The Secular Side of Christmas
" HRISTMAS Day has to persons of distinction a good deal of insipidity about it." So wrote a journalist of the eighteenth century. The fashionable world complain, he declares, that it is altogether too much like Sunday, " although the share which devotion had in the solemnisation of Christmas is very greatly reduced." All the fine people go out of town if they can and forget the whole business.
But we thought that Christmas was so merry in " those days " ? Well, apparently our forebears thought the same about what they called " those days." But they, like us, felt it to be a dreary time in their own. If we turn over the pages of Addison's Spectator, the Rambler, the Taller, the Lounger, all those collections of once topical essays, we find constant laments about the dullness of the modern Christmas.
Christmas presents still load the stage coaches, the writers admit, but they no longer tend to general merri- ment. They do but serve as a reminder of the past custom of " distributing provisions at the severe quarter of the year to the poor." But that is all over, we read (in 1754), the poor have little or no cheer at Christmas. These presents are designed as " compliments to the great from their inferiors." Parsons sent them to their patrons, tenants to their landlords. " Nor is the hos- pitable custom of keeping open house for the poor neigh- bour any longer regarded." The Squire, we learn, " gets drunk with his brother fox-hunters in the smoking-room " while his household servants " swill their Christmas ale by themselves." The real poor are outside all this swinish " merriment." Sir Roger de Coverley, it is true, did differently, but Addison writing of him nearly forty years earlier than the essayist whom we have been quoting repeats again and again that " the knight " was a very old-fashioned man, noticeably old-fashioned, one " whose venerable figure drew upon him the eyes of the whole room." He kept to the " laudable customs of his ancestors " and sent at Christmas " a string of hog puddings with a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish." He loved, he said, " to rejoice their poor hearts at the most dead uncomfortable time of the year."
But these are distinguished folk, and very poor folk. Surely the middle class were in those days very " merry " at Christmas. There does not seem much record of it, judging by the newspapers of the time. " I have heard a plodding citizen most bitterly complain of the great expense of the housekeeping at this season when his own and his wife's relations claim the privilege of kindred to eat him out of house and home." Apparently they were not so very fond of family parties even then. Even then, it was thought necessary to apologize for the part which eating took in festivity. It is only feasting, we are told, which can bring together all sorts and conditions of men, great and small, " the philosopher and the buffoon." Family parties bring them together anyway, and with a result not always conducive to merriment—or at least not till we can look back upon them from a safe distance !
Of course, this grudging spirit on the part of the " plodding citizen " had something to do with " the present total decay of trade and the load of taxes." But you have to look back a long way to get beyond that state of distress, as the early journalist observes, for he himself remembers " the country undone " at Christmas time for forty years.
To go back to Sir Roger de Coverley, the " laudable doings " of his ancestors, say his grandfather—(people do not usually quote and imitate ancestors much further back than that)—would take one into the time of Pepys: - What sort of Christmas did he spend as a• rule ? So far as our memory serves us, very " quiet " indeed. One or two that he speaks of were notably dull. This is how he spent December 25th, 1668 :—" To dinner alone with my wife who poor wretch, sat undressed all day, till ten at night altering and lacing of a noble petticoat, while I by her, making the boy read the life of Julius Caesar and Des Cartes book of Musick." True there were some merry Boxing Days when he went to the play, " heard a wench sing very naughtily" and watched Nell Gwynn's " acting of a serious part which she spoiled."
Of another Christmas Day he speaks with disappoint- ment. He went to the " Queene's Chapel " to see " the ceremonies." From nine o'clock on Christmas eye till two o'clock on Christmas morning he stood in a crowd, and though very near the altar rail " expected but found nothing extraordinary." He was, he says, " sorry for coming, there being nothing but a high mass." On his way home " drank some burnt wine at the Rose Tavern door while the constables came, and two or three bellmen went by, it being a fine, light, moonshine morning."
A Christmas sermon which Pepys once listened to at Whitehall bears a little on our subject. He spent the morning " looking over pictures," and then walked to Chapel where Bishop Morley preached " a poor but long " sermon " reprehending the jollity of the Court." The courtiers laughed, to show, as Pepys points out, that they didn't think much of Bishops. While rebuking vice he, however, " did much press us to joy in these public days of joy and to hospitality. But one that stood by whis- pered in my ear that the Bishop do not spend one groat on the poor himself."
Stow in his London gives a wonderful account of the Christmas streets in the Middle Ages. Decorations and processions delight the mind's eye. It was a very young world then, even in the literal sense of the phrase. Scholars and apprentices swarmed. Men did not live to be old, or not in great numbers. The two streams of riot and religion ran on together before the waters were divided at the time of the Reformation, and spontaneity got lost as the sacred and the secular diverged more and more widely, Where the obligation which we all inwardly acknow- ledge to be " merry " at Christmas takes its origin it is hard to say. Is it, perhaps, an unconscious recollection of childhood, a kind of mirage, a reflection of days before our teens, when a few presents and a little company could not fail to make us merry ? We are very much inclined to think that this is true. They are only a few years behind us these merry Christmasses ; we do not need to search for them among the shadows of historical change, or to try to bring them back, as Dickens tried, by a strong effort of sentimentality. We can turn round and look at them quite close, enjoy them even in our children's eyes, but for most of us grown-up people they are—and perhaps they always have been—over !
CECILIA TOWNSEND.
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