* Henry Cole (1808–82) began as a clerk in the Parliamentary Record Commission, which he immediately, and publicly, exposed as a hotbed of sinecure and corruption. He then worked with Rowland Hill on his campaign to reform the postal service before beginning to campaign for railway reform, write children’s books and produce a line of ‘art manufactures’, or paint-boxes, as well as designing an award-winning tea-service. He became the de facto administrator of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and was then appointed secretary to the government department charged with establishing training schools for art and design, and the new South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum).
* Why robins became a Christmas regular is unknown. It might be that the red breast links it chromatically to holly berries, or possibly the bird was a reference to hunting the wren, an old St Stephen’s Day custom in parts of England and Ireland, when boys hung a dead wren from a stick and processed through their village reciting a verse:
The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,
St Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze;
Although he is little his family is great,
I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.
A simpler explanation might be that robins had earlier appeared on Valentine cards, their red breasts a symbol of the heart, and the image was unthinkingly transferred.
* For those who feel ‘Compliments of the Season’ is a mealy-mouthed contemporary concession to the secular twenty-first century, the phrase was widely printed on cards from the 1860s.
* Hone loses a little credibility by citing a comic anthology entitled Busby’s Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes as his source. A twentieth-century folklore expert records the first surviving reference to the practice of hodening only to 1807. He adds dryly that any descriptions of traditions that include the words ‘pagan’, ‘fertility’ or ‘Celt’ are likely to be dubious, while those using ‘sacrifice’, ‘Druid’, ‘earth goddess’ or ‘vegetation spirit’ are ‘complete nonsense’.
* The Oxford English Dictionary, with some hesitation, finds the origin of ‘hogmanay’ in the Middle French word for new year. It also lists spellings that include hagmena, hagman heigh, hagnuna, hogmena, hagmana, hagmane, hagmonay, hoguemennay, hogmoney, hugmenay, hangmanay and many more.
* It was Scottish émigrés, too, who promoted the tradition of seeing the New Year in together outdoors, although this did not become popular outside Scotland until the 1920s, when many copied the pattern of standing outside the Tron Kirk on Edinburgh’s High Street by congregating outside London’s St Paul’s. In the 1930s that moved to the more night-friendly, crowd-friendly Piccadilly, and then on to Trafalgar Square after World War II (possibly only coincidentally beside another church, St Martin-in-the-Fields). In the last few decades, the location has moved once more, down to the river where the fireworks can best be seen. In New York, the place to be until 1904 was Trinity Square, in Lower Manhattan, after which Times Square took over (see p. 179n).
* Citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, which historically has relied on books rather than more topical newspapers and journals for its sources, can often be pre-dated, but in this particular case, it is not easy to find any citations before 1850, although that first usage, and the next example I can find, from the Belfast News-Letter in 1864, both use the phrase as though it were already well known.
* The famous Times Square ‘ball drop’ was the brainchild of the son of German-Jewish immigrants to the Midwest. Adolf Ochs, the owner of the New York Times, had initially organized a German Midwestern fireworks displays for New Year, which drew the crowds away from Trinity Church. In 1907, however, Ochs settled on a novelty, adapting the old-fashioned maritime ‘time-ball’, a ball on a pole on the front of an observatory or other maritime station, which dropped at a predetermined hour every day.
† ‘Dutch’ meaning German was fairly standard, from ‘Deutsch’, as with the Pennsylvania Dutch, who were mostly immigrants from south-western Germany, the Alsace and the Moravians discussed earlier.
* Although some details seem more artistic than realistic: we are told visitors to the Slavic households kissed one of three logs in the fireplace, but it is hard to imagine unlit fires in midwinter Montana.
* As with so many popular Christmas events, there’s a perfectly charming and entirely fabricated history attached to this carol. The story goes that the church organ in the small town of Oberndorf fell into disrepair just before the all-important Christmas services, and so the curate (Joseph Morh, words) and the assistant organist (Franz Xaver Gruber, music) hastily cobbled together a carol to a guitar accompaniment. In reality, the church’s organ continued to give good service for some years after the carol’s appearance. More prosaically, the piece was heard by a visiting folk-music enthusiast who included it, as an ‘authentic’ Tyrolean song in a concert staged in Leipzig in 1823. A music publisher heard it there and published it as a traditional piece, and it took some time before the original authorship was determined.
* This attitude persists. In 1992, the otherwise entirely admirable editors of the New Oxford Book of Carols, despite their enormous knowledge of secular carols, treat religious carols as the template, with ‘tedious catalogues of eating and swilling’ the aberration.
* Stephen Foster (1826–64) was called the ‘father of American music’, writing over 200 parlour and minstrel songs, including ‘My Old Kentucky Home’, ‘Jeanie with the Light-brown Hair’, ‘O! Susannah!’, ‘Camptown Races’, ‘The Old Folks at Home (Swanee River)’ and ‘Beautiful Dreamer’.
* And nineteenth-century eggnog was a force to be reckoned with. One recipe recommended half a pint of brandy and a pint of Madeira (852ml of alcohol in total) to every pint (568ml) of milk. By comparison, the proportions in one modern recipe are 175ml of alcohol to 940ml of dairy.
† He was the brother of James ‘Jingle Bells’ Pierpont, p. 185, and both were the future uncles of the banker J. P. Morgan.
* The modern Québécoise dish of French fries, gravy and curd cheese named poutine appeared only in the later twentieth century. The origin of the word itself has variously been found in the English ‘pudding’, the Provençal for ‘bad stew’ and the Languedocien for ‘a mixture’, as well as a variety of other dialect words.
* The historical background was a revolt in the second century BC, after the Seleucid ruler, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, had ordered a temple to Zeus to be erected over the remains of the Temple in Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism. Yehuda HaMacabee (Judas Maccabeus, or Judah the Hammer), with his four brothers, led a rebellion, and by 165 BC the Seleucids had been routed. To rededicate the Temple, oil that had been declared pure by the high priest was needed. Only one jar could be found, enough to burn for a single day, and yet, miraculously, the flames continued to burn for eight days, until more pure oil could be found. An eight-day festival of lights was the result.
* A compromise was reached in which a few carols were interspersed among more secular offerings. Yet it is not coincidental that the beginnings of what was later named the ‘War on Christmas’ by the religiously inclined concerned about the supposed increasing secularization of the day, has its origins in the period. Not, however, in commerce, or not directly, but in the writings of that notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford, whose 1921 book The International Jew warned of a devious Jewish plan to eradicate both Christmas and Easter. The fear was renewed in 1958 in a pamphlet, published by the right-wing Commie-bashing John Birch Society, entitled ‘There Goes Christmas?!’ (confirmation of the soundness of the rule, never trust anyone who uses double punctuation). The author’s Cold War, Reds-under-the-beds paranoia was resurrected in the early twenty-first century, with the bad guys now the big-city liberals.
* While the American printmakers Currier and Ives produced thousands of prints with a vast range of subjects between 1834 and 1895, today their name is used mainly to conjure up a vanished rural America. While that was certainly among their stock-in-trade, so too were curr
ent events: carnage on the battlefield, Lincoln’s assassination – without question both entirely absent from twentieth-century department-store recreations.
* Eaton’s parades were always called Christmas parades: Canada’s colder climate puts the Thanksgiving harvest holiday in October, not at the end of November.
* The change was mocked in Holiday Inn, a film made the following year, when at one point the camera pans to a calendar with all the holidays written in. When it reaches November, a turkey scrambles from one square to the next, unsure of where to roost.
* This is not something that has faded, either. In 2007, the German National Tourist Office promoted the country’s Christmas markets as a destination for those ‘tired of commercialism taking over this holiday period’ – in other words, if you’re tired of commercialism, head for a place that exists to sell things.
* The Old-Dutch-style spellings of Dunder and Blixem – in modern Dutch, donder and bliksem, thunder and lightning – soon became rendered more Germanic, as Donner and Blitzen, possibly owing to the large number of German immigrants in the USA, before ending in a halfway house as Donder and Blixen.
* The tree at Rockefeller Center dates either from 1933, the first official tree, paid for by the buildings’ landlords, or from 1931, while the site was still under construction, when an unlit tree, decorated by the workmen, was erected by their pay-desk. By the end of the twentieth century half a million people visited this tree every weekend.
* And as always, Chanukah won’t be left out: the White House began holding an annual menorah-lighting ceremony in 1979; there has been a menorah beside Oslo’s tree in Trafalgar Square from 2007.
* Yet it looks as if this 150-year-old tradition might not survive the electronic world. By the beginning of World War II, the population of England and Wales sent, on average, ten cards each; by 1977, that had risen to eighteen; by 1992, it was twenty-seven. But by 2014, that figure had halved, to fourteen cards per person, the first ever fall in numbers in the history of Christmas cards.
* The BBC was established in October 1922 by a number of US and UK electrical companies who sold radios and wanted to increase their market by improving the available content. It was taken into public ownership in 1927.
* The continuing process of myth-making can be seen in the film The King’s Speech (2010), a triumph-over-adversity narrative of George VI’s struggles with his stammer against the perceived need to make this annual broadcast in a time of war. While the film portrays his speech as a heart-warming success, at the time one working-class woman wrote in her diary: ‘I wish he would not speak’; his broadcast was ‘a most uncomfortable quarter of an hour’ which she spent ‘wishing the whole time that I could do it for him’. How typical she was we cannot know, but this is the kind of voice that the airwaves exist to contradict.
* In 1922 the playwrights George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly parodied Tiny Tim’s ‘God bless us every one’, making it Scrooge’s company slogan as Tiny Tim Products takes off. And plenty more comedy versions unconsciously replicate the money aspect, instead of reform and charity. Mickey’s Christmas Carol in 1974 features Scrooge McDuck driving a mini-tractor through his piles of gold; in 1988, Blackadder’s Christmas Carol makes Ebenezer Blackadder, the family’s ‘white sheep’, ‘the kindest, loveliest man in all England’, who must learn to be miserly so that his descendants can prosper.
* More than a century earlier, also in Indiana, although Christmas trees had then only recently arrived in the Midwest, the banker Calvin Fletcher followed the Tree Rule too, erecting a tree at home when his children were young; once they were grown, the tree moved to the houses where his grandchildren lived.
* Of course, ‘home’ is a fluid term. In one Swedish survey, 80 per cent said they spent Christmas Eve ‘at home’, yet 61 per cent of households reported six people or more were present at their Christmas Eve, in a country where the average number of people per household is fractionally over 2.
* Possibly some of the impetus came from Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia, which used Tchaikovsky’s suite to great effect.
* Nor is he even a descendant of Siberian shamans, an enticing 1980s theory that suggested Santa’s origins were found in these men who, in trances instigated by the consumption of fly-agaric mushrooms, wore red and white robes, flew through the air in sleighs guarded by reindeer spirits and entered houses through their smoke-holes. Sadly, Siberian shamans were later discovered not to travel by sleigh in trances, to have little or nothing to do with reindeer spirits, nor to wear red and white, nor descend through smoke-holes.
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