Let every man be jolly;
Each room with ivy leaves is drest,
And every post with holly.
Though some churls at our mirth repine,
Round your foreheads garlands twine,
Drown sorrow in a cup of wine,
And let us all be merry.
“Now all our neighbors’ chimneys smoke,
And Christmas blocks are burning;
Their ovens they with bak’d meats choke,
And all their spits are turning.
Without the door let sorrow lie;
And if for cold it hap to die,
We’ll bury’t in a Christmas pye.
And evermore be merry.
“Now every lad is wondrous trim,
And no man minds his labor;
Our lasses have provided them
A bagpipe and a tabor.
Young men and maids, and girls and boys,
Give life to one another’s joys;
And you anon shall by their noise
Perceive that they are merry....
“Now poor men to the justices
With capons make their errants;
And if they hap to fail of these,
They plague them with their warrants:
But now they feed them with good cheer,
And what they want they take in beer;
For Christmas comes but once a year,
And then they shall be merry....
“The client now his suit forbears,
The prisoner’s heart is eased,
The debtor drinks away his cares,
And for the time is pleased.
Though others’ purses be more fat,
Why should we pine or grieve at that?
Hang sorrow! care will kill a cat,
And therefore let’s be merry....
“Hark! now the wags abroad do call
Each other forth to rambling;
Anon you’ll see them in the hall,
For nuts and apples scrambling.
Hark! how the roofs with laughter sound;
Anon they’ll think the house goes round,
For they the cellar’s depths have found.
And there they will be merry.
“The wenches with the wassail-bowls
About the streets are singing;
The boys are come to catch the owls,
The wild mare[109] in is bringing.
Our kitchen-boy hath broke his box,
And to the kneeling of the ox
Our honest neighbors come by flocks,
And here they will be merry.
“Now kings and queens poor sheep-cotes have,
And mate with everybody;
The honest now may play the knave,
And wise men play at noddy.
Some youths will now a-mumming go,
Some others play at Rowland-boe,
And twenty other gambols moe,
Because they will be merry.
“Then wherefore, in these merry days,
Should we, I pray, be duller?
No, let us sing some roundelays,
To make our mirth the fuller;
And, while we thus inspired sing,
Let all the streets with echoes ring—
Woods and hills and everything
Bear witness we are merry.”
Or Master Milton, again, Latin secretary to the council, author of the
famous _Iconoclastes_, shield (or, as some would have put it, official
scold) of the Commonwealth, the scourge of prelacy and conqueror of
Salmasius—he was orthodox surely; yet what of _Arcades_ and _Cornus_?
Master Milton, too, had written holiday masques, and, what is more,
they had been acted; nay, he had even been known more than once, on no
less authority than his worshipful nephew, Master Philips, “to make so
bold with his body as to take a gaudy-day” with the gay sparks of
Gray’s Inn. Alas! such carnal-minded effusions belonged to the
unregenerate days of both these worthy brethren, when they still dwelt
in the tents of the ungodly, before they had girded on the sword of
Gideon and gone forth to smite the Amalekite hip and thigh. Vainly
might the menaced festival look for aid in that direction. So far from
saying a word in its favor, they would now have been fiercest in
condemnation, if only to cover their early backsliding; if only to
avert any suspicion that they still hankered after the fleshpots. Poor
Christmas was doomed.
So, by act of Parliament, “our joyful’st feast” was solemnly stricken
out of the calendar, cashiered from its high pre-eminence among the
holidays of the year, and degraded to the ranks of common days. All its
quaint bravery of holly-berries and ivy-leaves was stripped from it,
its jolly retinue of boars’ heads and wassail-bowls, of Yule-clogs and
mistletoe-boughs, of maskers and mummers, of waits and carols, Lords of
Misrule and Princes of Christmas, sent packing. Then began “the fiery
persecution of poor mince-pie throughout the land; plum-porridge was
denounced as mere popery, and roast-beef as anti-Christian.” ’Twas a
fatal, a perfidious, a short-lived triumph. The nation, shocked in its
most cherished traditions, repudiated the hideous doctrine; the British
stomach, deprived of its holiday beef and pudding, so to speak,
revolted. The reign of the righteous was speedily at an end. History,
with her usual shallowness, ascribes to General Monk the chief part in
the Restoration; it was really brought about by that short-sighted
edict of the 24th of December, 1652. Charles or Cromwell, king or
protector—what cared honest Hodge who ruled and robbed him? But to
forego his Christmas porridge—that was a different matter; and Britons
never should be slaves. So, just eight years after it had been
banished, Christmas was brought back again with manifold rejoicing and
bigger wassail-bowls and Yule-clogs than ever; and, as if to make
honorable amends for its brief exile, the Lord of Misrule himself was
crowned and seated on the throne, where, as we all know, to do justice
to his office, if he never said a foolish thing he never did a wise
one.
And from that time to this Christmas has remained a thoroughly British
institution, as firmly entrenched in the national affections, as
generally respected, and perhaps as widely appreciated as Magna Charta
itself. Sit on Christmas day! A British Parliament now would as soon
think of sitting on the Derby day. To how many of their constituents
have the two festivals any widely differing significance perhaps it
would be wise not to inquire too closely. Each is a holiday—that is, a
day off work, a synonym for “a good time,” a little better dinner than
usual, and considerably more beer. Like the children, “they reflect
nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond
the cake and orange.” “La justice elle-même,” says Balzac, “se traduit
aux yeux de la halle par le commissaire—personage avec lequel elle se
familiarise.” His epigram the author of _Ginx’s Baby_ may translate for
us—English epigrams, like English plays, being for the most part matter
of importation free of duty; _e.g._, that famous one in _Lothair_ about
the critic being a man who has failed in literature or art, another
consignment from Balzac—when he makes Ginx’s theory of government
epitomize itself as a policeman. So Ginx’s notion of Christmas, we
suspect, is apt to be beef and beer and Boxing-night—with perhaps a
little more beer.
Certainly the attachment of the British public to these features of the
day—we are considering it for the moment in the light in which a
majority of non-Catholics look upon it, apparently, as a merely social
festival, and not at all in its religious aspect (though to a Catholic,
of course, the two are as indistinguishably blended as the rose and the
perfume of the rose)—has never been shaken. If one may judge from a
large amount of the English fiction which at this season finds its way
to the American market—and the novels of to-day, among a novel-reading
people, are as straight and sure a guide to its heart as were ever its
ballads in the time of old Fletcher of Saltoun—if one may judge from
much of English Christmas literature, these incidents of the day are,
if not the most important, certainly the most prominent and popular.
What we may call the Beef and Beer aspect of the season these stories
are never tired of glorifying and exalting. Dickens is the archpriest
of this idolatry, which, indeed, he in a measure invented, or at least
brought into vogue; and his _Christmas Stories_, as most of his
stories, fairly reek with the odors of the kitchen and the tap-room.
Material comfort, and that, too, usually of a rather coarse kind, is
the universal theme, and even the charity they are supposed to
inculcate can scarcely be called a moral impulse, so much as the
instinct of a physical good-nature, well-fed and content with itself
and the world—of a good-humored selfishness willing to make others
comfortable, because thereby it puts away from itself the discomfort of
seeing them otherwise. It is a kind of charity which, in another sense
than that of Scripture, has to cover a multitude of sins.
One may say this of Dickens, without at all detracting from his many
great qualities as a writer, that he has done more, perhaps, than any
other writer to demoralize and coarsen the popular notion of what
Christmas is and means; to make of his readers at best but good-humored
pagans with lusty appetites for all manner of victuals and an
open-handed readiness to share their good things with the first comer.
These are no doubt admirable traits; but one gets a little tired of
having them for ever set forth as the crown and completion of Christian
excellence, the sum and substance of all that is noble and exalted in
the sentiment of the season. Let us enjoy our Christmas dinner by all
means; let the plum-pudding be properly boiled and the turkey done to a
turn, and may we all have enough to spare a slice or two for a poorer
neighbor! But must we therefore sit down and gobble turkey and pudding
from morning till night? Should we hang up a sirloin and fall down and
worship it? Is that all that Christmas means? Turn from the best of
these books to this exquisite little picture of Christmas Eve in a
Catholic land:
“Christmas is come—the beautiful festival, the one I love most,
and which gives me the same joy as it gave the shepherds of
Bethlehem. In real truth, one’s whole soul sings with joy at
this beautiful coming of God upon earth—a coming which here is
announced on all sides of us by music and by our charming
_nadalet_[110] Nothing at Paris can give you a notion of what
Christmas is with us. You have not even the midnight Mass. We
all of us went to it, papa at our head, on the most perfect
night possible. Never was there a finer sky than ours was that
midnight—so fine that papa kept perpetually throwing back the
hood of his cloak, that he might look up at the sky. The ground
was white with hoar-frost, but we were not cold; besides, the
air, as we met it, was warmed by the bundles of blazing
torchwood which our servants carried in front of us to light us
on our way. It was delightful, I do assure you; and I should
like you to have seen us there on our road to church, in those
lanes with the bushes along their banks as white as if they
were in flower. The hoar-frost makes the most lovely flowers.
We saw a long spray so beautiful that we wanted to take it with
us as a garland for the communion-table, but it melted in our
hands; all flowers fade so soon! I was very sorry about my
garland; it was mournful to see it drop away and get smaller
and smaller every minute.”
It is Eugénie de Guérin who writes thus—that pure and delicate spirit
so well fitted to feel and value all that is beautiful and touching in
this most beautiful and touching service of the church. To come from
the one reading to the other is like being lifted suddenly out of a
narrow valley to the free air and boundless views of a mountain-top;
like coming from the gaslight into the starlight; it is like hearing
the song of the skylark after the twitter of the robin—a sound pleasant
and cheery enough in itself, but not elevating, not inspiring, not in
any way satisfying to that hunger after ideal excellence which is the
true life of the spirit, and which strikes the true key-note of this
festal time.
But Eugénie de Guérin is perhaps too habitual a dweller on those serene
heights to furnish a fair comparison; let us take a homelier picture
from a lower level. It is still in France; this time in Burgundy, as
the other was in Languedoc:
“Every year, at the approach of Advent, people refresh their
memories, clear their throats, and begin preluding, in the long
evenings by the fireside, those carols whose invariable and
eternal theme is the coming of the Messias. They take from old
pamphlets little collections begrimed with dust and smoke, ...
and as soon as the first Sunday of Advent sounds they gossip,
they gad about, they sit together by the fireside, sometimes at
one house, sometimes at another, taking turns in paying for the
chestnuts and white wine, but singing with one common voice the
praises of the _Little Jesus_. There are very few villages,
even, which during all the evenings of Advent do not hear some
of these curious canticles shouted in their streets to the
nasal drone of bagpipes.
“More or less, until Christmas Eve, all goes on in this way
among our devout singers, with the difference of some gallons
of wine or some hundreds of chestnuts. But this famous eve once
come, the scale is pitched upon a higher key; the closing
evening must be a memorable one.... The supper finished, a
circle gathers around the hearth, which is arranged and set in
order this evening after a particular fashion, and which at a
later hour of the night is to become the object of special
interest to the children. On the burning brands an enormous log
has been placed; ... it is called the _Suche_ (the Yule-log).
‘Look you,’ say they to the children, ‘if you are good this
evening Noel will rain down sugar-plums in the night.’ And the
children sit demurely, keeping as quiet as their turbulent
little natures will permit. The groups of older persons, not
always as orderly as the children, seize this good opportunity
to surrender themselves with merry hearts and boisterous voices
to the chanted worship of the miraculous Noel. For this final
solemnity they have kept the most powerful, the most
enthusiastic, the most electrifying carols.
“This last evening the merry-making is prolonged. Instead of
retiring at ten or eleven o’clock, as is generally done on all
the preceding evenings, they wait for the stroke of midnight;
this word sufficiently proclaims to what ceremony they are
going to repair. For ten minutes or a quarter of an hour the
bells have been calling the faithful with a triple-bob-major;
and each one, furnished with a little taper streaked with
various colors (the Christmas candle), goes through the crowded
streets, where the lanterns are dancing like will-o’-the-wisps
at the impatient summons of the multitudinous chimes. It is the
midnight Mass.”
There you have fun, feasting, and frolic, as, indeed, there may fitly
be to all innocent degrees of merriment, on the day which brought
redemption to mankind. But there is also, behind and pervading all this
rejoicing and harmless household gayety, the religious sentiment which
elevates and inspires it, which chastens it from commonplace and
grossness, which gives it a meaning and a soul. The English are fond of
calling the French an irreligious people, because French literature,
especially French fiction, from which they judge, takes its tone from
Paris, which is to a great extent irreligious. But outside of the large
cities, if a balance were struck on this point between the two
countries, it would scarcely be in favor of England.
This, however, by way of episode and as a protest against this
grovelling, material treatment of the most glorious festival of the
Christian year. As we were about to say when interrupted, though
Christmas regained its foothold as a national holiday at the
Restoration, it came back sadly denuded of its following and shorn of
most of its old-time attractions. So it fared in old England. In New
England it can scarcely be said ever to have won a foothold at all, or
at best no more than a foothold and a sullen toleration. Almost the
first act of those excellent Pilgrim Fathers who did _not_ land at
Plymouth Rock was to anticipate by thirty years or so the action of
their Parliamentary brethren at home in abolishing the sacred
anniversary, which must, indeed, have been a tacit rebuke to the spirit
of their creed. They landed on the 16th of December, and “on ye 25th
day,” writes William Bradford, “began to erect ye first house for
comone use to receive them and their goods.” And lest this might seem
an exception made under stress, we find it recorded next year that “on
ye day caled Christmas day ye Gov’r caled them out to worke.” So it is
clear New England began with a calendar from which Christmas was
expunged. In New England affections Thanksgiving day replaces it—an
“institution” peculiarly acceptable, we must suppose, to the thrift
which can thus wipe out its debt of gratitude to Heaven by giving one
day for three hundred and sixty-four—liquidating its liabilities, so to
speak, at the rate of about three mills in the dollar. In the Middle
States and in the South the day has more of its time-old observance,
but neither here nor elsewhere may we hope to encounter many of the
quaint and cheery customs with which our fathers loved to honor it, and
which made it for them the pivot of the year. Wither has told us
something of these; let a later minstrel give us a fuller picture of
what Merry Christmas was in days of yore:
“And well our Christian sires of old
Loved, when the year its course had rolled,
And brought blithe Christmas back again,
With all its hospitable train.
Domestic and religious rite
Gave honor to the holy night:
On Christmas Eve the bells were rung;
On Christmas Eve the Mass was sung;
That only night of all the year
Saw the stoled priest the chalice rear.
The damsel donned her kirtle sheen;
The hall was dressed with holly green;
Forth to the wood did merry men go
To gather in the mistletoe.
Then opened wide the baron’s hall
To vassals, tenants, serf, and all.
The heir, with roses in his shoes,
That night might village partner choose;
The lord, underogating, share
The vulgar game of ‘post and pair.’
All hailed with uncontrolled delight,
And general voice, the happy night
That to the cottage, as the crown,
Brought tidings of salvation down.
The fire, with well-dried logs supplied,
Went roaring up the chimney wide;
The huge hall-table’s oaken face,
Scrubbed till it shone, the day to grace,
Bore then upon its massive board
No mark to part the squire and lord.
Then was brought in the lusty brawn
By old blue-coated serving-man;
Then the grim boar’s head frowned on high,
Crested with bays and rosemary....
The wassail round in good brown bowls,
Garnished with ribbons, blithely trowls.
There the huge sirloin reeked; hard by
Plum-porridge stood and Christmas pye.
Then came the merry masquers in
And carols roared with blithesome din;
If unmelodious was the song,
It was a hearty note and strong.
Who lists may in their mumming see
Traces of ancient mystery....
England was merry England then—
Old Christmas brought his sports again;
’Twas Christmas broached the mightiest ale;
’Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft would cheer
A poor man’s heart through half the year.”
Let Herrick supplement the picture with his
“CEREMONIES FOR CHRISTMASSE.
“Come, bring with a noise,
My merrie, merrie boyes,
The Christmas log to the firing;
While my good dame, she
Bids ye all be free
And drink to your hearts’ desiring.
“With the last yeeres brand
Light the new block, and
For good successe in his spending
On your psaltries play,
That sweet luck may
Come while the log is a-teending.
“Drink now the strong beere,
Cut the white loafe here,
The while the meate is a-shredding
For the rare mince-pie,
And the plums stand by
To fill the paste that’s a-kneading.”
Does the picture please you? Would you fain be a guest at the baron’s
table, or lend a hand with jovial Herrick to fetch in the mighty
Yule-log? Are you longing for a cut of that boar’s head or a draught of
the wassail, or curious to explore the contents of that mysterious
“Christmas pye,” which seems to differ so much from all other pies that
it has to be spelled with a _y_? Well, well, we must not repine. Fate,
which has denied us these joys, has given us compensations. No doubt
the baron, for all his Yule-logs, would sometimes have given his
baronial head (when he happened to have a cold in it) for such a
fire—let it be of sea-coal in a low grate and the curtains drawn—as the
reader and his humble servant are this very minute toasting their toes
at. Those huge open fireplaces are admirably effective in poetry, but
not altogether satisfactory of a cold winter’s night, when half the
heat goes up the chimney and all the winds of heaven are shrieking in
through the chinks in your baronial hall and playing the very mischief
with your baronial rheumatism. Or do we believe that boar’s head was
such a mighty fascinating dish after all, or much, if anything,
superior to the soused pig’s head with which good old Squire
Bracebridge replaced it? No, every age to its own customs; we may be
sure that each finds out what is best for it and for its people.
Yet one custom we do begrudge a little to the past, or rather to the
other lands where it still lingers here and there in the present. That
is the graceful and kindly custom of the waits. These were Christmas
carols, as the reader no doubt knows, chanted by singers from house to
house in the rural districts during the season of Advent. In France
they were called noels, and in Longfellow’s translation of one of these
we may see what they were like:
“I hear along our street
Pass the minstrel throngs;
Hark! they play so sweet.
On their hautboys, Christmas songs!
Let us by the fire
Ever higher
Sing them till the night expire!...
“Shepherds at the grange
Where the Babe was born
Sang with many a change
Christmas carols until morn.
Let us, etc.
“These good people sang
Songs devout and sweet;
While the rafters rang,
There they stood with freezing feet.
Let us, etc.
“Who by the fireside stands
Stamps his feet and sings;
But he who blows his hands
Not so gay a carol brings.
Let us, etc.”
In some parts of rural England, too, the custom is still to some extent
kept up, and the reader may find a pleasant, and we dare say faithful,
description of it in a charming English story called _Under the
Greenwood Tree_, by Mr. Thomas Hardy, a writer whose closeness of
observation and precision and delicacy of touch give him a leading
place among the younger writers of fiction.
Very pleasant, we fancy, it must be of a Christmas Eve when one is, as
aforesaid, toasting one’s toes at the fire over a favorite book, or
hanging up the children’s stockings, let us say, or peering through the
curtains out over the moonlit snow, and wondering how cold it is
out-doors with that little perfunctory shiver which is comfort’s homage
to itself—there should always be snow upon the ground at Christmas, for
then Nature
“With speeches fair
Woos the gentle air
To hide her guilty front with innocent snow”;
but let us have no wind, since
“Peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
His reign of peace upon the world began.
The winds, with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kist,
Whispering new joys to the wild ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charméd wave”—
at such a time, we say, it would be pleasant to hear the shrill voices
of the Waits cleaving the cold, starlit air in some such quaint old
ditty as the “Cherry-tree Carol” or “The Three Ships.” No doubt, too,
would we but confess it, there would come to us a little wicked
enhancement of pleasure in the reflection that the artists without were
a trifle less comfortable than the hearer within. That rogue Tibullus
had a shrewd notion of what constitutes true comfort when he wrote,
_Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem_—which, freely translated,
means, How jolly it is to sit by the fireside and listen to other
fellows singing for your benefit in the cold without! But that idea we
should dismiss as unworthy, and even try to feel a little uncomfortable
by way of penance; and then, when their song was ended, and we heard
their departing footsteps scrunching fainter and fainter in the snow,
and their voices dying away until they became the merest suggestion of
an echo, we should perhaps find—for these are to be ideal Waits—that
their song had left behind it in the listener’s soul a starlit silence
like that of the night without, but the stars should be heavenly
thoughts.