History of Christmas Foods and Feasts by Claire Hopley

Author:Claire Hopley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783408023
Publisher: Remember When
Published: 2013-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Christmas at home

Christmas parties of families and friends gathered round a cake and a wassail bowl, or modestly enjoying whatever special fare the season offered, must have occurred during earlier centuries, but literary and other historical records spotlight royal occasions and the hospitality of great aristocrats who kept open house at Christmas. What happened in houses of medieval and Renaissance craftsmen, merchants and farmers is more obscure. Did the men who cavorted as guisers and mummers share their rewards with their wives at home? In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries poor women sometimes received Christmas gifts of clothing or money from charities. The Eighteenth-Century Parson Woodforde recorded in his diary regularly sending a shilling to some of his poor parishioners’ wives. How did they spend it? What was Christmas like for children? Little is known. The happenstance of literary survival partly accounts for this, but it is clear that medieval and Renaissance Christmas celebrations were public rather than domestic: at court there were feasts and entertainments; in city streets there were processions and music; in villages and towns, wassailers and mummers made their rounds of farms and houses. However, by the late Seventeenth Century literary records show that Christmas was disappearing from the streets and settling down at home.

Ironically, the Puritan laws against Christmas may have spurred its domestication. They could control public festivities such as processions and mumming; they could go into churches and tear down mistletoe and holly. It was harder to supervise what went on behind closed doors. Opponents claimed that Puritans ‘plunder[ed] pottage pots’ and ‘ransack[ed] ovens’ to make sure no-one was cooking forbidden fare. In 1659 a minister at Elgin, Scotland inspected his parishioners’ houses to see if anyone was hiding a goose for an illegal Christmas feast. As late as 1819 one Scotswoman, embarrassed by the unexpected arrival of the minister, hid her Christmas dinner under the bed. However, such pantry investigations were not common, and could never have been entirely effective. Many a secret mince pie must have been eaten on the quiet and nowhere more safely than by the fireside of home.

A more significant long-term change underlying the new domestic Christmas was the economic growth that began in the Renaissance and transformed Britain in the following centuries. The country became more mercantile and more industrial and more of a colonial power. People got richer. The middle class spent their money on houses. They had more space. Men who worked in offices took pleasure in the homes, furniture, gardens, and families that their wealth supported. By the early Eighteenth Century Daniel Defoe was characterising Christmas as ‘days of entertaining among friends and relations’. The changes that brought this about did not occur all at the same time. They extended into the Nineteenth Century and beyond, gradually involving more and more of the people in the family Christmas that is now the norm.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.