CHRISTMAS DAY.

Previous
25th December.
And now has arrived the great and important day itself which gives its title to the whole of this happy season, and the high and blessed work of man's redemption is begun. The pÆan of universal rejoicing swells up on every side; and after those religious exercises which are the language that man's joy should take first, the day is one of brightened spirits and general congratulation. In no way can man better express his sense of its inestimable gift than by the condition of mind that receives gladly, and gives freely; than by mustering his worldly affections, that he may renew them in the spirit of the time. This is not the proper place to speak more minutely of the religious sentiments and services which belong to the season than we have already done. We may merely remark that the streets of the city and the thousand pathways of the country are crowded on this morning by rich and poor, young and old, coming in on all sides, gathering from all quarters, to hear the particulars of the "glad tidings" proclaimed; and each lofty cathedral and lowly village church sends up a voice to join the mighty chorus whose glad burthen is—"Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace, good will toward men."
Woman pulling pudding out of large cauldron over fire Christmas Pudding.Page 286.

From the religious duties of the day, we must turn at once to its secular observances; and these we will take in the order, with reference to the progress of its hours, in which they come, mingling the customs of modern times with those of the past in our pages, as, in many respects, we wish our readers would do in practice.

The plate then on the other side represents the earliest, and not the least important, of the worldly ceremonies of the day, the due observance thereof being essential to the due observance of that later ceremony which no man holds to be unimportant, least of all on Christmas Day, the dinner. But, "oh! Molly Dumpling! oh! thou cook!" if that clock of thine be right, thou art far behindhand with thy work! Thou shouldst have risen when thou wast disturbed by the Waits at three o'clock this morning! To have discharged thy duty faithfully, thou shouldst have consigned that huge pudding at least two hours earlier to the reeking caldron! We are informed by those who understand such matters, that a plum pudding of the ordinary size requires from ten to twelve hours boiling; so that a pudding calculated for the appetites of such a party as our artist has assembled further on, for its consumption, and due regard being had to the somewhat earlier hour than on days in general at which a Christmas dinner is commonly discussed, should have found its way into the boiler certainly before six o'clock. Molly evidently wants a word of advice from the ancient bellman:—

"Up, Doll, Peg, Susan! You all spoke to me
Betimes to call you, and 'tis now past three,
Get up on your but-ends, and rub your eyes,
For shame, no longer lye abed, but rise;
The pewter still to scow'r and house to clean,
And you abed! good girls, what is't you mean?"

On the subject of the identity of the modern plum pudding with the ancient hackin, we are furnished with the following curious remarks by Mr. Crofton Croker, which we think well worth submitting for the consideration of the curious in such matters.

"The 'hackin,'" says that amusing old tract, entitled 'Round about our Coal Fire,' "'must be boiled by daybreak, or else two young men must take the maiden [i. e., the cook] by the arms, and run her round the market-place, till she is ashamed of her laziness.' Brand, whose explanation Hone in his Every-Day Book has adopted, renders 'hackin' by 'the great sausage;' and Nares tells us, that the word means 'a large sort of sausage, being a part of the cheer provided for Christmas festivities,'—deriving the word from hack, to cut or chop. Agreeing in this derivation, we do not admit Nares's explanation. 'Hackin,' literally taken, is mince-meat of any kind; but Christmas mince-meat, everybody knows, means a composition of meat and suet (hacked small) seasoned with fruit and spices. And from the passage above quoted, that 'the hackin must be boiled, i. e., boiling, by daybreak,' it is obvious the worthy archdeacon who, as well as Brand and Hone, has explained it as a great sausage, did not see that 'hackin' is neither more nor less than the old name for the national English dish of plum pudding.

"We have heard first-rate authorities upon this subject assert, the late Dr. Kitchener and Mr. Douce were amongst the number, that plum pudding, the renowned English plum pudding, was a dish comparatively speaking of modern invention; and that plum porridge was its ancient representative. But this, for the honor of England, we never would allow, and always fought a hard battle upon the point. Brand indeed devotes a section of his observations on popular antiquities to 'Yule-doughs, mince-pies, Christmas-pies, and plum porridge,' omitting plum pudding, which new Christmas dish, or rather new name for an old Christmas dish, appears to have been introduced with the reign of the 'merry monarch,' Charles II. A revolution always creates a change in manners, fashions, tastes, and names; and our theory is that, among other changes, the 'hackin' of our ancestors was then baptized plum pudding. In Poor Robin's Almanack for 1676, it is observed of Christmas,—'Good cheer doth so abound as if all the world were made of minced-pies, plum pudding, and furmity.' And we might produce other quotations to show that, as the name 'hackin' fell into disuse about this period, it was generally supplanted by that of plum pudding."

Plum pudding is a truly national dish, and refuses to flourish out of England. It can obtain no footing in France. A Frenchman will dress like an Englishman, swear like an Englishman, and get drunk like an Englishman; but if you would offend him forever, compel him to eat plum pudding. A few of the leading restaurateurs, wishing to appear extraordinary, have plomb-pooding upon their cartes; but in no instance is it ever ordered by a Frenchman. Everybody has heard the story of Saint Louis—Henri Quatre,—or whoever else it might be—who, wishing to regale the English ambassador on Christmas Day with a plum pudding, procured an excellent receipt for making one, which he gave to his cook with strict injunctions that it should be prepared with due attention to all particulars. The weight of the ingredients, the size of the copper, the quantity of water, the duration of time,—everything was attended to, except one trifle; the king forgot the cloth; and the pudding was served up like so much soup, in immense tureens, to the surprise of the ambassador, who was, however, too well-bred to express his astonishment.

Amongst our ancestors, the duties of the day which followed first after those of religion were the duties which immediately spring out of a religion like ours,—those of charity.

"When
Among their children, comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold,
Alas! then for the houseless beggar old!"
was a sentiment of which they never allowed themselves to lose sight. Amid the preparations making for his own enjoyment, and the comforts by which he set at defiance the austerities of the season, the old English gentleman did not forget the affecting truths so beautifully embodied in words by Mary Howitt:—
"In rich men's halls, the fire is piled,
And ermine robes keep out the weather;
In poor men's huts, the fire is low,
Through broken panes the keen winds blow,
And old and young are cold together.
"Oh! poverty is disconsolate!
Its pains are many, its foes are strong!
The rich man, in his jovial cheer,
Wishes 'twas winter through the year;
The poor man, 'mid his wants profound,
With all his little children round,
Prays God that winter be not long!"
Church in snow with people around Country Church, Christmas Morning.Page 290.
Immediately after the services of the day, the country gentleman stood of old, at his own gate (as we have represented him at page 109), and superintended the distribution of alms to the aged and the destitute. The hall, prepared for the festival of himself and his friends, was previously opened to his tenants and retainers; and the good things of the season were freely dispensed to all. "There was once," says the writer of "Round about our Coal Fire," "hospitality in the land. An English gentleman at the opening of the great day had all his tenants and neighbors enter his hall by daybreak; the strong beer was broached, and the black-jacks went plentifully about, with toast, sugar, nutmeg, and good Cheshire cheese.... The servants were then running here and there with merry hearts and jolly countenances. Every one was busy in welcoming of guests, and looked as snug as new-licked puppies. The lasses were as blithe and buxom as the maids in good Queen Bess's days, when they ate sirloins of roast-beef for breakfast. Peg would scuttle about to make a toast for John, while Tom run harum-scarum to draw a jug of ale for Margery."

Of this scene we have given a representation at page 42; and much of this ancient spirit, we hope and believe, still survives in this Christian country. The solemn festivals of ancient superstition were marked either by bloody sacrifice, secret revelling, or open licentiousness. There was no celebration of rites, real or symbolical, which might become a religion of cheerfulness, decency, and mercy. There was no medium between a mysteriousness dark and[291]
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gloomy as the grave, and a wild and savage enthusiasm or riotous frenzy, which mingled with the worship of the gods the impassioned depravity of human nature. From Moloch, upon whose dreadful altar children were offered, to Bacchus, at whose shrine reason and virtue were prostrated, there were none of the fabled deities of antiquity whose service united the spirit of devotion with innocent pleasures and the exercise of the domestic charities. This was reserved for the Christian religion, one of the marks of whose divinity it is that it can mingle with many of the pleasures, and all the virtues of the world, without sullying the purity of its glory,—without depressing the sublime elevation of its character. The rites of Ceres were thought profaned if the most virtuous believer of the divinity of that goddess beheld them without having undergone the ceremonies of special initiation. The worship of Saturn gave rise to a liberty inconsistent with the ordinary government of states. At the altar of Diana, on certain days, the Spartans flogged children to death. And the offerings which on state occasions the Romans made to Jupiter, were such as feudal vassals might offer to their warlike lord. But now, thank God!—to use the words of Milton's Hymn on the Nativity,—

"Peor and Baalim
Forsake their temples dim,
With that twice-batter'd God of Palestine;
And mooned Ashtaroth
Heaven's queen and mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine;
The Lybick Hammon shrinks his horn;
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.
"And sullen Moloch, fled,
Has left in shadows dread
His burning idol all of blackest hue;
In vain with cymbals' ring,
They call the grisly king,
In dismal dance about the furnace blue:
The brutish Gods of Nile as fast,
Iris, and Orus, and the dog Anubis haste.
"Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian grove or green,
Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud;
Nor can he be at rest,
Within his sacred chest;
Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud.
In vain, with timbrelled anthems dark,
The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipp'd ark.
"He feels from Judah's land
The dreaded Infant's hand;
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne;
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide;
Not Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine:
Our Babe, to show his God-head true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew."

Oh! how different were those religions of the passions and the senses from that of the sentiments and pure affections of the Christian heart; which, as it rises to heaven in sublime devotion, expands in charity towards its kind, until it comprehends all humanity in the bond of universal benevolence. To ameliorate the temporal, as well as elevate the spiritual state of man, is its distinguishing excellence, the sublime peculiarity of its character as a religious dispensation. All the systems of superstition were external and gross, or mysterious and occult. They either encouraged the follies and the passions of men, or by a vain and fruitless knowledge flattered their vanity. But Christianity came to repress the one and to dissipate the other; to make the exercise of the virtues the result and the proof of mental attachment to the doctrines which, while they afford grand subjects of eternal interest, contain the principles of all true civilization. It is in this religion alone that faith is the sister of charity; that the former brightens with the beams of another world the institutions by which the latter blesses this,—those institutions of mercy and of instruction which cover the land with monuments of humanity that are nowhere to be found but among the temples of our faith.

And now, when silent and desolate are even the high places over which Augustus ruled, fallen majestic Rome with all her gods, the religion proclaimed to the humble shepherds, whose sound was first heard by the moonlight streams and under the green boughs, has erected on the ruins of ancient grandeur a sublimer dominion than all those principalities of the earth which refused its hospitality. It came in gentleness and lowliness and the spirit of peace; and now it grasps the power of the universe, and wields the civilized energies of the greatest of all the nations to the beneficent extension of its authority,—imperishable in its glory, and bloodless in its triumphs!

men carrying in the boar's head on a platter Bringing in the Boar's Head.Page 295.

On the opposite side, our artist has given a lively and correct representation of the high festival anciently celebrated on Christmas Day in the old baronial hall; and has presented it at that important moment when the procession of the boar's head is making its way, with the customary ceremonies, to the upper table. Our account of Christmas would not be complete without some notice of this grand dish at the feasts of our ancestors, and some description of the forms which attended its introduction.

The boar's head soused, then, was carried into the great hall with much state, preceded by the Master of the Revels, and followed by choristers and minstrels, singing and playing compositions in its honor. Dugdale relates that at the Inner Temple, for the first course of the Christmas dinner, was "served in, a fair and large bore's head upon a silver platter, with minstrelsye." And here we would observe, what we do not think has been before remarked, that the boar's head carols appear to have systematically consisted of three verses. A manuscript indeed which we once met with, stated that the "caroll, upon the bringynge in of the bore's head, was sung to the glorie of the blessed Trinytie;" and the three subsequent illustrative specimens—in which the peculiarity mentioned may be observed—tend to confirm this notion. At St. John's, Oxford, in 1607, before the bearer of the boar's head—who was selected for his height and lustiness, and wore a green silk scarf, with an empty sword-scabbard dangling at his side—went a runner dressed in a horseman's coat, having a boar's spear in his hand, a huntsman in green carrying the naked and bloody sword belonging to the head-bearer's scabbard, and "two pages in tafatye sarcenet," each with a "mess of mustard." Upon which occasion these verses were sung:—

"The boare is dead,
Loe, heare is his head,
What man could have done more
Then his head of to strike,
Meleager like,
And bringe it as I doe before?
"He livinge spoyled
Where good men toyled,
Which made kinde Ceres sorrye;
But now, dead and drawne,
Is very good brawne,
And wee have brought it for ye.
"Then sett downe the swineyard,
The foe to the vineyard,
Lett Bacchus crowne his fall;
Lett this boare's head and mustard
Stand for pigg, goose, and custard,
And so you are welcome all."

So important was the office of boar's-head bearer considered to be, that, in 1170, Holinshed has chronicled the circumstance of England's king, Henry II., bringing up to the table of his son, the young prince, a boar's head, with trumpeters going before him. From this species of service it is probable that many of our heraldic bearings have originated. "The ancient crest of the family of Edgecumbe," observes Ritson, "was the boar's head crowned with bays upon a charger; which," he adds, "has been very injudiciously changed into the entire animal."

This same diligent arranger and illustrator of our old ballads gives us, in his collection of ancient songs, a Boar's-head Carol, which probably belongs to the fourteenth century, from a manuscript in his possession,—now, we believe, in the British Museum.

In die nativitatis.

"Nowell, nowell, nowell, nowell,
Tydyngs gode y thyngke to telle.
The borys hede that we bryng here,
Be tokeneth a prince with owte pere,
Ys born this day to bye vs dere,
Nowell.
"A bore ys a souerayn beste,
And acceptable in every feste,
So mote thys lorde be to moste & leste,
Nowell.
"This borys hede we bryng with song,
In worchyp of hym that thus sprang
Of a virgyne to redresse all wrong,
Nowell."

The printing-press of Wynkyn de Worde has preserved to us the carol believed to have been generally used, prior to 1521, upon these occasions; a modernized version of which continues to be sung in Queen's College, Oxford. It is entitled "A Caroll bringyne in the Bores heed;" and runs thus:—

A tradition of the same college states the introduction there of the boar's head (which according to Ritson, is now a mere representation "neatly carved in wood") to be contrived "as a commemoration of an act of valor performed by a student of the college, who while walking in the neighboring forest of Shotover, and reading Aristotle, was suddenly attacked by a wild boar. The furious beast came open-mouthed upon the youth; who, however, very courageously, and with a happy presence of mind, is said to have rammed in the volume, and cried grÆcum est, fairly choking the savage with the sage." To this legend a humorous "song in honor of the Boar's head at Queen's College, Oxford," refers, having for its motto, Tam Marti quam Mercurio, but for which we cannot afford space.

The ancient mode of garnishing the boar's head was with sprigs of sweet-scented herbs. Dekker, than whom we could not name a more appropriate authority on this subject, speaking of persons apprehensive of catching the plague, says, "They went (most bitterly) miching and muffled up and down, with rue and wormwood stuft into their eares and nostrils, looking like so many bore's heads, stuck with branches of rosemary, to be served in for brawne at Christmas." The following lines describe the manner of serving up this famous dish:—

——"if you would send up the brawner's head,
Sweet rosemary and bays around it spread;
His foaming tusks let some large pippin grace,
Or 'midst these thundering spears an orange place;
Sauce like himself, offensive to its foes,
The roguish mustard, dangerous to the nose;
Sack, and the well spiced hippocras, the wine
Wassail, the bowl with ancient ribands fine,
Porridge with plums, and Turkeys, with the chine."

Sack and hippocras are no longer to be found in our cellars; but, as we have shown, we still compound the wassail-bowl.

large gathering around table Christmas Dinner.Page 300.

The Christmas dinner of modern days is, as most of our readers know, a gathering together of generations, an assembling of Israel by its tribes. In the one before us, the artist has given a pretty extensive muster. We have them of the seven ages and the several professions. Contrast with this modern Christmas dinner, as well as with the high festival of yore, the dreary picture of a Christmas Day and dinner, under the stern prescription of the Puritans, as given in his Diary, by Pepys, the chatty secretary to the Admiralty. "1668, Christmas-day. To dinner," thus he writes, "alone with my wife; who, poor wretch! sat undressed all day till ten at night, altering and lacing of a noble petticoat; while I, by her, making the boy read to me the life of Julius CÆsar and Des Cartes' book of Music."

To the heads of the very respectable family before us, we have already been introduced, in an earlier part of this volume, and are glad to meet with them again, under circumstances so auspicious, and supported by their junior branches. In a family so flourishing, we might have expected to escape the exhibition of antiquated celibacy. But, no! that is clearly an old maid, who is hobnobbing with the gentleman in the foreground, and, we must say, there is something about him which carries a strong suspicion of old-bachelorship. We suppose the one and the other are to be found in most families. However, they are not the parties who least enjoy this sort of reunions. We fancy, it is known to most people that meetings of this description are very happy ones amongst the members of a family, and remarkably uninteresting to third parties. We should certainly prefer reading Des Cartes, with Pepys and his wife, to finding ourselves a "foreigner" in such a group as the present.

But the best of the day is yet to come! and we should have no objection to join the younger members of that group in the merry sports that await the evening. We need not give the programme. It is like that of all the other Christmas nights. The blazing fire, the song, the dance, the riddle, the jest, and many another merry sport, are of its spirits. Mischief will be committed under the mistletoe-bough, and all the good wishes of the season sent round under the sanction of the wassail-bowl.


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