Christmases Past & Present

By Ronnie Bray

Christmas when I was a boy was different, very different from what
it is for me today. Christmas in my childhood home was not at all a
religious occasion, and yet there was always a conspicuously
changed atmosphere that pervaded the season as if it crept in
unnoticed from a mysterious place that kept it prisoner all year
around, letting it run free for a short time to work its special magic
at Christmas.

As Christmastime draws near, I feel to contrast the Christmas

experiences of other people and times with my own Christmases and
times.

Most will readily agree that Christmas is a time to be with family

and loved ones. It is a hard time to be alone, and when it is not
possible to be in the midst of the ones we love and cherish, then the
soul thus deprived feels the pain of separation deeply. Charles
Dickens wrote of an enforced extended stay at an isolated inn, the
Holly Tree, on the Yorkshire moors during one Christmas, from
where he had hoped after a single night’s stay to travel on and spend
Christmas in the rosy warmth of the good company of his friends.

“When I travel,” he wrote, “I never arrive at a place but

what I immediately want to go away from it. Before I had
finished my supper of broiled fowl and mulled port, I had
impressed upon the waiter in detail my arrangements for
departure in the morning.
 “Breakfast and bill at eight. Fly [which is a horse drawn
carriage] at nine. Two horses, or, if needed, even four.

“Tired though I was, the night appeared about a week

long.

“In the morning I found that it was snowing still, that it

had snowed all night, and that I was snowed up. Nothing
could get out of that spot on the moor, or could come at
it. When they might cut their way to the Holly-Tree,
nobody could tell me.

“It was now Christmas Eve. Still being snowed up was a

thing I had not bargained for. I felt very lonely.”

The Christmases of my childhood were largely confined within the

isolating walls of my Fitzwilliam Street home, but there were
intimations that something momentous was taking place, and that
unnamed ‘something’ felt extremely virtuous. The atmosphere was
transformed so that even in the ever-present melancholy of wartime,
the air about us seemed changed, and people were more open,
unselfish, and good-natured than they usually were. A chattering
kindness infused social transactions that was not present at other
times of the year. And it was good – very good!

When I was a boy, there were very few motor cars in my town, but
it was remarkable to see their drivers stop in Christmas weather to
give lifts to total strangers to whom they had not been properly
introduced! A few days earlier those same drivers would not have
spoken to or had any regard for those they now so generously
assisted under the influence of the Spirit of Christmas.
The rich became passing kind to the poor, and even those
entrenched at opposite ends of the political spectrum saluted each
other as if they had been long lost brothers.

Ill-natured people who were uncomfortable in the presence of

children, patted tiny pixie-hooded heads and smiled mendaciously
as their troubled consciences robbed their pockets of a few pennies
while they uttered “Have a Merry Christmas, my dears,” through
their gritted teeth. Christmas had caught them in its invisible but
effective trap!

Although I realised that they were not all they could have been, in
one way or another my childhood Christmases were exciting, due to
my impatient expectation that extraordinary presents would appear,
delivered, I was told and so believed, by Father Christmas, who was
represented as a kindly personage whose dwelling was the frozen
wasteland around the North Pole. I knew too little of that area to
question such ‘facts.’

That was before Father Christmas had been fixed up with a Mother
Christmas and a company of elves, which is not surprising because
nothing stays exactly as it used to be, and our beloved institutions
have to be brought up-to-date every couple of generations to keep
them relevant.

I was to learn later that it was supposed to be a boy’s father who

acted the part of Father Christmas, but since my step-father didn’t
take to me, I presumed it was my mother who climbed the extra two
flights of stairs to hang the receptacles bearing my Christmas gifts.
However, on reflection, my presents were probably placed by my
Grandfather Bennett whose solitary attic bedroom I shared. Little
did he know how much his secret ministrations meant to me. Or
perhaps he guessed. Little acts of kindness make a child feel
protected from the harshness of life. Charles Dodgson, the author of
“Alice in Wonderland,’ wrote:.

Without, the frost, the blinding snow,

The storm-wind’s moody madness –
Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,
And childhood’s nest of gladness.
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.

Christmas then, as now, was rich with vestiges of pre-Christian

religions, when every tree might house a god, every animal be a
familiar, and the unknown forces of nature be venerated, feared, or
both.

The coming of Christianity to the British Isles had chased away

these imaginative religions, but their departure had not been
complete, for the garlands that once decked the groves of outlandish
pagan gods are now pinned to our walls to herald the coming of
Christmas, and sprigs of mistletoe that once yielded to the golden
knives of pagan priests, hung from our ceiling, although I cannot
remember any kissing taking place in my home, but who knows
what transpired when young eyes were closed and catch-all ears
snuffed shut by sleep?

In Christian England the only house of worship where

mistletoe was permitted was in the Minster at York, the
county town of Yorkshire. Mistletoe was frowned on
because of its ancient associations with Druids’ fertility
rites. But at York each Christmastide bundles of
 mistletoe were laid on the great altar before a sort of
‘Urbi et Orbi’ manifesto of ‘a public liberty, pardon, and
freedom to all sorts of inferior and wicked people at the
gates of the city to the four corners of the earth.’

In other places children played active parts in the festival of

Christmas. In some parts Yorkshire they wended their way from
door to door to summon dwellers with their traditional call,

We wish you a Merry Christmas

And a Happy New Year.
Please may we be
The Lucky Birds here?

Then the doors would open and the ‘Lucky Birds’ be handed a few
coppers. It is told that this custom still lives. There were other
customs that enchanted children in their Yorkshire Christmas. It
must be understood that Christmas was a time when more traditions
of family, community, and faith are loosed than in all the rest of the
year, and children figure largely in these. Author George Collard, in
his delightful and informative book ‘A Yorkshire Christmas,’ tells us
that the season was called Yorkshire’s ‘twelve days of madness, and
then he details some of the ancient folklore that in some form or
other yet survives.

Of these, the one that has always tugged at my heartstrings and

which brings tears to my eyes and a lump in my throat as it did in
my younger days is the legend that when Christmas Eve turned into
Christmas Day, the cattle in the byre would weep and kneel, and
that if any was present they would also be heard to speak! This
deathless lore has been forged by Thomas Hardy into a poem whose
exquisite simplicity betrays the power of earnest faith that the world
has a hard time holding onto, but which is present in the hearts of
children not yet tainted by the doubts of a materialistic world. It is
called, ‘The Oxen.’

The Oxen
By Thomas Hardy (1915)

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen.
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few believe

In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve
“Come; see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder comb

Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

My classmates talked about Christmas and its anticipated prizes for

weeks before it came. They chatted excitedly about what they
hoped ‘The Man in Red’ would bring to their bedsides – though
none of us dared risk calling him by any such impious name, lest he
be offended, and you know the cost of offending Father Christmas!

Children anticipated visits from favourite aunties, beneficent uncles,

and in, some cases, from spiteful cousins that would laugh at their
prezzies, and brag about their own. It seems that even Christmas
can not entirely transform contentious souls, although it opened
windows of opportunity for self-improvement, but their sour natures
shut such apertures as fast as they had opened, and life for the
cantankerous rolled on leaving them beyond the pale of the rapture
that brightened the spirits of harmonious folk. These differences in
human nature are well defined by Dickens in his excellent work, ‘A
Christmas Carol,’ at the moment when the miserly Ebeneezer
Scrooge is visited by his cheerful nephew, Fred.

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open that he

might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little
cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge
had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very
much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't
replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own
room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel,
the master predicted that it would be necessary for them
to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter,
and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort,
not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a

cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew,
who came upon him so quickly that this was the first
intimation he had of his approach.
"Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!"

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog

and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a
glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes
sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's nephew.

"You don't mean that, I am sure."

"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have

you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry?
You're poor enough."

"Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What right

have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be
morose? You're rich enough."

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the

moment, said "Bah!" again; and followed it up with
"Humbug."

"Don't be cross, uncle!" said the nephew.

"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in

such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out
upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but
a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding
yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for
balancing your books and having every item in 'em
through a round dozen of months presented dead against
you? If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly,
"every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on
 his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and
buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He
should!"

Although I have no reason to doubt that my Auntie Nora and Uncle

Will Stead and their four children, our cousins, Brian, Shirley,
Audrey, and Keith, visited us around Christmastime, I have no
recollection that they ever shared our feast, but neither do I
remember any but pleasant words passing between us, which is how
it has always has been, and still.

The French ‘Magasin Pittoresque’ of 1850 has an article

titled, "La Christmas," which includes an account of a
charitable act performed on Christmas Day, but whose
author stringently condemns the seasonably philanthropic
for deliberately and habitually avoiding the poor who sat
with them in Church on that festive day, concluding
dolefully that only in England are the old Yuletide
traditions honoured. He observes:

“Now still, in England, Christmas is a time for bringing

people together. The gifts which among us are given on
New Year's Day are exchanged among our neighbours on
the day of the Saviour’s birth. It is the time of banquets
and of a free and open hospitality across the isle. On
every side chimneys smoke; the baker's ovens overflow
with meats brought by modest households; there the least
rich cook their Christmas treat; spits turn; streetlights,
torches, lamps, candles shine in the foggy night; from
midnight, servants, the suppliers of great houses go
singing to present the Christmas box where offerings fall.
 Ah, let all men come to understand that he whose misery
one eases may see in you a benefactor, but one only
becomes the brother of those whose joys we share!”

Our Christmas came, as Christmas always does, and we children

were ready for it. On Christmas mornings, René, Arthur, and I
woke before Old Sol had blinked his een, or ere Chanticleer began
his dawn ditty, and scrambled to the bottom of our beds to unhook
the gift-laden pillowcases off the corner bedposts, and tip up the
knee socks that also hung with them that held without annual
variation an apple, an orange, and a shiny new penny. The
pillowcase held the present or presents. Our gifts might include a
book, and or a game, and we felt well done to.

Presents of a different kind were delivered courtesy of the

German Navy to Scarborough Castle at Christmas of
nineteen-fourteen. Although the Castle had not been used
as a military installation for more than two hundred and
fifty years, the German High Command decided to shell it
from their warships steaming through the North Sea.

Their principal targets were the ancient barrack buildings

that served no purpose, and after flattening these
insignificant structures they coldly bombed the town of
Scarborough, damaging buildings and inflicting fatalities
on those who were not engaged in the war effort in any
way except by keeping their morale high and their hopes
for victory strong, in the face of an action that served to
deliver to its perpetrators no advantages whatsoever.
It seemed to us in our World War Two Christmases, that every
Christmas was a white Christmas and more than passing cold
besides. The short trousers I wore – obligatory at that time for
English schoolboys – allowed the snow, the sleet, and the
unrelenting frost wet then freeze and chap my legs to a painful raw
redness that hurt all the more when I got back into the warm and
feeling returned to bring tears often in its wake. Emily Brönte’s
woeful lyric catches the awfulness of a winter that had been too
harsh, stayed too long, and had admitted tragedy under colour of
innocence.

It Was Night

It was night, and on the mountains

Fathoms deep the snow-drifts lay;
Streams and waterfalls and fountains
Down in darkness stole away.

Long ago the hopeless peasant

Lost his sheep all buried there:
Sheep that through the summer pleasant
He had watched with fondest care.

Now no more a cheerful ranger

Following pathways known of yore,
Sad he stood, a wildered stranger
On his own unbounded moor.

Safe in the warmth of a blazing coal fire at home, our Christmas

decorations were grand green paper garlands with deep red flowers
at intervals and slung at great peril to those who climbed rickety
stepladders to fix them to the walls with drawing pins, and a couple
of paper gala balls that opened to show their cunning constructions
and delightfully bright colours.

It was a sad sight when the austerity of wartime saw some of these
replaced with chains made of loops of paper lacking the depth of
colour, the shapes, and the antique texture of the traditional garlands
that did not look as if they had been constructed by unsophisticated
children. Looking back to a time eighty-seven years before I was
born, Catherine Waters wrote,

In 1848 the London Illustrated News carried a full-page

engraving of the Royal family encircling the Christmas
tree at Windsor castle; the engraving became widely
known from its reprinting, and was accompanied by a
description of the decorations used to adorn the tree and
an explanation of its function in the Royal household.
Clearly the custom of the tree met the needs of the new
Christmas that was in the making. It could be set up
inside the home, the centre of the Victorian family
Christmas, it was a vehicle for the giving of presents
suitable to the age and sex of their recipients and its
decoration was a source of great appeal to the children
who were rapidly becoming the focus of the institution.

We always had the same Christmas Tree. It was about two feet
high, and its base was an imitation plant pot made from wood,
painted red, and lined around with a few fine bands of gold. Its
branches were cleverly made of twisted wire into which were
inserted goose feathers that had been dyed green and split along the
length of their quills. Their barbs separated as the wire was wound
into a spiral, making favourable impressions the branches of fir
trees, each of which was tipped with a wooden holly berry.

It is told that eighth century Christian Saint Boniface

prevented a child from being put to death as a human
sacrifice by pagans when he knocked down the oak
sapling they were to use as the stake, and, miraculously, a
fir tree sprang up in its stead, whereupon Boniface
declared the tree holy and charged faithful Christians to
have one in their houses surrounded with love and
favours.

In eleventh century Europe fir trees were hung with

apples to symbolise the Tree of Life in the Garden of
Eden. Trees appeared in homes in 1521 when Princess
Hélène de Mecklembourg carried one to her home in
Paris after she married the Duc de Orleans. This custom
become so popular that Alsace almost ran out of pine
trees so their use was limited by statute to one tree to each
house.

Hanoverian Kings brought the Christmas Tree, or

Tannenbaum as they called it, to England, but the English
didn’t like the German Royal family and few followed
the custom until the reign of Queen Victoria. Decorations
were home made, but later in Victoria’s reign when the
tree became more popular, they were hung with
ornaments fashioned from silver wire, candles, tinsel, and
strings of glass beads. In eighteen eighty-two fancy
baubles made from garishly painted fine glass and electric
lights were introduced. Artificial trees were made in
 Germany in nineteen-thirty and were made from goose
feathers

Our well-worn glass baubles came out each Yuletide to deck the tree
along with tiny candles in crimped clip-on holders made of thin tin.
These were never lit because they represented a fire hazard and we
had no wish to further the work of an enemy whose seasonal gifts
included incendiary bombs delivered by small parachutes. Our
decorations seemed as eternal as Christmas itself. The tree was
always in place on the back sideboard on Christmas Morning to
greet us as we traipsed downstairs lugging our bulging sacks. In the
innocence of childhood we could not imagine a world without
Christmas, and yet ...

In 1643, Parliament abolished Christmas celebrations,

and Lord High Protector Oliver Cromwell banned
Christmas carols between 1649 and 1660. Cromwell
considered that Christmas should be kept as an intensely
sacred day so the only permitted celebration was a prayer
service and a suitable sermon.

We dared not venture downstairs too early to show each other our
gifts for fear of waking the Kaken, alias Nanny, who had strict rules
about children and what and when they could do what the house
regulations allowed. Going downstairs before a responsible and
approved grown-up had descended was not permitted, not even at
Christmas.

When the familiar tread of our aged attendants was heard as one
such left the bathroom to descend the wooden hill, then it was that
we dared also to descend to show what we had and to enjoy each
other’s gifts. I do not recall envy playing any part of these
discoveries. I do not remember everything about those times, but
cannot remember that particular passion raising its ugly head.

The English Christmas has been called, “ … the

Christmas by which all other Christmases are measured,
wherever Christmas is celebrated,” and a scribbler writing
about Sir Roger de Coverley, a fictional character who
typified the values of an old English country gentleman,
was portrayed as 'rather beloved than esteemed' in the
satirical magazine The Spectator of Tuesday, January 8,
1712, wrote:

“Mr. Spectator,

“Sir Roger, after the laudable Custom of his Ancestors,

always keeps open House at Christmas. I learned from
him that he had killed eight fat Hogs for the Season, that
he had dealt about his Chines very liberally amongst his
Neighbours, and that in particular he had sent a string of
Hogs-puddings with a pack of Cards to every poor
Family in the Parish.

“I have often thought,” says Sir Roger, “it happens very

well that Christmas should fall out in the Middle of the
Winter. It is the most dead uncomfortable Time of the
Year, when the poor People would suffer very much from
their Poverty and Cold, if they had not good Cheer, warm
Fires, and Christmas Gambols to support them.
 “I love to rejoice their poor Hearts at this season, and to
see the whole Village merry in my great Hall. I allow a
double Quantity of Malt to my small Beer, and set it a
running for twelve Days to every one that calls for it. I
have always a Piece of cold Beef and a Mince-Pye upon
the Table, and am wonderfully pleased to see my Tenants
pass away a whole Evening in playing their innocent
Tricks, and smutting one another...”

Christmas food was always better than everyday food. Partly

because it was better, richer, more exotic fare than usual, and partly
because of the Good Spirit of the Season that hovered over the table,
making us cheerful and boosting our appetites, as Christmas found
its way into our home for a brief stay.

At the centre of our festive board was the goose, besides which was
a joint of roast beef, and sometimes for a change a clove-studded
pork joint that obliged with fulsomely delicious crackling that made
our teeth ache for chewing so much of it at the neglect of the flesh
of the swine.

Lesser in the hierarchy of presentations but equally welcome and

palatable were boiled and roast potatoes that vied with Brussels
sprouts, buttered garden peas, and Yorkshire puddings to edge the
slices of meat over the edges of our plates and onto the floor where
a well practised black cat waited for manna from heaven. It did not
have to wait very long nor very often.

Somewhere in the course of the main course the crackers are seized,
pulled, the remains, scavenged, and prizes claimed, and the de
rigueur paper hats plonked unceremoniously onto our festive heads.
It was Christmas and we were having fun! An English Christmas
with a cracker for everyone just isn’t right.

Invented by London confectioner Tom Smith, in 1847,

Christmas Crackers were fashioned after his ‘bon-bon’
sweets, which he sold in what was to become the standard
twisted paper sweet-wrapper. Smith’s crackers were
cardboard tubes wrapped in brightly coloured crepe
paper. They are pulled by two people to the point where
they break into two with a loud report. The biggest piece
contains the novelties.

The contents are a coloured paper hat or crown, a toy or

other trinket, and a printed motto or joke. Smith added
the "crack" to his crackers after enjoying the crack of a
log in his fireplace. His son, Walter, to distinguish his
father’s original product from the scores of imitators that
sprang up, was the first to put trinkets, toys, and paper
hats in them, and to vary their design.

After the meat course, during which we had pulled our crackers,
plonked the crowns on our head and tried to make sense of the
groaner jokes, the Christmas pudding that had been wrapped in
sheets of muslin and boiled in the washboiler for many hours several
weeks ago was borne in with customary gravitas.

The pudding was as big as a leather football and topped with a rich
white sauce and a sprig of holly. It was set down in the middle of
the table where the big meat plate had been, carved with the meat
knife, and thick wedges of it plopped onto our plates with a look
from Nanny that made us feel as if we didn’t deserve it. But,
merited or not, we shovelled it into our mouths as if we enjoyed it.

English Christmas pudding is a dense steamed pudding

made from a variety of dried fruit, nuts, brown sugars,
black treacle or molasses, and suet or butter. It is
effectively black from the sugars and treacle and the long
period of steaming or baking involved in its cooking.
The pudding dough can be soaked with citrus juice,
brandy, or other alcohol, unless you are a Latter-day Saint
or other teetotaller.

Christmas puddings are boiled in pudding cloths, that

makes them round, but since the beginning of the
twentieth century they have also been prepared in
pudding basins. They are traditionally cooked several
weeks before Christmas, and steamed for many hours,
and served after it has been reheated by steaming, and
either dressed with a spicy white sauce, or with warmed
brandy that is set alight to emit flames as the pudding is
borne in triumph to the dining table from the kitchen.

Nanny’s luscious Christmas cake followed the pudding. One of the

best parts of the season was licking out the huge bowls after the
cake and puddings had been mixed in them. To this day, cake
dough tastes better than cake to me. The Christmas Cake was
almost as dense as the pudding but had a different texture and
flavour.

It was iced white, had a little festive nonsense on top, with a white,
red, and green paper frill around its outside. That frill acted out its
part year on year until it was forced into early retirement after a
mere ten years due to losing an enthusiastic argument with the cake
knife.

After the cake came the mince pies. Those not already pogged to
busting became so after forcing two or three of the rich pies into
their mouths. The question of why we think we can cram four or
five times more than our normal intake down inside us when we are
sat at the Christmas table still awaits a sensible answer?

The mince pie began its life perhaps a thousand years ago
in mediaeval kitchens where it was called the "chewette,"
that was either baked or fried. Originally, these were
minced meat and spice confections, but eventually, dried
fruit and sweet ingredients were added for variety. By
the sixteen hundreds, 'mince' or shred pie was a
Christmas speciality. By the mid-sixteen hundred, liver
and chopped meat were abandoned and were replaced by
a mixture of minced suet, dried fruits and peels, and nuts
that were called ‘mincemeat,’ and still are despite the fact
that it contains no meat, or meat products apart from suet.

Mince pies are a favourite food of Father Christmas, and

Yorkshire children and their descendants always put a
plate with a couple of them on in the hearth or in some
other place where he cannot miss them, along with a glass
of milk and a carrot or two for the reindeer, as thank you
presents for well-filled stockings and pillowcases, and for
plenty on and around the tree.

Yorkshire tradition insists that the mincemeat mix is only

to be stirred ‘sunwise’ or else you risk bad luck for the
 year ahead from affronting Sol Invictus, which is
evidence of the antiquity of the custom. It is also a
Yorkshire tradition that you make a wish when eating
your first mince pie of the season, and that these princely
pies are eaten in solemn silence. Eating a minimum of
one pie per day on each of the Twelve days of Christmas
is thought by some to bring good luck for the coming
year, and considered by cardiologists to be a heart attack
in the making!

The True Yorkshire Mince pie has a star on top

representing the Star that led the Wise Men to baby Jesus
in Bethlehem. Other counties have adopted the Yorkshire
customs. When ‘Mince Pyes’ are well made, they are
incomparably scrumptious.

Christmas is, as I have already said, a family time. But at

Fitzwilliam Street it was never strictly a family affair because
several of our lodgers had nowhere else to go, having no family or
friends but us. It did not seem strange because they had always
been there since we could remember. But it make me realise,
thinking about these men in later years, that it is a wretched and
unpredictable to be dependent on strangers for one’s home and
kindred amenities. Christmas must be hard on lonely old men when
such friends as they had have died off, and they are left alone with
no one to make pleasant their staying or mourn their passing.

A pleasant and affable geniality settled on us as we sat there full in

the sitting-cum-dining room in the cellar of Nanny’s lodging house
that was out home. Some of it was alcohol related, although alcohol
was never consumed at the dining table, but some had been out for
an early start at the pub, and whatever its cause it was a welcome
change from the sour paranoia that normally sullied the house and
its victims. That proves that Christmas works its peculiar magic
everywhere, and that few are totally immune to its effects.

The story is told of the 'Christmas Truce' of 1914, in

which the soldiers of the Western Front laid down their
arms on Christmas Day and met in ‘No Man's Land,’
exchanging food and cigarettes, as well as playing
football. The pause in the fighting was unofficial and
spontaneous, a gesture of goodwill from men arrayed to
kill each other. Not only is this a true story, but it was
more widespread than most people realise.

The most famous truce was that between British and

German forces. However, French and Belgium troops
also took part. Some versions tell that British troops
heard their German opponents singing Christmas carols
and joined in.

Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, said

both sides erected signs wishing the enemy 'Merry
Christmas' and some men crossed the lines unarmed with
their hands in the air signifying that they were making a
peaceful approach. These were met by soldiers from the
opposing side. By the time their officers had latched onto
what was happening the first meeting had already taken
place. Most officers then either looked the other way or
else joined in.

In many sectors, the fraternisation lasted all of Christmas

day. Exchanges of Food and supplies were made and, it
is told, in some places tools and equipment were
 borrowed from the enemy to make their trenches more
habitable.

Games of football were played using whatever came to

hand for a ball, while fallen comrades, abandoned on the
battlefield between the entrenchments of the warring
armies that earned the name of ‘No Man's Land,’ were
retrieved and buried as decently as possible.

In many zones of battle, the Christmas Truce lasted much

longer. Richard's account told how both sides held their
fire over Boxing Day, when British troops were relieved
and left the front line. In other places, Christmas
goodwill lasted several weeks. But the demands of war
urged ‘peace on earth, goodwill to all men’ to finally
wear off, and the murderous struggle was continued.

Our own Christmas didn’t last long either. As it died into the old
year the good spirit seemed to go with it. Before we were ready,
Christmas was over, and the unaccustomed geniality had gone as
quickly as it had come, and the torment of daily routines rolled back
over us as the chill of a sea fret creeps ashore. It froze us to the
bone, and buried all that we had experienced in our short-lived
Christmas.

Festoons were glumly taken down, and with their falling went our
spirits as the magic was refolded and stored for another long year.
The little tree was stripped of its trinkets, its baubles were boxed,
and its lush limbs folded before it was reboxed, losing some of its
berries in the process to rattle around when the box was settled to its
resting place on the shelf below the long silent row of bells, there to
slumber until summoned back into service the following year.
And then, too soon Christmas was extinguished. Yet, it had taken
place, and because it had something had changed. Exactly what the
difference was is difficult to quantify, but something had happened.
Even though the world changed back to what it had been before
Christmas had come and motorists no longer picked up stranded
revellers whose last buses had departed into the darkness and foul
weather of a winter’s night, something lingered in my heart.
Something was at work deep inside me. Christmas was working its
merry magic. Although I did not know it, nephew Fred knew what
it was, and, perhaps, expressed Dicken’s own feelings for Christmas
in words he had Fred say to his unconverted Uncle Scrooge.

"...I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time,

when it has come round – apart from the veneration due
to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it
can be apart from that – as a good time: a kind, forgiving,
charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the
long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by
one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to
think of people below them as if they really were fellow-
passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures
bound on other journeys. And therefore, though it has
never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe
that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say,
God bless it!"

Even after my toys were broken, and my games had mysteriously

lost essential pieces, and the whole seeming pretence of good times
was over, something remained to work within me as yeast works
deep in dough, swelling, aerating, converting ordinary into
wonderful, commonplace into extraordinary, and what is banal into
the miraculous, so I enjoyed faint stirrings that led me to seek to
understand what seemed inconceivable, and ask myself, “What is it
that makes the difference at Christmas? What, exactly, is
Christmas?” The cold hard facts of history didn’t shed much light
on how a holiday could be so many things to so many people. I will
tell you some and you can see for yourself.

Christmas in England began in AD 597, when St

Augustine landed on her shores with monks who wanted
to bring Christianity to the Anglo Saxons, who became
the English from their name, ‘Angles.’ the earliest
mention of a special feast for the Nativity, which is the
Feast of the Birth of Jesus, being held on the 25th
December is in the Philocalian Calendar in the year 354,
and refers to earlier such feats dating from 336. In 388,
Saint John Chrysostom – that means ‘Golden Mouth,’
wrote that the observing of the festival of the Nativity on
December 25th ‘was not yet ten years old.’ Records
show that Augustine came to Britain with his missionary
monks from Rome, and on Christmas Day of 597 he
baptised more than ten thousand of the English into
Christianity.

In the year 816, the Council of Chelsea enforced the

observance of Christmas on December 25th throughout
Britain. In the time of the Saxon Ethelred 991-1016 – it
was decreed that the Nativity period should be one of
peace and goodwill, when all contention and arguing
must end.

Until 1170, the Christmas was called by the Latin names

of 'In Festis Nativitatis' or 'Natalis,' meaning, The Feast of
the Nativity, or Birth of Jesus Christ. The anglicised
form, 'Christes-Masse' did not come into usage until after
the Norman invasion in 1066.

In 1644 the Puritan Parliament first sat on Christmas Day

to set a trend of 'no Christmas,' and in 1645 they declared
Christmas an ordinary working day, and Christmas was
forbidden! Anyone found making Christmas Mince Pyes
could be arrested and jailed.

After the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in

1660, things got better, but after over a hundred years of
puritanical control, many of the old customs were not
restored as they had once been, although there was more
than a hint of the Christmases of Olde Merrie England
that bled into Georgian England, for the majority the old
customs were lost, forgotten, and unimportant. The
revival of Christmas as an English religious festival
centred on the family is due to Victorian scholars
interviewing ancients in the tiny villages of Northern
England where time slipped by more slowly than in the
metropolitan conurbations, and traditions were hung on to
as revered contacts with their sacred past.

As I grew towards my teen years I learned at the

Methodist Sunday School I faithfully attended that
Christmas was not really about Father Christmas, but that
Father Christmas himself was connected with a more
profound and important festival that was hidden in the
name Christmas, and that it was the remembrance and
celebration of the birth of a baby who was called Jesus,
 who was miraculously born to God Almighty and a
Jewish maid called Mary, and that Jesus was the long
awaited Messiah who gave his life as a sacrifice to save
all mankind. Yet there was much more to this Christmas
thing than a history lesson. It was an affair of the heart or
else it was nothing. Archbishop Temple of York, later of
Canterbury, wrote of Christmas, explaining,

“All kinds of people, whatever their religious beliefs or

disbeliefs, have adopted Christmas as the festival of
family and friendship. It is a great thing to have such
festival generally recognised, whether its religious basis
is accepted or not. It helps to keep together friendships
which may be drifting into forgetfulness, and it
strengthens the bonds of affection alike between friends
and kinfolk. Christmas itself is a very real influence for
the maintenance of goodwill amongst men.”

Of those points I was convinced early in my life, but there was

something ‘other’ lurking behind the seasonal facades of glitter,
good humour, and feasting that I had not quite touched or been
touched by. Temple continued:

“What Christians commemorate on Christmas Day is

not merely the Birth of a Child who grew up to be a
 remarkable man; it is the turning point of human history
and the appearance within it of the Eternal God revealing
Himself in human life. ‘ The Word was made flesh and
we beheld his glory.” … “So let us feast and be merry,
not because tomorrow we die but because today Jesus
Christ is born; and if that is the reason for our merriment,
it will be such as to bring no sorrow in its train.” … And
when today is over let us carry that divine merriment into
our sombre and busy lives, and let all our mirth be such
as Love Divine inspires.

So it will be with us if we can join the Shepherds and the

Kings in their worship at the manger cradle. For to
worship is to humble one’s self before Him to whom
worship is given and open one’s heart to receive Him. If
we can humble ourselves before the innocence of helpless
childhood and open our hearts to receive its simplicity, its
trustfulness, its happiness, its love, then for us too
Christmas will have been the birthday of Love Divine in
the hearts to which we invite and welcome Him. Once
more then, as when the day began, so now as it draws to a
close – Come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.”

Then it made sense to me. It was not a profound theological truth

that supplied the answer, nor was it historical facts that meshed all
the formerly grinding gears that milled around my questions of
Christmas and the changes that swept over people – especially my
people, normally so stolid and set in their daily rounds, and
apparently unmoveable – it was nothing less than a Divinely
appointed miracle.
Poet Richard Crawshaw expressed our wonder at the Incarnation of
the Son of God in his contemplative work, “Sospetto D’Herode” in
which a guilty King Herod contemplates what and who Jesus might
be and struggles to make sense of the contrasts between the Jesus he
has experienced, and what in his dark moments of cold fear he is
afraid he might be.

That the great Angell-blincking light should shrinke

His gaze, to shine in a poore shepherd’s eye;
That the unmeasur’d God so low should sinke
As pris’ner in a few poore rags to lie;
That from His Mother’s Brest, he milke should drinke
Who feeds with nectar Heav’n’s faire family;
That a vile manger His low Bed should prove,
Who in a Throne of stars Thunders above.

That He Whom the Sun serves, should faintly peepe,

Through clouds of infant flesh: that the old
Eternal Word should be a child, and weepe:
That he who made the fire should feare the cold:
That Heav’n’s high Majesty his court should keepe
In a clay cottage, by each blast control’d:
That Glorie’s self should serve our griefs and feares:
And free Eternitie submit to yeares.

That the ‘unmeasur’d God’ was the Father of His Divine Son was
the great ‘secret’ of Christmas from which I had been so removed
even as I had stood close to its signs as to touch but not comprehend
them, and with the sunrise of this understanding I knew the
customary apparatus of Christmas would never be the same to me
again.
Yet what of my friend, Father Christmas? What could I make of
him in the light of these new truths? I had thought of Father
Christmas as warm and well rounded, a dispenser of cheer and good
gifts, a transmogrifying power in a troubled and selfish world in
which millions were engaged in annihilating each other.

In 1822, American Clement Clarke Moore described his own image

of Father Christmas in his well known and oft-quoted poem, 'A Visit
from St Nicholas.'

He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,

And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pedlar just opening his sack.

His eyes how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,

And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly.

He was chubby and plump,--a right jolly old elf--

And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.

But until I actually discovered what motivated the original Father

Christmas, Saint Nicholas of Myra, a Christian bishop who
habitually gave generous gifts to the poor and needy the mystery
remained unsolved. I found that Bishop Nicholas, sometimes
referred to familiarly as ‘Saint Nick,’ was actually imitating Jesus,
whom he revered as the Christ the Only Begotten Son of God, and
the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind.

I learned that Jesus ministered to the poor, the needy, the outcast,
and that he taught that God was love, and therefore we should love
each other. So powerful is his message that even when watered
down to little more than a transparency, it retains its power to
transform lives, communities, and nations, even my childhood
home. Christmas was and always will be a miracle of immense
proportions. I had come to understand that the ‘founder of the feast’
was not Father Christmas, but his exemplar Jesus Christ.

Yet my Christmas celebrations do not omit Father Christmas.

Rather it honours his example as he honoured the example of the
One he served. I like Christmas because it is a special time for
children. I like children and used to be one myself. Now that I
know the secret of Christmas it is always a special time and will
remain so no matter how old I become.

Since I laid bare the essential of the Christmas Gift, Christmas is

much more than baubles, trees, candles, gifts, feasting, baking,
Father Christmas, friends, and warm fuzzy love. I have been
privileged to unwrap the mystery of the Gift that long puzzled me,
and to find at its heart the Babe of Bethlehem whose universal love
breaks through the troubles and trials of this disappointing world,
and touches our hearts, even though we do not know what is
happening to us, or why. Christ’s Love is the heart of the gift of
Christmas whose power I have felt and witnessed in all the
Christmases in all the long years of my life.
With that precious Gift locked in my heart it is certain that if our
festive board were bare, our tree a shabby thing devoid of gifts, and
if the usual raft of cards from old friends did not come, or no visitor
crossed our threshold, Christmas would still be the consummate
experience because of Him whom we honour by its keeping.

Tiny Tim was understandably mistaken when he saluted Ebeneezer

Scrooge as ‘the founder of the feast!’ Cratchitt’s employer, the
miserly and ill-humoured crank who scoffed at Christmas and would
not open his heart or his purse to help a soul in need, was changed
by the pure Love of Christ which is the Divine gift of Charity
described by the Apostle Paul as the greatest of all spiritual gifts.

Scrooge, the old skinflint, was frightened into being Christlike. But
whatever his motivation the important thing is that he made the
transition, and that saved him from misery in mortality and an
eternity of being weighed down with chains forged from his sins and
from despising his fellowmen.

I know that the changes to which I was led have saved me from a
life starved of faith, hope, and charity, and have increased my
capacity to love and be loved. And so, with overflowing, heart I
raise my voice and say,

“Thank you Jesus, and a Holy and Merry Christmas to you for the
greatest of all Christmas gifts and for an enchantment that stays on
and on long after December twenty-fifth has been swallowed up by
the Old Year.”

How different are my Christmases now that I have been led to

unwrap the greatest Gift of all! And how grateful to God I am for
the gift of his Son Jesus Christ. May we all remember as we unwrap
our wondrous gifts this Christmas that one gift that is at the centre of
all we do and all we feel.

And so I am led to exclaim:

God bless our Christmas as remembering

God’s holy Son, a tiny babe was he;
Whose coming long had been foretold
But whom the eyes of faith
Alone could see.

Helpless then he who would our helper be,

And needing succouring
Who succours you and me
With his eternal love and gifts
That raise us from the earth
To heaven, and higher than we know
To sit with him in glory

He gave the gift none other could

A spotless Lamb to cleanse with blood
And seal our souls to be with him,
The Saviour, and to share
In all his Father has prepared
To seal on him, and he on us,
Bound each to each, and all to God.

It is the babe who, lying there

In manger straw, the veil divides.
He shows us, walking this dark earth,
What he had won for us to share
With Him when he returned
To sit on God’s pure throne
And, beckoning, summon us to home.
 Yet some who look on his sweet face,
See but a baby; others see the Christ.
Some think him trifling, human.
Others know him Lord, the Son of God.

Yet so today, some see though God-filled eyes

The Saviour of mankind,
Whilst others to his state are careless, blind,
And slow to see the infant in the straw
As the fulfiller of the ancient Law.
The promised Christ,
The answer to our need,
To save and raise we who are Adam’s seed.

He lifts the stumbling, rests the weary soul,

Comforts the dying, makes the sinner whole.
And from the pain with which our days are rife,
He heals and grants eternal life.

And me, what do I see when I behold his face?

In his dear eyes I see the fount of love,
The vessel of God’s grace.
The promises that at a coming day
Will raise me to his side, and keep me safe always.

And though at Christmastime I smile to see

Him shown a swaddled child,
I will remember his divinity, his making free
My stricken soul, on whom he looked and smiled.

Then shall this time be filled with thoughts of love

For him who for us left his home above
To serve, to teach, to suffer and to die,
That each of us shall not abandoned lie,
But rise on shafts of glorious light
To see our Father God in heaven’s light
When at the end our shining souls take flight
 To God the Father.

To God the Father I give thanks to know

He sent his Son to look on us below,
To make us His as once before we were,
And take us home again in peace and joy.

I wish you a very, merry, and a holy Christmas.

Copyright © Christmas 2007
Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED