CHRISTMAS DAY

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 151, 23 December 1921, Page 15

CHRISTMAS DAY

OLD-FASHIONED IDEAS

SOME REFLECTIONS ON FEASTING

CUSTOMS OF OTHER TIMES,

■ Somebody has bean adjuring me by an advertisement to keep Christmas in the pood old-fashioned way, wrote a contributor to the London Telegraph. And I wonder what that is. Ingenious young gentlemen have from time to time explained to me that Christmas is a festival invented by Washington Irving, and made popular and vulgar by Charles Dickens. It is odd how everybpdy who uses this little device for shocking ordinary folk seems able to persuado himself that nobody ever thought of it before. Tedious they are, these peoplo whose sad ambition is to be frightfully cynical. But I suppose the worst of them is their tendency to convince you that everything they defame is supremely right. You listen .to'-the arguments that Christmas was invented tho other day, . and you depart believing that holly and mistletoe were used in Bethlehem, and that turkey and plum pudding ■ were consecrated to Christmas Day in the first century.

I suppose there is no doubt that garlands of holly and the sanctity of the mistletoe are much older than the feast of Christmas, and by their origins have nothing at all to do with the Christian religion. Evergreen decorations are as primitive as clothes, and mistletoe has a connection with the Druids, .who, whatever thoy were, were not of our faith. And, of course, you can go on to point out that high jinks at some date near the shortest day in the year are so. ancient a custom, so general, that you dare not cay they came in with the Christmas era, that you are almost tempted to beli'jve as winter festival is tho expression of a physical need of human nature. AVhen the days are at the shortest and gloomiest men and women require exhilaration, I have often noticed that to find a 'plausible, mechanical; material, pseudo-scientific reason for a habit makes people doused v. itli you who would cry aloud and cut themselves with knives if you said you thought it was a religious duty or a beautiful tradition.

And this is. on the whole, a pity. I am all for fine old crusted ceremonies myself, but I like them to have some sort of meaning, which is' to say 'that I like people to have a notion what they mean. Take the turkey. "What is the turkey there for? I- never understood, and I never knew anybody who could tell me. The one certain thing about him is that he has no pedigree. •He is a parvenu. You never heard of him till yesterday. Scrooge, to be sure, has to send the biggest turkey he can find to Bob Cratchit; but Scrooge is a mere mid-Victorian. Your turkey is not traditional. Tlie ruling tradition demands beef—roast beef—a baron of beef. But do you serve it on Christmas Day? I cannot —thank Heaven —remember more than a few of the Christmas dinners I have eaten, but I am sure roast beef made a scanty show therein. Roast beef, like virtue, is praised, and left outside. Turkey we insist upon. When or why turkey rose to fame nobody can tell me. It has no history. The ajneient pieces of resistance are beef and a boar's head:— O cheer you all this Christmas, The boar's head and mustard, Caput apri defero \

Reddeus laudes Domino. Which is to say, "Thank God for the brawn." Well, we eat it still,' and we eat beef, but who thinks of them as obligatory to our modern Christmas dinner?

The turkey came -from America with the potato, and before Elizabeth was dead he had found his way to the Christmas table, but only as one of many birds, peacocks and cygnets, geese, capons, and pheasants. His supremacy seems to be an invention' of the nineteenth century. The ancient things are the beef and brawn and the puddings and pies. But the name and sentiment are the only things about the confectionery which endure. Like'the rest of us, pies and puddings change with changing years. They are subject to evolution. Your -midding was once a porridge, 'made of beef or mutton broth, thickened with brown bread,, boiled up with raisins, currants, prunes and all the spices you ever heard of, and served with the roast beef. A hardy folk our ancestors. Sir1 Roeer de Coverley, it is written, thought there was some hope of a dissenter when he saw him enjoy his porridge at the squire's table on Christmas Day. But it must have been an acquired taste. As for the pies, they seem to have begun their career as mutton pies, which, does=not sound alluring. Then ox tongue took the place of mutton, and "tossed up with plumbs and sugar" the pie became the pie we know. But they used to bake them in an oblong shape to represent the manger where "no crib for his bed, the little Lord- Jesus laid down His sweet head."

A phrase such as that from a carol and ypu ask why in the world talk about Christmas is always talk about food. Well, after all, a festival means feasting. We are v/hat wo are, and it is not much use.asking us to feel joyful on the bread of affliction and the water of affliction. I have never understood why one should be more ashamed of liking one's dinner than of liking poetry. The things, no .doubt, are different. But we are so constructed, and that is not by our choice, that we cannot get on without the dinner, though some of us do contrive to get on without the poetry. It is plain that an exclusive devotion to the dinner .element in life leaves people but little higher than the swine. It is agreed that an excessive affection for dinner makes people very unwell. But I do not know that a consuming passion for higher things bears very satisfactory fruits. To despise your dinner and neglect your body may be the means to intellectual and spiritual magnificence, but it is not, speaking broadly, the way to health and good temper. While we live in this world physical well-being and physical happiness are necessary to us, as well as high thinking and ethereal emotions—and quite as helpful to other people.

Well, but they fay that Christmas is a vulgar business, a glorification of guzzling and maudlin sentiment.. I wonder whether the people who think we aire gluttonous nowadays, the people who think that Dickens was a low fellow to mako such a noise about, eating and drinking, ever had a look at #fb records of the feasts of the past. There is no sort of doubt that on occasions of ceremony we eat very much less than our ancestors, and by, comparison, drink almost nothing. It is possible that the more remote progenitors gorged themselves at their feasts and starved (comparatively) in the intervals, as savages do. But for the last three centuries tho rations of the well-to-do classes, at any rate, have steadily diminished. Qmit the war and all the dietetic consequences of war from your consideration, and if you have lived long enough to have any right to an opinion you will agree that our meals have grown shorter and less bulky throughout the memory of living man.

I have heard the opposite contended. There are one or two books of gossip, I know, which depict the late 'nineties and the early years of this century as a period of coarse luxury-, compared with the frugality of the early mid-Victorians. The result can onfy be obtained by comparing unlike things, the life of a quiet, sedate country house with the life of

Sir Gorging Midas, or -a middlo class family dinner, with a vast public banquet." What has been elaborated is the variety of food and the manner of servr ing! I do not say that our modern finesse is "altogether admirable. ■ I hate your Persian apparatus. Tho bare table, the fantastic lights, the odd decorations make- me uncomfortable. > But I do not renwrl; that they are accompanied by any abundance of food or. any luxuriance of'the cook's art. On the contrary. When people talk' to me of, our modern gluttony I quote to them a sentence from tho Almanack dcs Gourmands- (date about 1000, which mourns that "after the sixth dozen,: oysters cease-to whet--the appetite." There is no case for .any indictment of the greed of our generation. The truth is rather with the grandfathers and grandmothers, who are sometimes heard to complain that their children's idea, of a good dinner is semi-starvation. But, of course, that is not the end of ,the charges against our Christmas feast. If it is" not/a debauch of gluttony, the cynics will have it that it is a debauch of sentimentality. They exhaust themselves in denouncing the cant .about good feeling and good fellowship, and above all the cant about children. A display of kindliness which you do not share is certainly most annoying. That wretched man Dickens has much to answer for in his , glorification of ordinary folk.' If you really believe that men and women "in a loomp is bad," you are condemned to find Christmas disgusting. If you really feel that children are an ineffable bore you had certainly better dine with yourself all ..through the Christmas holidays. If you have a commission to hate your relations it is for the general good" that you should avoid them. But you must not ask others to believe that' Dickens invented goodwill towards men. or Sir James Barrie the charm of children, or expect, us to hate our families because you are disagreeable. You have a right to boast that you are, not normal. But if we were all like you your distinction would bo gone._ The essence of Christmas is that it is the festival of ordinary folk, of the normal, the natural, the rational—all the things which anybody can bo. .