Christmas during the Regency


The first commercially-produced Christmas card, sold in London
in 1849. Note the multi-generational family in the center,
and the acts of mercy depicted on either side.



When I picture an English Christmas, I think of Christmas trees, plum puddings and Jolly Old St. Nick. But all these Christmas traditions developed after the Regency period. So, how did people celebrate Christmas during the Regency?

By having a lot of fun, apparently. For the gentry, Christmas was the highlight of the year. Their homes were filled with family and friends, who expected good food and amusements for many days. Gifts were exchanged during the season (such as the needle bag Jane Austen made for a friend) and festive meals with roasted turkey and other special Christmas treats were enjoyed.

One of those treats was a plum cake, a likely precursor of the plum pudding. In his 1808 book Letters from England, Robert Southey informs us that at Christmas shops were filled with large plum cakes, crusted with sugar and decorated in “every possible way.” Sounds a lot like a Christmas cookie to me! 

An assortment of traditional English holiday cookies.
 I'll bet there's a plum cake in there somewhere.



Acts of charity were also customary at Christmas. In one of her letters Jane Austen said that the only thing better than eating turkey at Christmas was boxing up parcels of food and clothing and giving them to the poor. (But then, Jane was a clergyman's daughter.)

Christmas amusements could include a shooting party for the men, an impromptu dance or recital, a visit to a church or even amateur theatricals. The prospect of acting out a play for family and friends thrilled some and terrified others. Jane Austen's sister-in-law Eliza couldn't persuade her cousin to visit the Austens at Christmas - her cousin was too afraid she'd have to participate in a play. 

Singing carols and just sitting by the fireside and catching up on family gossip (perhaps while drinking a cup of punch or wassail) were also fun entertainments on a cold, dark winter’s night. 

A bowl of wassail. This modern version of the traditional holiday beverage
contains seven  pints of brown ale, a bottle of dry sherry, ground ginger
and nutmeg, a cinnamon stick and  lemon  slices. Yum!



Games were also very popular, and these included the card game whist and a gambling card game called commerce. Games more familiar to us, such as drafts or draughts (what Americans call checkers), chess and backgammon were also played.

Livelier games for those who didn't mind burnt fingers and lots of mess were snapdragon and bullet pudding.

Bullets like these round musket balls were most likely used in
bullet pudding - conically shaped bullets were developed later.



Snapdragon, often played on Christmas Eve, was especially dramatic. To play it you’d get a shallow bowl, fill it with brandy and raisins and heat the mixture until it was really hot. To increase the wow factor, you could cut the lights in the room so that the space was lit only by the blue flames of the burning brandy. The object of the game was to snatch the hot raisins out of the flaming alcohol and pop them in your mouth. Ouch!

Whimsical image of a dragon playing a game
of snapdragon - illustration from the 1879
 Book of Days by Robert Chambers




Bullet pudding was less incendiary, but even messier. Here’s how Fanny Knight, Jane Austen’s niece, breathlessly describes the way she played this game during the 1812 Christmas season:

“You must have a large pewter dish filled with flour which you must pile up in a sort of pudding with a peak at the top; you must then lay a Bullet at top & everybody cuts a slice of it & the person that is cutting it when the Bullet falls must poke about with their noses & chins till they find it & then take it out with their mouths which makes them strange figures all covered with flour but the worst is that you must not laugh for fear of the flour getting up your nose & mouth & choking you . . .”

Not laugh during a Christmas game? Impossible, especially when you are covered with flour. 

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, or even Festivus, I hope your holiday is filled with just the right proportions of laughter, friends, family and good food. 



Photo credit: Malene Thyssen



***

Sources for this post include:
  • Voices from the World of Jane Austen by Malcolm Day, published by David and Charles Limited, 2006
  • The Pageantry of Christmas, Vol. 2 in the Life Book of Christmas, Time Inc., 1963
Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Frost Fair of 1814

Frost Fair of 1814, painted by Luke Clenell


Cold enough for you? That’s a somewhat obnoxious question people like to ask when your teeth are chattering and your fingers and toes ache from freezing temperatures.  

Where I live in Portland, Oregon, we are really feeling the cold right now with the mercury in the thermometer sinking down into the single digits. That is rare for this city, which usually enjoys a temperate climate moderated by the Pacific Ocean.

As a result of the frigid temps I've been spending a lot of time keeping my bird feeder filled with seeds and the sugar water in my hummingbird feeder thawed. Yesterday morning I barely got the hummingbird feeder on its hook (after keeping it overnight in the house so it wouldn't freeze) when a hummingbird forgot its shyness and buzz-bombed me, eager for a sweet liquid fix.


 Juvenile male Ruby-throated Hummingbird. This was  a
featured photo on the English Wikipedia in Nov. 2013.
It's also what I saw inches from my face yesterday.



However cold it is here, though, it is nothing compared with one winter during the Regency. During the winter of 1814, London got so cold that the River Thames actually froze solid for days between London Bridge and Blackfriars. And when that happened, Londoners did what they had done for centuries before: they put on a Frost Fair.  

People celebrated the cold, erecting booths and tents on the frozen stretch of the river. What followed was a regular fair, with food, games and entertainment. Someone even led an elephant onto the ice. After four days of revelry the fair shut down when the ice began to crack.

This wasn't the first time the Thames froze over and a fair was held. The river used to be shallower and its current flowed more slowly. As far back as 250 AD the river reportedly froze for nine weeks.

And England used to be colder, too. From the 15th to the early 19th century the river froze regularly, during what’s been called Britain’s Little Ice Age. Frost Fairs were held frequently during the bone-chilling winters of those centuries, and there are many accounts of people traveling on the river by coach or sleigh to get across London more easily.

Frost Fair of 1683-84, by Thomas Wyke

A notable Frost Fair was held during the winter of 1683-1684, when the River Thames was iced over for two months. The cold that year was so severe that ice stretched for miles in the North Sea off the coasts of England, France and Belgium. The ground was frozen in Manchester to a depth of 27 inches; in Somerset the depth was four feet.

And so the Great Frost Fair of 1683-1684 was organized. Attractions included coach and horse racing, bull-baiting, puppet shows and skeet shooting. There were coffee houses, beer gardens, roast beef vendors, toy shops, music and much, much more. You could also find “tipling houses” at the fair if you wanted to drink stronger spirits along with "other lewd places” to visit, according to English writer and diarist John Evelyn, who witnessed the fair.

I guess people got a little carried away during the fair; Evelyn described it as a “bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water” (make that frozen water).

Of course, when the river froze it wasn't all fun and games. Shipping was halted, affecting the city’s commerce. Fish, birds and deer died in the extreme cold, and the poor had difficulty finding enough fuel to keep warm. When the thaw did come, it could be dangerous, too, especially if it was too rapid. Five people were crushed to death in January, 1789, when melting ice on the Thames dragged a ship and the riverside pub building it was tied to into the river.

Though the revelers who attended the fair couldn't have known it at the time, the Frost Fair of 1814 was the last Frost Fair on the River Thames. Both the climate and the river changed after that event, and the Thames has never frozen quite so solid since.

Winter temperatures in London are milder now than they were two centuries ago, and embankments have been added to the river, making it deeper along the shores and less likely to freeze. Also, the old London Bridge was torn down in 1831 and replaced with a bridge that has wider arches. The new bridge design allows the tides that flow under the bridge to move more freely, and that, too, inhibits freezing.

So, if you are living in a cold climate you may want to remember London’s great Frost Fairs when your bird bath freezes over. If I could figure out a way to set up tiny booths on the ice for the birds and squirrels, this miserable weather would be a lot more fun. 

My bird bath -  now it's more of a bird ice-skating rink!


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Photos courtesy of  Wikimedia Commons, except where otherwise noted.

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