One of my favorite adaptations of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is Richard Donner’s 1988 film, Scrooged starring Bill Murray. Murray’s Scrooge is the president of a television network in New York who is attempting to put on a live Christmas Eve performance of Dickens’s story in high 1980s-executive-television fashion, until he meets his otherworldly visitors who urge him to change his money-focused life. One of the aspects which is so fascinating about Scrooged is that it is presenting a modernized conception of what Victorian London looked like in its sets of a faux London for the live television studio production of Carol. The fake streets are populated with ragged children and street salesmen who are covered with bags of fake snow, and Big Ben looms in the background although he wouldn’t be up for another 17 years after Carol was published. What a "Dickensian Christmas" should be to the television executives in the film is a fascinating look at memory and creation. The sets are a cookie-cutter image of the pleasant scenes which adorn many a greeting card, made with the express purpose to conjure the essence of Christmas in the viewer’s mind. This is done in Scrooged tongue-in-cheek, and is meant to be over the top in its generalizations, but at the same time, it is pulling on modernity’s concept of what Christmas should look like.
In Dickens’s story, the haunting takes place in one night on the anniversary of Marley’s death. Scrooge explains, "'Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years…He died seven years ago, this very night.'" In the spirit of Marley’s "death-day", here are seven lesser known facts about Christmas celebrations in the 1830s, the time in which the Dickens family lived and worked at Doughty Street (the site of the Dickens Museum in London). Do they coincide with your impressions of Victorian Christmases, are they still ways in which Christmas is celebrated today, or are they dinosaurs of our cultural past not even relegated to be part of a "Christmas memory" (to quote Truman Capote)?
What you thought you knew but didn’t about Christmas trees.
The historian Alexander Demandt wrote about Christmas trees: "the meaning is Christian, [but] the origins are ancient." The tradition of adorning a tree at Christmas time has its roots in ancient Germanic culture and is centered on bringing light into the home during the darkest period of the year. Referred to as the "Miracle Tree" by nineteenth century German author E. T. A. Hoffman, the Christmas tree is traditionally accredited to becoming part of Britain’s Christmas celebrations by Prince Albert of Germany. However, during the reign of King Henry VIII, Loseley manuscripts cite "'a tree of golde' which was adorned with bows, pomegranates and roses." An early Christmas tree perhaps? Of course, Prince Albert did help bring the tradition to the masses when he imported several spruce firs from his native Coburg in 1840, but they were no novelty to the aristocracy. In 1830s America, New Yorkers trekked across the East River to Brooklyn, where the (mostly western European) inhabitants had a "custom of dressing a Christmas tree." Thus, the celebration of trees in the 1830s was varied and spanned across continents along with the movement of peoples.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet: Father Christmas or Santa?
Father Christmas, Santa Claus and Saint Nicholas were all thought to have been at one point in time, separate people. In many pagan winter festivals, a Father Christmas figure would be present, who represented the coming of spring and wore a long green hooded cloak and a wreath of holly. When Vikings invaded Britain, their traditions of the Norse God Odin came with them. A transformed Odin visited Earth at the end of December wearing a white beard and a long blue hooded cloak. He rode through the world on his eight legged horse giving gifts to the good and punishments for the bad. "A Visit from Saint Nicholas," also more commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas" was written anonymously in 1823 but Clement Moore, an American professor of literature and divinity, acknowledged authorship in 1837. "The Night Before Christmas" is largely responsible for how we view Santa Claus today: clad in fur, covered in soot, cheery, jovial and with a miniature sleigh with eight reindeer. We have the Coca-Cola Company to thank for dressing Santa in red. The soft drink company developed a marketing advertisement in the 1930s that dressed Santa in their signature red color. Of course some of Santa’s minions are more menacing than others, take for example the Germanic Krampus, Saint Nicholas’s ghastly companion who punishes the bad children while Saint Nicholas rewards the good. Too disturbing to be pictured here!
Does Tofurky count as a Christmas meal? As far back as the sixteenth century, the turkey has been associated with Christmas, however as with many of Britain’s Christmas traditions, the turkey was popularized in the Victorian era. Turkeys were an American import (the bird is indigenous to North and Central America), but had been domesticated throughout England since the reign of Henry VIII. Turkeys were popular in the 1830s with European aristocracy, but were especially prized in France where one season nearly 36,000 were sold in Paris! In "A Christmas Carol," the Cratchits opt for goose just as many poor families would have done (if they could afford any meat at all), and the prize turkey remained in the butcher shop window until the reformed Scrooge bought it. Perhaps a commonality we can draw between the Victorians and ourselves is their use of all the leftovers of a Christmas turkey. Victorian housewives struggled with how to incorporate their turkey into meals but thankfully were very waste-conscious, and used the leftovers well into the New Year.
Plum Pudding and Fruit Cake: the two discarded treats of Christmas.
Plum Pudding traditionally has its roots in medieval England and actually contains NO plums as the pre-Victorian word for plums meant raisins. It is traditionally composed of a variety of fruits and held together by egg and suet. It is then aged for a month (or even a year!), the high alcohol content preventing it from spoiling. Catherine Dickens includes several plum pudding recipes in her cookbook What Shall We Have For Dinner (1852), but perhaps its elevation to holiday fare in the mid-nineteenth century is related to its use in "A Christmas Carol"? When Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Present, he is surrounded by a huge feast including: "turkeys, geese, game poultry…long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters…juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch." No wonder Scrooge was "reverent!" The cake we all love to hate, the fruitcake, hails from ancient Rome where something similar with barley and dried fruit was used as an energy bar, and indeed it too was also quite popular in the Middle Ages across Europe as dried fruits became more readily available. If you enjoyed this article, please don’t send the author a fruitcake.
Plastic Wreaths and Paper Holly: why the wreath is popular. Many ancient cultures used evergreen trees and garlands as décor to symbolize everlasting life (the Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Hebrews and European pagans all partook of this practice). Christmas decorations were recorded to have been present in London as early as the fifteenth century. Traditionally, Christmas colors included green, symbolizing eternal life, red for the blood of Jesus and gold, as it was one of the gifts given by the Three Magi and symbolized royalty. Green has been considered a hopeful colour in many cultures, "midwinter greenery was thought to radiate and summon vitality and fertility [and] to keep harm at bay." Wreathes have much history and symbolism dating to ancient Etruscan, Grecian and Roman ceremonies. They have usually been made of evergreens and symbolize strength, as evergreens stay true to their namesake throughout the winter. The first known association of wreathes with Christmas dates back to the German Lutherans who used the circular shape to help children count the approach of Christmas through the Advent season (every Sunday of Advent, white candles would be put in the wreath, and for every day in between a red one would be added).
I’ll have a blue Christmas without you.
Christmas time festivities were varied, but all centered on creating fun for friends and family. Two games recorded by Dickens’s younger daughter Mamie as being played at the Dickens Family Christmases were "Any Questions" and charades. When Scrooge and The Ghost of Christmas Present visit the former’s nephew and nieces, they’re playing many games including Yes and No (the same game as "Any Questions"), Blind Man’s Bluff and Forfeits. The Pickwick Papers also adds the Christmas game Snapdragon which is played at Dingley Dell farm. Putting on Christmas plays where the actors were comprised of your family and closest friends was also a popular Victorian entertainment, as was ghost story telling, which seems ill-fitting today, but perhaps explains why Dickens focused so acutely on ghost visitations for his Christmas tales. Mumming is formed from an ancient pagan tradition and means "making diversion in disguise." The tradition was that men and women would swap clothing, don masks and visit their neighbors while singing, dancing or putting on a play. The leader of the mummers would be dressed as Santa, and it is thought that in Britain, mumming was first done on St. Thomas’s day, or the shortest day of the year. Mumming occurs today around Christmas-time in some areas of west England, eastern provinces of Canada and in the US in Philadelphia.
Believe it or not, Christmas cards weren’t invented by the Hallmark Company!
It is thought that the first Christmas card was made in Germany some time before the nineteenth century, but the first mass-produced cards were designed in Torquay by artist John Calcott Horsley. Sir Henry Cole, a busy civil servant in 1840, did not have the time to write to all of his family and friends and so he commissioned Horsley to design a card with a message on it. The image Horsley designed depicted the feeding and clothing of the poor on each side and in the centre, a happy family having a drink and enjoying Christmas festivities. The printed text on the card was, "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year To You," which is still a popular saying on modern-day Christmas cards. It is interesting to note that the idea of charity at Christmas time was a popular notion in the early part of the nineteenth century, as it is with so many of Dickens’s Christmas stories.
Perhaps, as we round out 2017, we can strive to remember this nineteenth century idealism in the face of adversity? If 2017 has not been one of your favorite years, remember that the change which overcame Scrooge hinged on his belief in the importance of the needs of others. Scrooge knew that some would laugh at his newfound charity, "but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset."
Further Reading:
Bernd Brunner, Inventing the Christmas Tree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
Susan M. Rossi-Wilcox, Dinner for Dickens (Trowbridge: Prospect Books, 2005).
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fruitcake-101-a-concise-cultural-history-of-this-loved-and-loathed-loaf-26428035/