GUSTATORY RITES

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 16, 16 December 1932, Page 7

GUSTATORY RITES

CHRISTMAS IN LITERATURE

wi?h hr ‘ i & 'n tra dition,i]ly associated with good cheer/' and “good cheer” di o -« X + ?enmC^ t , ally , associated with inf*® estl ? n - Tll <? late Frederic Harri-on-e,infers, was of a temperate habit and but little addicted to the pleasures of the table—has remarked is Tide an essential part of the Religion of Christmas, and is about the most religious thing people do in the year.” There is, perhaps, an element of exaggeration in this statement; at the same time it may be just ns well that the festive season comes but once a year. It has been claimed by Charles piclcens that ho “invented” Christmas, it would be truer to say that be rediscovered it. Certainly it is • more than a little curious that there is scarcely a single reference to Cliristnias in the writings of that most- genial and convivial of authors, Charles Lamb. But Dickens will always remain the chosen celebrant of the Christmas feast. No reader of “A Christmas Carol” is likely to forget the description of that wonderful plum pudding which graced the festal board of Bob Cratchit and his family: Hallo 1 A great deal of steam 1 The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing day I That was the cloth. A smell like an eating house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding I In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered —flushed, hut smiling proudly—with the pudding, like a speckled cannon hall, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half a quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top. THE UNFORTUNATE CHAPLAIN. The mince pie, that other indispensable concomitant of the Christmas feast, can boast an ancient origin. There is a reference to it in one of the essays of Addison, and one gathers that in the year 1710 it was a delicacy denied to the chaplain in the houses of the rich. Christmas is essentially a home festival, but to extract the finest flavour from it, it should be spent in town. There are certain discomforts attending the country Christmas. Soma of these have been feelingly recalled by Mr G. W. E. Russell. “There was,” he writes, “the tramp across a damp park to an imperfectly ordered service in a cold church, with a faint odour of long-descended ancestry forcing its way up through the floor of the family pew. There was eating on the largest scale, and, of the most revengeful food. There was the boisterous merriment of a company of cousins, who recalled Lord Beaconsfield’s sardonic saying that ‘an affectation of gaiety may often be detected in the young.’ There was, in brief, a combination of distresses which might justify the childish petition ‘Forgive us our Christmas, as we foi'give them that Christmas against us!’ ” A GERMAN FEAST. In the villages and towns of Germany —as 5n England—Christmas is always celebrated with appropriate gustatory rites. In her hook, “My German Year,” Miss I. A. R. Wylie describes a typical Teutonic Christmas. The day opens with a visit to church, and .even those who never as a rule attend places of worship put in an appearance, it se-erns, on Christmas Day* “After church comes the great dinner —sometimes enlivened with an English plum pudding —to which guests are invited, and which, if it is thoroughly German, will last for hours. ... It is not that so much is eaten, hut the Teuton has a failing of never knowing when to bring a social gathering to an end. When he once starts enjoying himself he goes on until he drops with exhaustion.” ~ . The phenomenon, it may be said, is not confined to Germany. The social aspects of Christmas ha.ve frequently been recorded by the poets, who are. on the whole, jolly fellows. George Wither, in one of liis poems, has a very pleasant description of an English seventeenth-century Christmas: — Hark how the wags abroad do call Each other forth to rambling; Anon you’ll see them in the ball For nuts and apples scrambling. ITark how the roofs with laughter soundAnon they’ll think the house goes round, For they the cellar’s depth have found, And.there they will be merry. Wither lived long enough to witness the period of Puritan repression, and must have been frequently tempted to echo the words- of Shakespeare, “Oh, what a falling off was there 1 GOOD CHEER. An equal spirit of jollity and mirth Is reflected in Geoffrey Smith’s poem, “At the Sign of the Jolly Jack” : The jolly landlord stands him up, And welcomes all to bite and- sup; Ho has a hearty face and red, lie knows not Who lies in his shed. What harm, if he be honest and true. That he may be Christ’s landlord too? So he makes merry and has good cheer For Christmas comes but once a year; Ho scrapes his fiddle and beats his drum, And he’ll bury the night ere morning come. Mr G. K. Chesterton has described Christmas as ‘the old European festival, Pagan and Christian, . . . that trinity of eating, drinking, and praying ” and such, despite the fluctua--tions of fashion and the changes of creed, it will continue to be so long as our civilisation endures.