Christmas
By E. E. KELLETT CnarerivrAs is a season in which I almost become an old- fashioned Tory, and welcome the maintenance of old customs. And Christmas customs are very old indeed. No one knows when or how they began. In the most ancient historical times they were spoken Of as originating in times still more ancient, When the gods walked on earth and mingled with men. Our own ancestors conceived of Thor and Odin as keeping Yule- tide, apparently as a time which had always been kept. should imagine that, as soon as people noticed the " death of the sun, and thought he could no longer see them, they began to play about like schoolboys when the master is away.
Whatever the origin of the customs, many of them still survive. I like to think, when I see the crowds thronging Oxford Street to buy presents, that they are doing what was done thousands of years ago. Perhaps some of the presents are humorous or mischievous, like the volume of bad poetry which, "on the best of days," Calvus sent to his friend Catul- Itia, and to which Catullus threatened to retort with a cartload of all the worst poems he could buy (presumably on credit) at the bookshops. When the apparently inexhaustible writer of thrillers lays down hi S pen for a few hours to play with his family, he is doing almost exactly what Martial urged the author of one of the dullest and longest of epics to do during the "Saturnalia." "Put away," said he, "your Punica, with its talk of Hannibal's perfidious stratagems ; now is the free time of December, when public gambling is allowed, and the dice-boxes are rattling all over the city." We may perhaps go further back still. There was only one season in Eden, but that was probably a year-long Christmas. At any rate, if Milton may be trusted, even the elephant enjoyed himself, and the lion, like a modern paterfamilias, "sporting ramped, , and in his paw dandled the kid."
• As I look at the mistletoe, I remember how it was the one thing on earth which was left out when every thing else swore not to hurt Balder, and how the envious Loki used it to kill the god of fairness and happiness, thus violating the " grith " or peace of the holy season. It has taken the oath since then, and is now the harmless plant of innocence and mirth.
. There is one old custom which may well have been salutary, but which the sensitive amour-propre of later times has considerably modified. Among the Romans, and indeed among many other peoples, you had the chance of seeing yourself as others saw you. In " libertate Decembri " slaves became free, and wore the dress of freemen. . Then was the chance of telling their masters what they thought of them ; and, as Horace informs us, they somethnes took it. "I've had to listen to you a long while," said Davus to Horace ; "now it's your turn to listen to me " ; and the irascible poet heard some very plain home-truths, which must hard been laid to heart or he would not have troubled to record them. There is some " Decembrian license" today, and more still at Italian carnivals ; but I doubt if many English householders would endure from their servants what Horace, with a certain natural impatience, stood from his bondman.
I take the Shakespearean privilege of " jumping o'er tunes, and turning the accomplishment of many years into an hour-glass." From the reign of Augustus I leap to the age (if there ever was such an age) of King Arthur. Christmas at Camelot seems to have been very specially refined. According to the author of Gawayn and the Green Knight there was rich revel, a feast of fifteen days, all the meat and mirth that men could devise, dear din in the day and dancing at night, the loveliest ladies that ever life had, the comeliest king that court could hokl, and everything else that could be worked into an alliterative line. A prize was offered for whoever made most mirth. But we are distinctly told that what gave most pleasure was the courteous conversation, and that the knights gained much comfort from the talk of the fair ladies by whose side they sat at the feast. We may not have advanced as far as we think from the fourteenth century.
The Church was right to take over this season from the Saturnalia of the Romans and the joy-time of the worshippers of Mithras eternal and invincible ; nor was she wrong, when she reached the Northern peoples, to annex their Yuletide. It is true enough that, as some of the Fathers pointed out, the 25th of December was a very unlikely date on which shepherds would abide in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. There were some also who disliked the heathen tone of the revels, and others who detected in them a taint of the Jewish Chanukah. But the general sense was . wiser;; it recognised the good in things evil, and saw no harm in borrowing jewels from the Egyptians. Like Luther, who did not wish Satan to have all the good tunes, the Church did not see why the heathen should have the best festivals For this we owe her thanks.
Some, inevitably, of the old rites disappeared ; others were altered, and have gone on altering. The "Lords of Misrule" have largely vanished ; we no longer celebrate Twelfth Night as Shakespeare celebrated it ; and not all of what Washington Irving described has remained. That fine old descendant of Sir Roger de Coverley, the Squire of Bracebridge Hall, could he return to life, would note with stern disapprobation that several of his favourite rtes had passed into oblivion in a mere hundred years. It would take us far to inquire why, of these. ceremonies, " some be abolished and sonic retained" ; indeed, I doubt whether any explanation is possible. It is an affair of fashion, and fashion blows as it lists. But there are two sides to this fickleness.. Equally unaccountably, what has departed may return, and indeed some departed fashions are, I think, returning. The eating of frumenty, I believe, never died out in the North of England, and if I am not mistaken, it will be eaten during the coming season in the South also. Should this be the case, so much the better. .
A question on which I should greatly like my ignorance to be enlightened is as to the time when publishers first thought of taking advantage of the Christmas feeling. What publisher first said, " People are kindly at this season, and may be inclined to take pity even on a bookseller" ? Or to what editor, full of love for the human race, did the idea first occur of increasing even Yule-tide happiness by scattering abroad Christmas Numbers of his magazine ? And who first perceived that, to be ready in time, he must begin working up his. Christmas jollity in the doldrums of July ? I confess I do not know. Christmas cards, I do know, began about 184A J; Christmas annuals somewhat earlier ; but the kind of thing we see now, when did it begin ? There is a Latin book called Saturnalia, and we have, as we have seen, some classical Christmas letters. But did the Roman boOksellers in the Argiletum load their counters with books and pamphlets gorgeously decorated, and painted in all the colours of the rainbow . Did the children pester their parents to buy them picture-books ? I fear not ; and, if I am right, we are in this respect, at least better off than the ancients.
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