12th Night - Just a Bit of English Literature

First Folio William Shakespeare wrote the play Twelfth Night, circa 1601.

William Shakespeare wrote a play called Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, but it did not deal with the traditional religious holiday. Steve Sohmertells us that Shakespeare wrote Twelth Night for two performances: (1) on Twelfth Night 1602 Gregorian, and (2) on Candlemas 2 February Julian. The title 'Or What You Will' refers to Queen Elizabeth's decision to retain England's Old Julian calendar (27 Dec Julian = 6 Jan Gregorian).

Those interested in Elizabethan Christmas - Twelfth Night customs in literature might be interested in the details imparted in Steve Roth's “Hamlet as The Christmas Prince: Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, Revels, and Misrule” in Early Modern Literary Studies 7.3 (January, 2002). Among cited sources of this article, one might read, Popular and Popish Superstitions and Customs On Saints’-Days and Holy-Days in Germany and Other Papist Lands A. D. 1553, Being the Fourth Booke of “The Popish Kingdome, or reigne of Anitchrist, written in Latine verse by Thomas Naogeorgus (or Kirchmaier), and englyshed by Barnabe Googe. . . Anno 1570.

Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness was performed on 6 January 1605 at the Banqueting House in Whitehall. It was originally entitled The Twelvth Nights Revells. The accompanying Masque, The Masque of Beauty was performed in the same court the Sunday night after the Twelfth Night in 1608.

Robert Herrick's(1591-1674)poem Twelfe-Night, or King and Queene, published in 1648, describes the election of king and queen by bean and pea in a plum cake, and the homage done to them by the draining of wassail bowls of "lamb's-wool", a drink of sugar, nutmeg, ginger and ale.

Twelfth Night: or, King and Queen

NOW, now the mirth comes
With the cake full of plums,
Where bean's the king of the sport here ;
Beside we must know,
The pea also
Must revel, as queen, in the court here.

Begin then to choose,
This night as ye use,
Who shall for the present delight here,
Be a king by the lot,
And who shall not
Be Twelfth-day queen for the night here.

Which known, let us make
Joy-sops with the cake ;
And let not a man then be seen here,
Who unurg'd will not drink
To the base from the brink
A health to the king and queen here.

Next crown a bowl full
With gentle lamb's wool :
Add sugar, nutmeg, and ginger,
With store of ale too ;
And thus ye must do
To make the wassail a swinger.

Give then to the king
And queen wassailing :
And though with ale ye be whet here,
Yet part from hence
As free from offence
As when ye innocent met here.

Charles Dickens' 1843 A Christmas Carol briefly mentions Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present visiting a children's Twelfth Night party. "It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared to be condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of it, until they left a children's Twelfth Night party, when, looking at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that its hair was grey."

In Chapter 6 of Harrison Ainsworth's 1858 novel Mervyn Clitheroe, the eponymous hero is elected King of festivities at the Twelfth Night celebrations held in Tom Shakeshaft's barn, by receiving the slice of plum cake containing the bean; his companion Cissy obtains the pea and becomes queen, and they are seated together in a high corner to view the proceedings. The distribution has been rigged to prevent another person gaining the role. The festivities include country dances, and the introduction of a "Fool Plough", a plough decked with ribands brought into the barn by a dozen mummers together with a grotesque "Old Bessie" (played by a man) and a Fool dressed in animal skins with a fool's hat. The mummers carry wooden swords and perform revelries. The scene in the novel is illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). In the course of the evening, the fool's antics cause a fight to break out, but Mervyn restores order. Three bowls of gin punch are disposed of, and at eleven o'clock the young men make the necessary arrangements to see the young ladies safely home across the fields.

Puritan Assault at St Andrews on Christmas during the 1600s

A 1660 English illustration from A Book of Roxburghe Ballads.  This particular ballad is The Merry Boys of Christmas or The Milk-Maids New-Years-Gift.

""Mark Stoyle investigates popular resistance to the Puritan assault on Christmas during the 1640s and 1650s...As the year 1645 limped towards its weary close, a war-torn England shivered beneath a thick blanket of snow. A few months earlier, parliament’s New Model Army, led by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, had routed the forces of Charles I at the battle of Naseby. Although that defeat had struck the king’s cause a mortal blow, the royalists still refused to surrender, and the bloody Civil War which had divided the country ever since 1642 continued to rage.

"Under constant pressure from the armies of both sides to supply them with money, clothing and food, few Englishmen and women can have been anticipating a particularly merry Christmas. Yet, for those who lived in the extensive territories which were controlled by the king’s enemies, there was to be no Christmas this year at all – because the traditional festivities had been abolished by order of the two Houses of Parliament sitting at Westminster.

"From Charles’s beleaguered wartime capital in Oxford, the royalist satirist John Taylor – by now in his mid-60s, but nevertheless one of the king’s most indefatigable literary champions – issued a cry of anguish at this assault on England’s time-honoured customs. All of the “harmless sports” with which people had long celebrated Christ’s nativity “are now extinct and put out of use… as if they had never been,” Taylor lamented in his pamphlet The Complaint of Christmas, and “thus are the merry lords of misrule suppressed by the mad lords of bad rule at Westminster”.

"So why had the parliamentarians decided to wage war on Christmas – and how did those, like Taylor, who were determined to defend the traditional celebrations, fight back?

"The attack on the feast of Christmas had deep roots. Long before the Civil War began, many zealous Protestants, or ‘Puritans’, had been troubled both by the boisterous nature of the festivities which took place at Christmas and by the perceived association of those festivities with the old Catholic faith. During the early 1600s, most English Puritans had been prepared to tolerate Christmas. Following the rebellion of the Presbyterian Scots against Charles I in 1637, however, all this was to change.

"The Scottish Kirk, which was itself fiercely Protestant, had abolished Christmas as long ago as the 1560s and, although James I had managed tentatively to restore the feast in his northern kingdom in 1617, it was banned there once again after his son’s defeat by the Scots in 1640.

"From this time onwards, attitudes towards Christmas among English Puritans began to harden. And as political tensions between Charles I and his opponents in parliament rose during 1641 so a handful of Puritan extremists took it upon themselves to abandon the celebration of Christmas.

"Following the outbreak of full-scale Civil War between king and parliament in 1642, John Taylor became one of the first to allude in print to the radicals’ decision to dump Christmas. In a satirical pamphlet published in January 1643 – a pamphlet which was clearly intended to appeal to a wide popular audience – Taylor provided his readers with the text of A Tub Lecture, which, he claimed, had been preached by a godly joiner to a group of Puritans at Watford “on the 25 of December last, being Christmas day”.

"In this fictitious address, the ‘lecturer’ is shown assuring his audience that they should not “conceive of me to be so superstitious, as to make any conscience of… this day, because the Church hath ordained [it]” to be a holy feast. “No, God forbid I should be so profane,” the ‘lecturer’ goes on, “rather it is a detestation of their blindness that have brought me hither this day, to enlighten you… [and] I give you to understand that the very name of Christmas is idolatrous and profane, and so, verily, are the whole 12 days [of Christmas] wherein the wicked make daily… sacrifices to riot and sensuality”.

"Here, Taylor was hinting to his readers that the godly parliamentarians posed a potential threat to Christmas itself. Eight months later, that threat was to become all too real.

1600s woodcut of Christmas celebration

"Seizing the initiative

"One of the clauses of the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ which parliament signed with the Scots in September 1643 stated that, in exchange for Scottish military assistance against the king, MPs would ensure that further “reformation” of the Church of England took place. As Ronald Hutton has observed, this clause encouraged religious radicals on the ground to seize the initiative and to attack those aspects of the traditional ecclesiastical calendar which they disliked.

"Three months later, a number of Puritan tradesmen in London opened up their shops for business on 25 December in order to show that they regarded this day as no different from any other, while several London ministers kept their church doors firmly shut. Meanwhile, many MPs turned up to sit in the parliament house, thus making their own disdain for the customary Christmas holiday very clear.

"During the following year, moreover – when Christmas Day happened to coincide with one of the monthly fast days upon which parliament’s supporters were enjoined to pray for the success of their cause – MPs ordered, not only that the fast day should be “observed” instead of the traditional feast, but also that the fast should be kept “with the more solemn humiliation, because it may call to remembrance our sins, and the sins of our forefathers, who have turned this feast, pretending [to] the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights”.

"In January 1645 the final nail was hammered into Christmas’s coffin, when parliament issued its new Directory for the Public Worship of God, a radical alternative to the established Book of Common Prayer, which made no reference to Christmas at all. Thus the way was paved for the ‘anti-Christmas’ of 1645 – a day upon which, in Taylor’s words, a man might pass right through the parliamentary quarters, and “perceive no sign or token of any holy day”.

"The parliamentarians had abolished the high point of the English ritual year, and the cancellation of Christmas aroused huge popular resentment – not just in the royalist camp, but in the districts controlled by parliament, too. As early as December 1643, the apprentice boys of London rose up in violent protest against the shop-keepers who had opened on Christmas Day, and, in the words of a delighted royalist, “forced these money-changers to shut up their shops again”.

"There were further dark mutterings the next year. On 24 December 1644, the editor of a pro-parliamentarian news-pamphlet expressed his support for the MPs’ decision to favour the monthly fast over the traditional feast, but admitted that “the parliament is cried out on” by the common people as a result, with incredulous shouts of “What, not keep Christmas? Here’s a Reformation indeed!”

"Many ordinary Londoners continued to show a dogged determination to keep Christmas special during the following year, and John Taylor’s decision to rush into print at this time with his Complaint of Christmas – a work which bore the same title as a pamphlet urging the enthusiastic observance of the mid-winter feast, which he had published as long ago as 1631 – was clearly motivated by a desire to stir up popular resentment against the parliamentarian leadership, as well as to turn a quick profit for its poverty-stricken author.

"How far Taylor succeeded in these aims it is impossible to say, but his satire quickly provoked a parliamentarian counter-satire entitled The Arraignment, Conviction and Imprisoning of Christmas. Published in January 1646, this publication took great pleasure in conflating Taylor himself with the symbolic character of ‘old Christmas Day’ whose persona the royalist writer had assumed in his own previous pamphlets. In one passage, Taylor/‘old Christmas Day’ – here described as “an old, old, very old grey-bearded gentleman” – is portrayed sitting dejectedly in the midst of the king’s shrinking territories, while desperately urging “all you that ever think to see Christmas again, stick to me now close!”

"Any lingering hopes on the part of the royalists that popular anger at the abolition of Christmas might somehow transform their military fortunes were soon to be dispelled. During early 1646, Charles I’s remaining field forces melted away almost as fast as the winter snow and by April the game was clearly up for the king. In the closing verse of a contemporary ballad, a gloomy royalist writer suggested that the collapse of the king’s cause had sealed the fate of Christmas itself, remarking: “To conclude, I’ll tell you news that’s right, Christmas was killed at Naseby fight.”

"Yet matters were not so simple, for, even though the king’s armies had been beaten out of the field and he himself had fallen into the hands of his enemies, most Englishmen and women continued to cling to their traditional Christmas customs. So strong was the popular attachment to the old festivities, indeed, that during the postwar period a number of pro-Christmas riots occurred. In December 1646, for example, a group of young men at Bury St Edmunds threatened local tradesmen who had dared to open their shops on Christmas Day, and were only dispersed by the town magistrates after a bloody scuffle. 

"Pro-Christmas riots

"Worse was to follow in 1647 – despite the fact that, on 10 June that year, parliament has passed an ordinance which declared the celebration of Christmas to be a punishable offence. On 25 December 1647, there was further trouble at Bury, while pro-Christmas riots also took place at Norwich and Ipswich. During the course of the Ipswich riot, a protestor named ‘Christmas’ was reported to have been slain – a fatality which could be regarded as richly symbolic, of course, of the way that parliament had ‘killed’ Christmas itself.

"In London, a crowd of apprentices assembled at Cornhill on Christmas Day, and there “in despite of authority, they set up Holly and Ivy” on the pinnacles of the public water conduit. When the lord mayor despatched some officers “to pull down these gawds,” the apprentices resisted them, forcing the mayor to rush to the scene with a party of soldiers and to break up the demonstration by force.

"The worst disturbances of all took place at Canterbury, where a crowd of protestors first smashed up the shops which had been opened on Christmas Day and then went on to seize control of the entire city. This riot helped to pave the way for a major insurrection in Kent in 1648 that itself formed part of the ‘Second Civil War’ – a scattered series of risings against the parliament and in favour of the king, which Fairfax and Cromwell only managed to suppress with great difficulty.

"Following parliament’s victory in the Second Civil War and the execution of Charles I in 1649, demonstrations in favour of Christmas became less common. There can be no doubt that many people continued to celebrate Christmas in private, and in his pamphlet The Vindication of Christmas (1652), the tireless John Taylor provided a lively portrait of how, he claimed, the old Christmas festivities were still being kept up by the farmers of Devon.

The Vindication of Christmas 1652

"Nevertheless, recent scholarship has shown that, as time went by, Christmas effectively ceased to be celebrated in the great majority of churches. It was ironic, to say the least, that while the godly had failed to suppress the secular Yuletide festivities which had vexed them for so long, they had succeeded in ending the religious observance of Christmas!

Following Cromwell’s installation as lord protector in 1653, the celebration of Christmas continued to be proscribed. While he had not been personally responsible for ‘cancelling Christmas’ in the first place, it is evident that both Cromwell and the other senior members of his regime were behind the ban, frequently transacting government business on 25 December as if it were a day just like any other.

"Only with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was ‘old Christmas Day’ finally brought back in from the cold, to widespread popular joy. John Taylor had died some years before, but if he could have foreseen that, two centuries later, Charles Dickens would be reprising the role which Taylor had made his own – that of the mouthpiece of the ‘true Christmas spirit’ – and that a century and a half later still, the celebration of Christmas would remain as ubiquitous in England and Wales as ever, he would doubtless have felt that his labours had been worthwhile.

"The defenders of Christmas had weathered the storm."

Text From the BBC History Magazine  Sunday 22nd December 2013

Submitted by Emma McFaron

Solstice & Advent Changed a Bit in 19C Britain

19C Mummers. From a MS. in the Bodleian Library

Development of the Christmas Spirit from Pagan Saturnalia to Victorian Feasts.

Written by J.A.R. Pimlott in History Today Volume 3: Issue: 12 1953 See history.com here.

"The English Christmas was largely reshaped in the 19C, but to understand what happened it is necessary to look back to the “old” Christmas out of which it developed.  The festivities derived  from the pagan midwinter celebrations at the time of the December solstice, which had the promotion of fertility as one of their chief purposes.

"The middle of winter has long been a time of celebration around the world. Centuries before the arrival of the man called Jesus, early Europeans celebrated light and birth in the darkest days of winter. Many peoples rejoiced during the winter solstice, when the worst of the winter was behind them and they could look forward to longer days and extended hours of sunlight.

"In Germany, people honored the pagan god Oden during the mid-winter holiday. Germans were terrified of Oden, as they believed he made nocturnal flights through the sky to observe his people, and then decide who would prosper or perish. Because of his presence, many people chose to stay inside.

"In Scandinavia, the Norse celebrated Yule from December 21, the winter solstice, through January. In recognition of the return of the sun, fathers and sons would bring home large logs, which they would set on fire. The people would feast until the log burned out, which could take as many as 12 days. The Norse believed that each spark from the fire represented a new pig or calf that would be born during the coming year.

"Eating & drinking were always an important feature of midwinter festivals & Christmas observances.  The end of December was a perfect time for celebration.  At that time of year, most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed during the winter. For many, it was the only time of year when they had a supply of fresh meat. In addition, most wine and beer made during the year was finally fermented and ready for drinking.

"In Rome, where winters were not as harsh as those in the far north, Saturnalia—a holiday in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture—was celebrated. Beginning in the week leading up to the winter solstice and continuing for a full month, Saturnalia was a hedonistic time, when food and drink were plentiful and the normal Roman social order was turned upside down. For a month, slaves would become masters. Peasants were in command of the city. Business and schools were closed so that everyone could join in the fun.

"Also around the time of the winter solstice, Romans observed Juvenalia, a feast honoring the children of Rome. In addition, members of the upper classes often celebrated the birthday of Mithra, the god of the unconquerable sun, on December 25. It was believed that Mithra, an infant god, was born of a rock. For some Romans, Mithra's birthday was the most sacred day of the year.

"In the early years of Christianity, Easter was the main holiday; the birth of Jesus was not celebrated. In the fourth century, church officials decided to institute the birth of Jesus as a holiday. Unfortunately, the Bible does not mention date for his birth (a fact Puritans later pointed out in order to deny the legitimacy of the celebration). Although some evidence suggests that his birth may have occurred in the spring, 

Pope Julius I chose December 25. It is commonly believed that the church chose this date in an effort to adopt and absorb the traditions of the pagan Saturnalia festival. First called the Feast of the Nativity, the custom spread to Egypt by 432 and to England by the end of the sixth century. By the end of the eighth century, the celebration of Christmas had spread all the way to Scandinavia. Today, in the Greek and Russian orthodox churches, Christmas is celebrated 13 days after the 25th, which is also referred to as the Epiphany or Three Kings Day. This is the day it is believed that the three wise men finally found Jesus in the manger.

"By holding Christmas at the same time as traditional winter solstice festivals, church leaders increased the chances that Christmas would be popularly embraced, but gave up the ability to dictate how it was celebrated. By the Middle Ages, Christianity had, for the most part, replaced pagan religion. On Christmas, believers attended church, then celebrated raucously in a drunken, carnival-like atmosphere similar to today's Mardi Gras. Each year, a beggar or student would be crowned the "lord of misrule" and eager celebrants played the part of his subjects. The poor would go to the houses of the rich and demand their best food and drink. If owners failed to comply, their visitors would most likely terrorize them with mischief. Christmas became the time of year when the upper classes could repay their real or imagined "debt" to society by entertaining less fortunate citizens.

"Little is known about the midwinter observances in Britain upon which Augustine & his successors sought to superimpose the Christian feast of the Nativity. There is a tantalizing reference to the heathen “Yule” in Bede, but for the most part it is necessary to rely on surmise. The story of the English Christmas from the Conversion to the Conquest, however, is epitomized in the instructions which Gregory the Great sent to Augustine. He was to be careful not to alarm the people by interference with heathen ceremonies, & the Pope specifically advised him to allow converts to kill & eat large numbers of oxen to the glory of God at the Christmas festival, as they had formerly done to the Devil.

"Until it had consolidated its position, the Church was obliged to acquiesce in the continuance of many pagan observances; but, as time went on, it was able to effect a synthesis between the old & the new in which the grosser customs had no place. Alfred & other Kings joined with the ecclesiastical authorities in prescribing that the Twelve Days should be kept as a period of festival & abstention from work. Even though the people still performed their traditional dances in the precincts of the church at Christmas, at least they came to church to do so. And a Christian background was provided for the feasting, the telling of tales, the nunstrelsy, the games, the wassailing, & the jousting, with which the Twelve Days were marked.

"The first chapter in the story may conveniently be closed in 1043, when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the first time spoke of December 25th as “Christmas” instead of “midwinter” or “midwinter’s mass.” By the 11C the main elements in the Christmas tradition, which the Normans inherited, had been established. The Twelve Days were the chief period of annual holiday— a sensible recognition of economic realities in a rural society, as well as a compromise with popular tradition. Survivals from paganism had been so successfully blended with Christian observances that even the Church had come to accept the mixture. What principally distinguished this complex of customs from those of today was their communal character; they involved the participation of the whole community, & were focused on some central point, whether it was the church or the hall of the local lord or magnate.

"The Norman Conquest led to no fundamental change in this pattern. One of its consequences, however, was to expose England to Continental Christmas traditions that went back to the Saturnalian & other celebrations of imperial Rome. Though the Continental “Feast of Fools” was never fully transplanted here, among the customs that it contributed to the English Christmas were the “Boy Bishop” ceremonies & the “lords of misrule,” who in the later Middle Ages were common under various names at the Court, in noble houses, & at colleges & inns of court.

"Saturnalian customs never took deep root in England, & the major innovations between the Conquest & the Reformation were largely native in character. The Nativity drama, evolved as a medium of religious instruction, became one of the chief forms of popular art & the forerunner of the secular theatre. But it was the carol that was the main literary glory of the mediaeval English Christmas. Imported in the first place from France & Italy, on English soil it was transformed from a dance song into the medium for some of the loveliest expressions of the English lyrical genius.

"The immediate impact of the Reformation upon Christmas observances was so slight as to be hard to discern... Carols & carol-singing also went into a decline, though this was due rather to the development of instrumental music than to religious reasons. On the surface, things continued much as before, but the changes that were taking place underneath were so fundamental that, when the crisis came under the Commonwealth & Protectorate, it was all the more explosive for having been delayed...

"In the early 17C, a wave of religious reform changed the way Christmas was celebrated in Europe. When Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan forces took over England in 1645, they vowed to rid England of decadence and, as part of their effort, cancelled Christmas. By popular demand, Charles II was restored to the throne and, with him, came the return of the popular holiday.

"The agricultural revolution, the expansion of trade & industry, the growth of the towns, the liquidation of the monastic estates, the increasing differentiation between social classes, all contributed imperceptibly but surely to the disintegration of the “feudal” Christmas of the manor, the gild, & the mediaeval corporation...The author of the late sixteenth-or early 17C verses, The Lamentation of Christmas, deplored the decline of the rural Christmas, attributing it to economic & social causes, which included the exodus of “great men” to London, rural depopulation as a result of sheep-farming, the impoverishment of the farmers, & the high cost of living.

"Herrick’s vivid & delightful descriptions of the countryman’s Christmas are evidence of the vitality of the old customs, even when the Puritan attack was at its height. As for the towns, the old Christmas is nowhere more faithfully summed up than in Ben Jonson’s Christmas Masque (1616), in which the eight sons & two daughters of the central figure, old Gregory Christmas, epitomize the main institutions of the season: “Mis-Rule, Caroll, Minc’d Pie, Gamboll, Post & Paire, New-Yeares-Gift, Mumming, Wassail, Offering, Babie-Cake.”

"Hezekiah Woodward succinctly stated the chief items of the Puritan indictment in the title of the tract he published in 1656: “Christmas Day, the old Heathens' Feasting Day in honour to Saturn their Idol-God, the Papists' Massing Day, the Superstitious Man's Idol Day, the Multitudes' Idle Day, Satan's That Adversary's Working Day, the true Christian Man’s Pasting Day.”

"There were popular uprisings against the Puritan ban, but, as John Evelyn, among others, discovered, the authorities did not hesitate to use the army to enforce it. That the Puritans merely accelerated an historical process is shown by the failure of Christmas to regain its former popularity after the Restoration. But...As Addison, Southey, Cowper & other writers bear witness, the traditional celebrations never entirely died out in rural England. Gay, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, are among those who provide evidence of the survival of the old forms in the towns; & the brisk business in Norfolk turkeys, which developed in the 18C, indicates the importance attached by the Londoner to a good Christmas table.

"Christmas was, nevertheless, by general consent in decline. The author of Poor Robin’s Almanack was perhaps indulging in poetic licence when he declared in 1709:

And Christmas scarcely should we know

Did not the almanacks it show.

"But David Garrick summed up the general view in A Christmas Tale (1774) '

Behold a personage well known to fame;

Once lov’d and honour’d—Christmas is my name!

"And Lamb was probably right in 1827; Old Christmas, he said, “cometh not with his wonted gait, he is shrunk 9 inches in the girth, but is yet a lusty fellow.”

"It is not easy to say why the process of decay should have been suddenly arrested in the middle of the 19C. The Christmas of Pickwick Papers, published in 1836-7, seems to be separated by an age from the Christmas of the Christmas Carol, published in 1843. Pickwick stressed the material side of the festivities, & looked back to the 18C. The Carol looked forward, & was largely responsible for the fact that Dickens, more than any other person, is associated with the modern conception of Christmas. Without neglecting the good things of the season the Carol dwelt upon the spiritual, though not specifically the religious, aspects of the festivity. As the immediate success of the Carol on both sides of the Atlantic showed, Dickens’s role was to translate into literary form the feelings that many inarticulate people were beginning to share.

"Dickens’s Carol was a protest against the hypocrisy that had made a mockery of conventional Christmas sentiments. Ebenezer Scrooge, at least, had the courage of his convictions; which was more than could be said of most of his fellow countrymen. The theme was not original; it was already part of the Christmas stock-in-trade of humanitarian & radical writers. Punch, for example, preached it year after year. “Christmas is fast approaching,” Punch wrote in 1841, “Let the physical weight of all corporations, all private benefactors of the poor, be distributed in eatables to the indigent & famishing.”

"The resurgence of Christmas did not prevent the continued decline of folk customs that had lost their meaning or were ill-adapted to modern conditions. A radical reshaping took place; Twelfth Night, mumming, wassailing, were some of the customs that were discarded. Many industrial workers, including children, had no other holiday than December 25th; & the giving of presents was transferred from New Year to Christmas Day...There were some revivals, the carol being the most important. It had never died out, but most of the mediaeval carols had been forgotten, & carol-singing had declined into little more than a rural folk survival.

"But the chief interest lies in the new customs that were introduced. There were at least three major innovations: in chronological order, the Christmas tree, the Christmas card, &...Father Christmas as we know him now. The Christmas tree in Germany went back at least to the early 17C; it is recorded at Strasbourg in 1605. But it remained localized in Germany, & largely unknown outside, until the second quarter of the 19C.

"The Christmas card...was a British invention. There was nothing novel, of course, about the exchange of seasonable greetings; it was an old custom. But in the age of the penny post the Christmas card was the obvious practical answer to the problem that became more complicated as Christmas was taken more seriously—how to communicate easily with friends & relatives who could not be greeted in person. Although it was separately invented in the forties by Sir Henry Cole, the Christmas card did not take hold until the late sixties. This delay is the harder to explain since it then acquired an astonishing vogue, which for the next generation almost amounted to a cult...

"Some time in the 3rd quarter of the century the traditional English Father Christmas began to be transformed into an anglicized version of the Dutch-American Santa Claus...He survived into the 19C as a grey-bearded symbol that was still being used in Punch as late as the eighties. He had nothing specifically to do with children, & was not associated with the filling of stockings or the bringing of gifts. These were the attributes of Santa Claus, who had evolved in New York State from the Saint Nicholas of the Dutch colonists, & sprang vividly to life in Clement Clarke Moore’s jeu d’esprit A Visit from Saint Nicholas, perhaps better known as The Night Before Christmas. Moore, who was a professor in an Episcopalian theological college, wrote these verses for his family: & they were published in 1823 without the approval of their author, who was afraid that they might prejudice his reputation as a serious poet. Like the Christmas Carol they happened to be perfectly timed. They struck the popular imagination, &, by clothing the Santa Claus myth in convincing detail, became a major influence in extending its currency throughout the world."