Christmas past II

Extract from "A West Country Christmas":

"In Somerset, it is recorded that on Christmas Eve the festivities would include a feast of hot cakes and nuts, washed down with a drink made up of mulled or warmed ale and spice roast apples.  The cake found favour in Cornwall too, so we learn from the English Illustrated Magazine for December 1903: 'In days gone by, every Cornish housewife provided "the Christmas" or the Christmas cake for her household.  This was a small saffron or currant cake for presentation on Christmas Eve, to every member of the family and to each guest and the custom was for everybody to taste everybody else's cake by way of good fellowship.  This practice is nearly out of fashion but was in evidence last year in some cottage homes near Redruth.'

Decorations formed as much a part of Christmas in times gone by as they do now.  Mistletoe, for instance, can be traced back to the Druids, who were convinced that the plant had magical properties.  A parasite chiefly found on oak and apple trees, the Druids called it a "Curer of all Ills".  They considered that the trees on which it grew were sacred, and that the birds which visited their branches were messangers from the gods.  When mistletoe was required for a religious ceremony, it was gathered with great care by a priest, who used a golden sickle to remove it.

Devonians believe that their county was cursed by ancient Druid fathers, who had decreed that mistletoe should not grow there.  There is no record to explain this believe but there is an account of a gentleman who possessed an orchard, one half of which lay in Devon, and the other half in Somerset, the division of the two counties being marked by a deep ditch.  On the Devon side of the ditch, the apple trees were free of mistletoe, whereas on the Somerset side the parasite grew in great abundance.  Every effort that he made to cultivate it on the trees in Devon failed.

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Christmas ws not always remembered with fondness.  Here is Martha's take on it (she lived with her husband Ned at Whiddon Down.  She was asked, does she look forward to Christmas as much as the children obviously do? :

Well, I do and I don't.  Us don't really like Christmas.  Something always goes wrong in our house when 'tis Christmas.  It has done ever since we've had the children small, you know.  One Christmas I remember I said, 'Put the turkey in the oven.'  Us done our work, then went to church, and then come home and had our dinner.  Then I helped out with the Christmas pudding.  Well, there us was sitting around in the kitchen, eating our Christmas pudding, and enjoying it because it was a beautiful recipe of my old mother's, and suddenly one of the boys starated to cry.  I said to Father, 'There's something wrong with that boy.'  I said, 'Look at him.  Get over and pat him on the back.'  So Father went over and give the boy a good pat on the back and the boy went a bit purple and spluttered and managed to tell us that he'd swallowed the sixpence!

Then I remembered another year, when things didn't seem too bad and I thought, 'Now this is better, this is going alright, this is.'  Us had got through the day pretty well.  Us had had tea, and then us went in front room, you do that Christmas night don't ye?  You light the fire and it smokes all day - it doesn't burn right until it's time to go to bed - but you sit there with your eyes watering and stick it out when all of a sudden one of the boys started to cry again.  I thought, 'There you are!  I thought that it was going too good to be true.'  The boy kept pointing to his ear so I said to father, 'Get on and have a look in the boy's ear.;  Well, he lit a candle and nearly set fire to the boy!  I swaid, 'Why don't you go in the kitchen and get the flashlight?'  So he come in with the flashlight and looked in the boy's ear.  'Cor Mother,' he said, 'You'll never guess what I've seed.  You want to look in the little boy's ear.'  So I did.  I took the torch out of his hand and looked in the boy's ear and, to tell you the truth, I nearly passed out.  Do you know when I looked in that boy's ear, there was an eye looking at me.  It was only the eye off his teddy bear, but you have a glass of sherry at Christmas time and look in somebody's ear and see an eye!  It don't half give you a turn!'


I think she must have had more than the one glass!!!

It's all over . . .

. . . bar the taking down of the decorations.

Here are a few photos in memory of the occasion.

The Christmas Eve walk up to Paxton's Tower, overlooking the flooding in the Towy Valley.

A wet and sombre view, downstream . . .

. . . and upstream.

Home-made Arctic roll, with sieved home-made Raspberry Jam.  Divine.

Home-made chocolate roulade - a Christmas tradition.  Traditon has it that breakfast on Boxing Day is a slice of this with Raspberry couli . . .

The finished Christmas wall-hanging, everything hand-stitched in the end.  The central panel got a bit too wrinkled for my liking, but I was sewing it on my lap, without an embroidery hoop (couldn't find my big one), so it is what it is.

Close up of one of the panels.

My three lovely children, who - just this once - I shall name: Danny, Tamzin and Gabby.  Next Christmas will be different as Danny is off to Australia for a year to work, with his best friend from school days, Joe, and then they are intent on travelling the Far East, so Christmas for them will be a BBQ on the beach!

I am hoping that my husband and I will be living in an easy-to-warm cottage somewhere in the Welsh Marches.  We shall have to see what 2014 brings.

In the meantime, thank you for all being such good blogging friends and visitors.

Thoughts of Christmas past

I bought a pack of dates today - just like the dates mum used to buy every Christmas. She was the only one who ate them though! They still have the same cream plastic "stabber" down the centre of the box, pretending to be the branch that the dates hung from . . .

These always formed part of the Christmas feast. Keeping them company on the sideboard, would be a box of Turkish Delight, a semi-circular box of "pretend" orange and lemon slices, and a box of Manderin oranges, each fruit wrapped in tissue paper with a delightfully foreign print on it. Sometimes they still had a little stalk and glossy dark green leaves and they seemed so exotic.

Back in the 50s and early 60s, turkey was still relatively rare as the main component of Christmas dinner. We, along with many of our neighbours, had a capon - which was a sterilized male chicken of almost turkey-like proportions. This would be stuffed with Paxo Sage and Onion stuffing (there was no other), and accompanied by sprouts, carrots and roast potatoes. Even if mum had ever heard of bread sauce, it never put in an appearance on our table. Mincemeat and Christmas pudding were always of the "boughten" variety - though my gran had always made her own, along with pickles, chutneys, jams and jellies. Somehow these skills skipped a generation with my mum . . .

Sometimes we had a proper (fir) tree, and I can remember having some little painted crinkly tin candle holders which fixed on the branch with a crocodile clip type attachment. You actually LIT the candles (Health and Safety would have 40 blue fits these days). We had glass baubles to go on the tree, but sadly more and more got broken each year and we no longer have any of the original ones. They weren't exotic - just simple spray-painted balls - some with dimples in. Tinsel went a long way to making up for any shortfall in baubles.

On a couple of occasions, I remember we didn't have the money for a tree, so mum and I went and cut off a big branch of gorse (or furze as we called it), which we painted with a thick paste of flour and water and then sprinkled with coloured glitter. One year we had a beautiful branch of Silver Birch, which was so graceful, and looked lovely on one end of the sideboard, glittered and decorated with the smaller decorations.

Mum and I would spend an afternoon in the run up to Christmas pasting together paper chains to hang up. You could buy packets of paper chain strips made from thin sugar-paper.

Mum always bought a few extra things each week in the run up to Christmas, to spread the cost. Peak Freans cheeselets were one extra - you can still get them, but I'm sure they tasted better back then. There would usually be a box of chocolates (Milk Tray) and a tin of biscuits. There was always a tin of ham too, though sometimes we would have a piece of boiling bacon on Boxing Day, though normally it was a brace of Pheasants which dad would bring home from Romsey.

No wine of course, but a bottle of sherry, a bottle of Advocaat, sometimes Dubonnet and a few light ales in case any of the neighbours came over.

When I see what some people are putting into their trolleys during Christmas week it makes my eyes water! We try not to go too over the top - I tend to be buying ingredients so I can make our Christmas treats, which is so much more satisfying. A new Christmas ritual in our house is to share a bottle of Cava as we open the presents - it feels quite decadent! My neighbour down the hill breakfasts on smoked salmon and scrambled egg on toast, with Champagne to wash it down! Good on her.