassail Bowl History #Christmas #holidays #Traditions #Customs
The term wasseling refers to the jovial revelry and carousing that went on in historic England when all classes of society would gather around a common banquet-table and the wassail bowl and indulge in the most unrestrained joviality and merriment around.
Wassail Bowl: Most great houses had a wassel-bowl, or cup, frequently of massy silver. Toasts were “Drine heil,” or “Was hail,” from which the howl derives its name but were replaced around the nineteenth century by “Come, here’s to you,” or “I’ll pledge you.” Now, we toast with the simplified version of ‘Here’s to you’. As the hour of twelve approached, carol-singers would prepare and bell-ringers would place themselves at their post to usher in the morning of the Nativity with lots of rejoicing and with bands of music parading the towns.
In some parishes in the West of England, carol-singers adjourn to the church to sing in Christmas-day, a remnant probably of popery, as in Catholic countries there were frequently church-services held at this time. In the 16th century, Tusser prescribed for Christmas: good drink, a good fire in the hall, brawn, pudding, and mustard withall, capon, or turkey, cheese, apples, nuts, and jolly carols. In rich houses, a wassail cup would be filled with rich wine, sweet and spicy, and with roasted apples bobbing on the surface. In poorer houses, the cup would hold ale with nutmeg, sugar, ginger, and roasted crab apples.
At the end of the winter term, schoolmasters would set their pupils to work on Christmas Pieces, samplers of writing on superior paper with engraved borders, to show parents how they had progressed during the year. By about 1820, the engraved borders were enhanced with color and the children’s pieces became more decorative.
However, the custom of sending cards at Christmas was started in the United Kingdom in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole. Postage had been standardized three years earlier and Cole was a civil servant who had played a key role in initiating Uniform Penny Post. He wanted ordinary people to become more interested in the new ‘Public Post Office’. With his artist friend John Horsley, they designed the first card which was issued from a periodical, Felix Summerley’s Home Treasury, and were sold for 1 shilling each.
The card was lithographed, hand-colored, had three panels and was in a rustic frame of carved wood and ivy. The outer two panels showed people caring for the hungry and the naked. The centre panel showed a family of three generations having Christmas dinner, although the temperate classes strongly objected to the idea of a child being given a glass of wine with dinner.
New railways carried more post, and a lot faster, than a horse and carriage so the Post Office offered a Penny stamp. Cards became even more popular when they could be posted in an unsealed envelope for one halfpenny. Christmas cards became truly popular when printing improved and cards could be produced in large numbers, around 1860. By the early 1900s, the custom had spread over Europe and especially in Germany.
Early cards usually pictured Nativity scenes, but in the late Victorian times, robins and snow-scenes became popular because the postmen wore red uniforms and were nicknamed ‘Robin Postmen’. Snow-scenes were also popular because they were a reminder of the very bad winter of 1836.
Snow scenes reflected the snowy and often harsh northern hemisphere winters when opening and reading Christmas cards was an enjoyable family experience. In 1860, Charles Goodall & Son, a British publisher of visiting cards, began mass producing cards to be used for visits during the Christmas period. These Christmas and New Year’s visiting cards were decorated with simple designs such as a twig of holly or flowers.
Sales of cards grew and designs and sizes changed. The first cards were meant to appeal to the masses and encourage them to send large numbers by post, so rather than focus on religious images, they showed sentimental or humorous images of family and children, fanciful designs of flowers, fairies, or reminders of the approach of spring. Religious themes of nativity scenes, children looking at the manger, or angels and candles remain popular to the modern day.
Cards could be shaped like bells, a fan, a crescent, a circle, or a diamond and were folding, decorated with jewels, iridescent, embossed, and carried either simple Christmas and New Year greetings or had verses and carols written in them. The next year, Mr W.C.T. Dobson produced a sketch symbolizing the ‘Spirit of Christmas’ which sold many more than the previous thousand and the novelty caught on.
Many artists became famous for their annual illustrations that became postcards and cards. Printing technology became more advanced in the age of industrialisation and the price of card production dropped. With the introduction of the halfpenny postage rate, the Christmas card industry industry increased until in 1880 11.5 million cards were produced.
Christmas: Typical Christmas Food Eaten By the Bridgerton and Jane Austen Families. #Christmas #Food #JaneAusten #Bridgerton
On the Christmas menu was generally mince pies and perhaps a goose or a piece of beef, depending on the family’s wealth and status. Mince pies were not made of fruit mince as we do now, but of offal or meat such as bullock’s tongue cooked with spices, orange peel, and wine and then used to fill pastry cases.
Another Christmas specialty was a Yorkshire Christmas pie which would be filled with turkey, goose, a hen, or perhaps woodcocks, partridge, or pigeons. And after the main courses, came the Plum Pudding, mixed on Stir-Up Sunday according to each family’s recipe and then boiled in a cloth.
‘The following is a valued receipt that has been handed down in a Cornish family for many generations, and the hand-writing of the receipt book will vouch for its antiquity. ‘A pound of beef-suet chopped fine; a pound of raisins do. stoned. A pound of currants cleaned dry. A pound of apples chopped fine. Two or three eggs. Allspice beat very fine, and sugar to your taste. A little salt, and as much brandy and wine as you like. An ancient Cornish custom at Christmas.” A small piece of citron in each pie is an improvement.’ From: 1833 Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern by William Sandys.
Mince meat pies, or Christmas or Twelfth Night pies, were always part of Christmas feasts. Originally the mince pies were oblong or oval but in the 1600’s, the pies became circular, although were quite large and could weigh up to 20 lbs. In London, they could be brought out on Lord Mayor’s Day which was the 9th of November.
Timeline of Mince Pies via Minced Pie Club.
In the 13th century, crusaders returned from the Middle Eastern with recipes containing meat, fruit and spices mixed together, which helped preserve meat without having to smoke, dry or salt.
1413 King Henry served a mincemeat pie at his coronation.
1588 Good Hous-Wiues Treasurie by Edward Allde: meats were still cut up to be eaten with a spoon and combined with fruits and heavy spices. His recipe for Minst Pye had practically the same ingredients as modern mince pies.
1657 Mince Pies were banned during the reign of Oliver Cromwell, along with other Christian traditions that were classed as gluttony.
1659 Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan influence spread to the American British Colonies and many towns banned mincemeat pies at Christmas time.
When pies were reintroduced in Britain, they were a lot smaller and could be served individually to guests and were named Wayfarer pies.
1832 Bill of Fare: no less than one hundred and eleven dishes of mince pies included.
More Minced Pie Trivia
When the monarchy was restored in 1660, the law regarding Minced Pies was disregarded but apparently never repealed so Mince pies are still, supposedly, illegal.
Pastry crusts sink in the middle and are thought to resemble Jesus’ manger so sometimes a small pastry doll was put in the middle and these were called crib pies.
Pies could last up to two months in cold weather.
Recipes varied by region, but usually included beef, poultry and other meats, suet, sugar, raisins or currants, spices, orange and lemon peel, eggs, apples and brandy.
Minced-meat was only supposed to be stirred clockwise, otherwise the stirrer would have bad luck in the coming year. bring bad luck for the coming year.
Filling included cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg to represent the gifts of the Magi to the infant Jesus and the star shaped pastry on top represents the star of Bethlehem.
If you ate minced pie every day of the twelve days of Christmas you were supposed to have twelve months of happiness, especially if the pies were baked by the dozen and offered by friends.
First made in 1850 by a London sweet maker called Tom Smith who decided it would a fun idea if his sweets and toys opened with a crack when their fancy wrappers were pulled in half. In early 1830, Tom Smith started work in a bakers and ornamental confectioners shop in London, selling sweets such as fondants, pralines and gum pastilles. He worked hard and took particular interest in the wedding cake ornaments and decorations, experimenting and creating new, more exciting and less crude designs in his spare time. Before long he was successful enough to leave and start up his own business in Goswell Road, Clerkenwell, East London. On a trip to Paris in 1840, he discovered the ‘bon bon’, a sugared almond wrapped in a twist of tissue paper. He brought the ‘bon bon’ to London and they sold extremely well, but in January demand virtually ceased and once again he was reliant on sales of cake and table decorations and ornaments.
Anxious to stimulate sales, Tom placed a small love motto in the tissue paper and encouraged his regular customers to take supplies. Tom took a risk and concentrated on developing it further, while still running the wedding cake ornament and confectionery business. The majority of ‘bon bons’ were sold at Christmas so Tom thought up ways to capitalize on this short, but very profitable, season. It was the crackle of a log as he threw it on his fire that gave him the flash of inspiration which eventually led to the crackers we know today. A ‘ crackle’ added excitement to his novelty ‘bon bon’ so he experimented to find a compound which gave a satisfactory bang. He perfected his chemical explosion to create a ‘pop’ caused by friction when the wrapping was broken and the trade jumped at Tom Smith’s latest novelty.
He quickly refined his product by dropping the sweet and the ‘bon bon’ name, calling his new crackers Cosaques, but he kept the motto and added a surprise gift. Delighted at his overnight success, Tom took his cracker abroad but an Eastern manufacturer copied his idea and delivered crackers to Britain just before Christmas. So Tom designed 8 different kinds of cracker, working his staff day and night and distributing stocks in time for Christmas. He lived to see the new branch of his firm grow to swamp the original premises in Goswell Road and the company moved to Finsbury Square in the City of London where it remained until 1953. When he died he left the business to his three sons, Tom Henry and Walter. A few years later, a drinking fountain was erected in Finsbury Square by Walter Smith in memory of his mother, Mary, and to commemorate the life of the man who invented the great British Cracker.
His three sons developed the cracker designs, contents and mottoes. Walter Smith, the youngest son, introduced a topical note to the mottoes which had previously been love verses. Special writers were commissioned to compose snappy and relevant maxims with references to every important event or craze at the time from greyhounds to Jazz, Frothblowers to Tutankhamen, Persian Art to The Riviera. The original early Victorian mottoes were mainly love verses. Eventually these were replaced by more complicated puzzles and cartoons, and finally by the corny jokes and riddles which characterise our crackers today.
Walter also introduced the paper hats, many of which were elaborate and made of best tissue and decorative paper on proper hatmakers stands and he toured the world to find new, relevant and unusual ideas for the surprise gifts, such as bracelets from Bohemia, tiny wooden barrels from America, and scarf pins from Saxony. Some were assembled in the factory, like the thousands of tiny pill boxes filled with rouge complete with powder puff.
A six foot cracker decorated Euston Station in London, and in 1927 a gentleman wrote to the Company enclosing a diamond engagement ring and 10 shilling note as payment for the ring to be put in a special cracker for his fiancee. Unfortunately he did not enclose an address and never contacted the Company again; the ring, letter and 10 shilling note are still in the safe today. In the early days, there was a large variety of specialist boxes, including Wedgwood Art Crackers from original designs by permission of Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, and designs such as Japanese Menagerie crackers containing the latest novelties from Japan, including animals, birds, reptiles and mottoes in Japanese.
Crackers were created for the War Heroes, Charlie Chaplin, The Wireless, Motoring, The Coronation and even the Channel Tunnel in 1914. Exclusive crackers were also made for members of the Royal Family and still are to this day. During the Second World War restrictions were placed on the production of cracker snaps.
The Ministry of Defence commissioned Tom Smith to fold and tie bundles of three to six snaps together with special string and regulation knots. These bundles were then used by soldiers in training as, when the string was pulled, they mimicked the noise of machine gun fire. After the war, vast quantities of these surplus cracker snaps were released back into the cracker trade. As the demand for crackers increased, Tom Smith merged with Caley Crackers in 1953 taking over their headquarters and factory in Norwich, East Anglia.
Tom Smith Group Limited currently hold a royal warrant from: HM QUEEN ELIZABETH II Ê 1906: Tom Smith were granted their first Royal Warrant by the then Prince of Wales which entitled them in 1909 to become members of the Royal Warrant Holders Association. 1910: In December, the reigning monarch, King George V granted Tom Smith his warrant as suppliers of Christmas Crackers. Tom Smith still holds the honour of producing special crackers each year for the Royal Household.
In the countries that now use them, a cracker is set next to each plate on the Christmas dinner table and a colourful party hat, a toy or gift and a festive joke falls out when the cracker is pulled in half with a loud bang! The party hats look like crowns, supposedly to symbolise the crowns worn by the Wise Men.
Another British company strongly associated with the cracker business was Batger and Co. Like Tom Smith, they sold a wide variety of crackers in highly decorated boxes and once again many were themed or in commemoration of a special event. Batger’s Gretna Green Crackers for the famous place for eloping lovers where couples in the Regency period ran off in a carriage to Scotland to be married at the blacksmiths forge at Gretna Green.
Crackers were an incredibly expensive luxury at the time costing from 14 shillings to 30 shillings a box. Others were Peerless Crackers and Mead and Field Crackers. Cabaret Girl from the Peerless series of Christmas crackers, from 1933, which promises that each cracker contains ‘both a juvenile costume and fancy hat or cap, amusing joke or riddle, a good snap.
I love finding out the tradition behind some of the things we do and say at Christmas, don’t you? So I am going to do a series of posts this week covering lots of the historical aspects of our celebrations. Why we say things, why we do things, and why we use things to decorate our houses. Enjoy the festive season with me with more posts to follow.
CHRISTMAS
The word has been around for centuries, with some dictionaries putting it in the late Old English period and others to the 12th century. Old forms include cristes masse and christmasse, meaning the festival (mass) of Christ. It replaced other pagan midwinter festivals when the church tried to persuade Romans to convert to Christianity.
XMAS
This abbreviation annoys a lot of people but it isn’ t simply modern shorthand. X was used to represent the Greek symbol chi, which is also the first letter in Christ. This has been used since Roman times.
DECORATE
The word means to adorn and is from the 16th century, but the seasonal meaning of to deck with ornamental accessories dates from the 18th century. The word originates from the Latin decoratus (beautify).
TINSEL
It was first seen in the expression tinsell saten which means strips of shining metal used for ornament. It also describes things that are showy and worthless. It is believed to have come from the Anglo Norman with ancestors in Old French.
Early Christians appropriated pagan customs and turned them into religious observances and, therefore, a victory over Paganism and a way to win more souls. By the end of the second century, numerous dates were being proposed as the correct date for the birth of Jesus. One popular method, allegorical theology, thought Christ must have born on the same day the sun was created, though our modern theorists estimate that the birth of Jesus was between 7 and 4 BC.
Unlike Easter, the earliest Christians didn’t celebrate the nativity or Christmas, which began in the late 3rd century AD as an alternative to pagan winter holidays. In the beginning, Christians only celebrated the baptism and resurrection of Christ and the death of the martyrs. The first evidence of Christmas being celebrated is in Rome in 336 AD and by the early fourth century, the 25th of December became the celebration day for the birth of Jesus Christ.
Origen of Alexandria, amongst others, opposed the celebration of Christ’s birth and pointed out that only Pharaoh and Herod celebrate their birthdays in the Bible, and that birthdays were for pagans, not Christians. Jehovah’s Witnesses follow this belief and reject the celebration of both Christmas and birthdays. Early religious Christmas customs began with special services held by candlelight and often at midnight. In Bethlehem, Midnight Mass is celebrated at the place of Jesus’ birth in the ancient Church of the Nativity.
But as the years passed, going to church, especially at Christmas, was something done by villagers and landowners as a custom, an obligation, or to show respect to the local clergyman rather than for any great religious reasons. People attended Church services on Sunday and Holy Days and donated money to village or church causes but the religious fervor of early years had dimmed. If a person was particularly devoted, they would read the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, or a book of sermons on a regular basis and probably attend the Church of England, which was the main church by the late Georgian and early Regency years.
Angels – Heralds for the news of the birth of a baby in a manger.
Bells – Bells have rung out for all important events for centuries, plus lost sheep are found by the sound of the bell.
Candy Cane – Symbolizes the crook of the shepherds who visited Christ. Red represents the blood that was spilled and white is for purity. The peppermint oil that flavors is known for its strong healing properties.
Cards – Produced in Britain in 1843 to be sent with love to family and friends around the world by the new Postal services.
Carols – Poems and stories of worship made into songs.
Carolers – Groups of people who strolled the streets singing Christmas songs
Feasting – To celebrate the joy of the baby’s arrival on the 25th December.
Gift Giving – The Wise Men bowed before the baby and gave him gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Gold – Decorating using the color of one of the gifts of the wise men.
Green – Decorating using the color of evergreens which show everlasting love.
Holly – Represents Eternal Life and the crown of thorns worn by Jesus.
Mistletoe: In the 18th Century, men kissed a woman who stood under mistletoe to show love, friendship and goodwill. If a woman was un-kissed, she would (supposedly) never marry.
Nativity: The birth of Jesus Christ
Poinsettia – Red flowers used in countries such as Mexico to symbolize Christmas time.
Stockings – Hung by children to receive gifts
Twelve Days of Christmas: Twelve days between the birth of Christ on December 25 and the coming of the Magi on January 6, the Epiphany.
Tree – Evergreen tree symbolizes eternal life and love
Wreath – Made of evergreens to symbolize never ending love
