TURKEY AND PLUM-PUDDING. CIHRISTMAS," writes one of our contemporaries, "is
an
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essentially English festival," and certainly there is no subject to which a large class of modern writers have devoted more care than to recording the way in which Christmas is wont to be cele- brated in the England of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Mr. Dickens and his school have created a special Christmas literature, and a crowd of inferior writers, always ready to follow in the trail of a man of genius, supply the public with pictures and with tales which present in every point of view the merriment and festivities deemed appropriate to the occasion. It is somewhat perplexing to understand wherein lies the charm of this particular kind of literature, since there would appear to be no natural pleasure in reading a description of circumstances, which, if the description be true, must be known to every one. A good breakfast is a pleasant thing, but intelligent men and women would hardly care to peruse lengthy eulogies of good bread and butter; and while we admit that fat turkeys are not bad eating, we do not precisely comprehend what is the beauty of pages which may be not unjustly defined as ingenious laudations of fat turkeys. Since, however, the literature of Christmas exists, and obviously meets the public taste, there is an interest in studying the view given in it of English life. Englishmen then, as painted by writers of the day, are an emphatically jovial set, whose merri- ment is just tinged with a dash of sentiment. The national temperament, kept in check during the greater part of the year, comes forth in all its vigour at Christmas. On Christmas morn- ing We all wake in exuberant health and rollicking spirits. The circumstances which have stimulated and almost caused this genial exhilaration are detailed in more elegant language than our own in a magazine, which attempts to embody the mirthfulness of the occasion.—" Every shop window is a tableau—a gratis exhibition to feast the eye and delight the imagination of the young street Tantalus and the poor Pandora, who has let hope fly for ever, to make the ruddy city Sysiphus with his burden gape and stare. Pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, ruddy brown-faced Spanish onions, shining like fires, mossy brown filberts reminding one of woodland walks, squab and swarthy biffins entreating people to buy and eat, these joys are all poured forth from the hone of Christmas." In other words, we have all grown merry while gazing at the dainties seen in butchers' shops, and thinking of of the dainties destined soon to burden our own tables and digestions. The expression of our joy bears resemblance to its source. Good dinners, social merry-makings, "catching," in the words of one of our contemporaries, "coy lips under the mistletoe," poking up the yule log, and stirring up hot punch, are the universal and appropriate signs of our general goodwill to ourselves and to others. A tendency to unusual facetiousness and pleasantry are never-failing characteristics of all well-disposed persons on the 25th December. One of Mr. Dickens's most successful publications is specially devoted to denounce those misan- thropical individuals, who are not "hail fellow well met" with every one on Christmas Eve. The hapless Scrooge is, no doubt, not an estimable person, but, after all, his chief crime is that his spirits do not rise sufficiently high at the return of the great festival, and when three ghostly visitants have at bet brought him to a right state of mind, he exhibits a proof of his conversion which, under the circumstances, is obviously the most appropriate course of action,—he buys a fat turkey which "was a turkey ; he never could have stood upon his legs, that bird, he would have snapped 'em off short in a minute, like sticks of sealing wax." Yet Scrooge's sins were great, and his repentance needed some greater proof than could be given even by presenting the fattest of birds to the poorest of his acquaintance, and the misanthrope, to place himself right with the world and his own conscience, joins a merry party and partakes of a good dinner. If Scrooge is a fearful warning of what a man comes to who does not kin his Christmas, Mr. Pickwick, we suppose, may stand as a representative of the manner in which the genuine English gentle- man comports himself on Christmas Eve : he kisses and is kissed by all the pang ladies, listens to old tales, sits by a blaring fire, and drinks as much punch as is compatible with sobriety. Wherever we look throughout the works of genial writers we find the same picture of Christmas-day. To doubt the truth of descriptions which universal approval stamps as lifelike is an act of daring scepticism ; yet even at the risk of being set down, according to the words of a writer before quoted, as "lizard-hearted cyniclings, who are base enough to be tired of all this talk about fat turkeys, country dances, holly, and red faces," we must express some doubt whether all this picture of roaring merry-making festivities corre- sponds with any of the facts of Englishmen's ordinary existence. Without question Christmas is, and ought to be, to many families a period of the sincerest happiness. The fact that friends and acquaint- ance who meet scarcely once a year are then brought together is enough to account for much real joyfulness which depends but little upon the goodness of mince pies or the delicate flavour of native oysters; but happiness is not uproarious merriment, and a nation who are as a race not much given either to cheerfulness or sentiment, are, one may suspect, not prone to exhibit their plea- sure at the return of a solemn anniversary either by excessive laughter or maudlin tears. Many of the customs, at any rate, which are detailed in column after column of newspapers and magazines, have not more than a traditional or conventional reality. No one, we presume, would attempt on going into a gentleman's household to "catch the coy lips" of his host's daughters. The endeavour to do so would entail a loss of all opportunities of repeating the experiment. Not one in a hundred of our readers can boast of having seen a yule-log in any other place than in the pictures of the Illustrated News, whilst many households may be found who know punch only by descrip- tion. In a certain sense, the existence of the literature of Christ- mas exposes the falsehood of the hypothesis on which that very literature exists. If to eat, drink, and be merry, and play such games as amused the daughters of the Vicar of Wakefield and their rustic neighbours were the real pastime of the majority of the middle classes, the Illustrated News would not sell its Christmas numbers by thousands. The taste which delights in reading Christmas tales or in spending tears and smiles over the "Cricket on the Hearth," is not the taste of men who delight in jests and in good eating. Squire Western, we doubt not, kept his Christmas with the yule log and mistletoe, but neither Squire Western nor even the refined Sophia would have cared much to read the "Christmas Carol," or "Somebody's Luggage." What it is which makes large bodies of readers enjoy tales of festivities which do not exist, of a merriment which they have never felt, or of pleasures which are not of the kind in which any sane man would wish to rejoice, it is hard to tell ; it is, however, sufficiently clear that there is some mysterious pleasure in being told that you ought to feel, and do feel, a genial joviality, which you, perhaps, have never felt, and certainly, if you did feel it, would be rather ashamed of.
For the truth must be spoken. The theory of life which makes the years culminate in a merry Christmas to be celebrated by feeding well and indulging in amiable sentiment is a degraded view of life. Merriment comes very rarely to any one past the age of childhood ; most rarely of all does it come on the occasion of an anniversary. Days of family festival have an inevitable tendency to become days of family sadness. The circle of friends which was once filled up ceases to be complete, and the faces of those who are present recal the face of some one who is absent. The best Christmas story produced of late years is, "The Aspen Faggot," and the whole beauty of the tale consists in the recog- nition of the sadness which blends with the happiness of every annual feast. The faggot, and the ceremonies connected with it, may, perhaps, have an existence nowhere but in Mr. Hughes's imagination, but the picture of laughing children surrounding a saddened father and mother is more true and more pathetic than all the artificial sentimentality of even the "Cricket on the Hearth." If there must be a Christmas literature, let it at least have some of the seriousness and dignity which begets a solemn festival. It is surely time to have done with books writ- ten to hallow with a touch of sentiment the natural, but by no means exalted enjoyment afforded by turkeys, mince pies, and plum-pudding.
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