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| Our Christmas of excess has forgotten its handmade and homely past | Our Christmas of excess has forgotten its handmade and homely past |
| (about 1 month later) | |
| For my Scottish family, the festivities brought a wire tree, modest gifts and a glimpse of more lavish lives | |
| Sat 16 Dec 2017 06.00 GMT | |
| Last modified on Sat 16 Dec 2017 11.47 GMT | |
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| History is complicated. Prince Albert usually gets the credit for introducing the Christmas tree to Britain, though it would be truer to say that he popularised a custom pioneered in royal circles 40 years earlier by Queen Charlotte, the German wife of George III. In 1800, she erected a yew tree covered with baubles and fruit in the middle of the drawing room at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, where it delighted the children considered good and grand enough to have been invited to her Christmas party. | History is complicated. Prince Albert usually gets the credit for introducing the Christmas tree to Britain, though it would be truer to say that he popularised a custom pioneered in royal circles 40 years earlier by Queen Charlotte, the German wife of George III. In 1800, she erected a yew tree covered with baubles and fruit in the middle of the drawing room at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, where it delighted the children considered good and grand enough to have been invited to her Christmas party. |
| German influence was renewed when in 1818 the Duke of Kent married the widowed Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. At the age of 13, their only child – named Victoria, after her mother – described in her journal the sight of two trees “hung with lights and sugar ornaments” in their home in Kensington Palace, with gifts spread out beneath. By 1830, a decade before Albert set sail for his wedding, decorated trees had become a fairly common feature of upper-class life. Albert’s achievement was to continue the custom into a different age, when pictures of the royal tree in new general-interest magazines such as the London Illustrated News promoted the idea among the swelling middle class. | German influence was renewed when in 1818 the Duke of Kent married the widowed Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. At the age of 13, their only child – named Victoria, after her mother – described in her journal the sight of two trees “hung with lights and sugar ornaments” in their home in Kensington Palace, with gifts spread out beneath. By 1830, a decade before Albert set sail for his wedding, decorated trees had become a fairly common feature of upper-class life. Albert’s achievement was to continue the custom into a different age, when pictures of the royal tree in new general-interest magazines such as the London Illustrated News promoted the idea among the swelling middle class. |
| As debatable, if not as complicated, is the story of the first (and, as it turned out, last) Christmas tree in my childhood home. I’ve always believed that it was made by my father at Cross’s cotton spinning mill in Farnworth, Lancashire, where he worked as a maintenance engineer. My brother, on the other hand, is convinced it was a gift from our paternal grandmother. | As debatable, if not as complicated, is the story of the first (and, as it turned out, last) Christmas tree in my childhood home. I’ve always believed that it was made by my father at Cross’s cotton spinning mill in Farnworth, Lancashire, where he worked as a maintenance engineer. My brother, on the other hand, is convinced it was a gift from our paternal grandmother. |
| What I remember of the tree, which I last saw in 1952 or thereabouts, supports both theories. Nothing about it looked real. It stood about two-and-a-half feet tall and its metal trunk sprouted branches made of thick wire that had been pleated, like the cheapest kind of lavatory brush, to hold bristles pretending to be pine needles. Here was a tree to represent the age of the ration card and the ersatz, when (so it was said) sausages were bulked up with sawdust, and little wooden pips were inserted into red jelly to pass it off as raspberry jam. | What I remember of the tree, which I last saw in 1952 or thereabouts, supports both theories. Nothing about it looked real. It stood about two-and-a-half feet tall and its metal trunk sprouted branches made of thick wire that had been pleated, like the cheapest kind of lavatory brush, to hold bristles pretending to be pine needles. Here was a tree to represent the age of the ration card and the ersatz, when (so it was said) sausages were bulked up with sawdust, and little wooden pips were inserted into red jelly to pass it off as raspberry jam. |
| My father brought home all kinds of things he’d made at work – wooden toys, a fine chessboard, a model Chinese junk – and, in this era of shortages, a Christmas tree made of wire would have been typical of his skill and ingenuity. Then again, it might have been bought in a shop: as I learned this week on a visit to east London’s Geffrye Museum, which is devoted to the history of the home, artificial trees of a similar size and shape became popular in the 1930s. My granny in Scotland could have bought one, bent the branches to align with the trunk, and made a long parcel and sent it 200 miles south. | My father brought home all kinds of things he’d made at work – wooden toys, a fine chessboard, a model Chinese junk – and, in this era of shortages, a Christmas tree made of wire would have been typical of his skill and ingenuity. Then again, it might have been bought in a shop: as I learned this week on a visit to east London’s Geffrye Museum, which is devoted to the history of the home, artificial trees of a similar size and shape became popular in the 1930s. My granny in Scotland could have bought one, bent the branches to align with the trunk, and made a long parcel and sent it 200 miles south. |
| Except that it was blue. This is a fact my brother and I agree on. It was blue because it could not be green, because my granny loathed green as the colour of Irish republicanism and by extension of the Catholic church, and refused to have it in the house. Her father was Irish and died of drink, and what provoked her loathing probably lay as much in this more intimate history as in the broader religious and political quarrels of the time, supposing these can ever be disentangled. | Except that it was blue. This is a fact my brother and I agree on. It was blue because it could not be green, because my granny loathed green as the colour of Irish republicanism and by extension of the Catholic church, and refused to have it in the house. Her father was Irish and died of drink, and what provoked her loathing probably lay as much in this more intimate history as in the broader religious and political quarrels of the time, supposing these can ever be disentangled. |
| There was also the question of bad luck: whenever she had worn green, she had had to wear black soon after, or so my father remembered her saying. The combination of British patriotism, an alcoholic father and superstition gave her prejudice an intensity that had to be obeyed. Nothing could contain green, not even the Christmas cards we sent her. And so we had a Prussian blue Christmas tree, which was either made by my father to honour her beliefs even in her absence, or which she herself had bought and then dyed. (It seems unlikely that even artificial Christmas trees could be bought blue, though silver became a fashion in the 1960s.) | There was also the question of bad luck: whenever she had worn green, she had had to wear black soon after, or so my father remembered her saying. The combination of British patriotism, an alcoholic father and superstition gave her prejudice an intensity that had to be obeyed. Nothing could contain green, not even the Christmas cards we sent her. And so we had a Prussian blue Christmas tree, which was either made by my father to honour her beliefs even in her absence, or which she herself had bought and then dyed. (It seems unlikely that even artificial Christmas trees could be bought blue, though silver became a fashion in the 1960s.) |
| It lasted only a year or two. My parents, born into Edwardian Scotland, never wholeheartedly embraced Christmas as a festival. Presbyterians disliked it for its pagan origins and what they saw as its idolatrous Catholic atmosphere. Only in 1958 did Christmas Day become a Scottish public holiday – Boxing Day had to wait until 1974 – and although my family’s religious beliefs had ended many years before, the habits of sobriety and restraint persisted. Christmas dinner was roast lamb and Christmas pudding; Christmas breakfast was liquorice allsorts or a Duncan’s chocolate Walnut Whip. Alcohol, and visits to or from our friends and relations, were reserved for new year. | It lasted only a year or two. My parents, born into Edwardian Scotland, never wholeheartedly embraced Christmas as a festival. Presbyterians disliked it for its pagan origins and what they saw as its idolatrous Catholic atmosphere. Only in 1958 did Christmas Day become a Scottish public holiday – Boxing Day had to wait until 1974 – and although my family’s religious beliefs had ended many years before, the habits of sobriety and restraint persisted. Christmas dinner was roast lamb and Christmas pudding; Christmas breakfast was liquorice allsorts or a Duncan’s chocolate Walnut Whip. Alcohol, and visits to or from our friends and relations, were reserved for new year. |
| By now we lived in Fife. The idea that a different kind of Christmas existed, one in which couples kissed tipsily under the mistletoe, wore party hats and blew party horns, ate huge turkeys and lay bloated on the sofa, buttons popping, with a postprandial glass of brandy in hand … this idea reached us via the pages of the Giles cartoon annual that every year lay among the pile of presents waiting on the fireside chair. | By now we lived in Fife. The idea that a different kind of Christmas existed, one in which couples kissed tipsily under the mistletoe, wore party hats and blew party horns, ate huge turkeys and lay bloated on the sofa, buttons popping, with a postprandial glass of brandy in hand … this idea reached us via the pages of the Giles cartoon annual that every year lay among the pile of presents waiting on the fireside chair. |
| Other cartoon annuals – Oor Wullie and The Broons – delighted us with amusing versions of our current unlavish whereabouts. Really big gifts, such as model train sets, came along only occasionally, restricted both by their expense and, in the early postwar years, their supply. My Hornby Dublo engine and trucks were acquired thanks only to a sharp-eyed relative who’d seen them in a distant shop window, reserved them with a deposit and written to us with the details. Cornucopianism lay hidden over the next horizon. | Other cartoon annuals – Oor Wullie and The Broons – delighted us with amusing versions of our current unlavish whereabouts. Really big gifts, such as model train sets, came along only occasionally, restricted both by their expense and, in the early postwar years, their supply. My Hornby Dublo engine and trucks were acquired thanks only to a sharp-eyed relative who’d seen them in a distant shop window, reserved them with a deposit and written to us with the details. Cornucopianism lay hidden over the next horizon. |
| Christmas dinner was roast lamb and Christmas pudding; Christmas breakfast was liquorice allsorts | Christmas dinner was roast lamb and Christmas pudding; Christmas breakfast was liquorice allsorts |
| Sometimes I’d hear my parents chaffing each other with memories of how little they’d had as children. “Christmas was the only time we saw oranges.” “Oranges! You were lucky – we had raw turnips.” And so on. But they were half amusing themselves, because by then memories of youthful hardship were a cliche that had begun to be mocked by satirists whose own more privileged backgrounds distanced them from it – in any case, like many people in the 1960s, they imagined it to be an experience that was dead and gone and would never return. | Sometimes I’d hear my parents chaffing each other with memories of how little they’d had as children. “Christmas was the only time we saw oranges.” “Oranges! You were lucky – we had raw turnips.” And so on. But they were half amusing themselves, because by then memories of youthful hardship were a cliche that had begun to be mocked by satirists whose own more privileged backgrounds distanced them from it – in any case, like many people in the 1960s, they imagined it to be an experience that was dead and gone and would never return. |
| It was thinking of these things that took me to the Geffrye Museum, whose history of the English Christmas has returned by popular demand every year since 1990, and then to the large and noisy fair in Hyde Park called Winter Wonderland. The contrast was instructive. All that happens at the Geffrye is that its usual sequence of rooms, demonstrating the domestic lives of the middle class from 1600 to 2000, is adjusted to show how Christmas was celebrated in 10 different periods. Ten tableaux show the changes in food and drink, in decoration, in the gifts given and the games played. It’s rather old-fashioned and scholarly; quiet, apart from the sound of recorders and viols; and sometimes witty. “This year they are following Nigella’s turkey recipe,” says the caption to the 1990s room. “Last year’s smoked duck with chorizo stuffing was not a success.” | It was thinking of these things that took me to the Geffrye Museum, whose history of the English Christmas has returned by popular demand every year since 1990, and then to the large and noisy fair in Hyde Park called Winter Wonderland. The contrast was instructive. All that happens at the Geffrye is that its usual sequence of rooms, demonstrating the domestic lives of the middle class from 1600 to 2000, is adjusted to show how Christmas was celebrated in 10 different periods. Ten tableaux show the changes in food and drink, in decoration, in the gifts given and the games played. It’s rather old-fashioned and scholarly; quiet, apart from the sound of recorders and viols; and sometimes witty. “This year they are following Nigella’s turkey recipe,” says the caption to the 1990s room. “Last year’s smoked duck with chorizo stuffing was not a success.” |
| Winter Wonderland could not have been more different. Bag searches at the entrance; warnings against pickpockets; the constant thud, thud of pop music; every stall an incitement to spend foolishly and eat unwisely. Cold rain swept down across bars and kitchens selling burritos and nachos, roti rolls, duck fat chips, galettes, crepes, paninis, doughnuts, pretzels, bratwurst, mulled wine and foaming tankards of beer. Chocolate spread, chillis, cheese and pork were prominent among the toppings and fillings; it was hard not to think of the pressure on the sewers. | Winter Wonderland could not have been more different. Bag searches at the entrance; warnings against pickpockets; the constant thud, thud of pop music; every stall an incitement to spend foolishly and eat unwisely. Cold rain swept down across bars and kitchens selling burritos and nachos, roti rolls, duck fat chips, galettes, crepes, paninis, doughnuts, pretzels, bratwurst, mulled wine and foaming tankards of beer. Chocolate spread, chillis, cheese and pork were prominent among the toppings and fillings; it was hard not to think of the pressure on the sewers. |
| The fair had Bavaria as its theme. There was a Bavarian village and an Alpen Hotel and signs in German: gluhwein, ausgang, zimmer frei. Christmas fairs, like Christmas trees, are a German tradition – corrupted here to match the spirit of the age. | The fair had Bavaria as its theme. There was a Bavarian village and an Alpen Hotel and signs in German: gluhwein, ausgang, zimmer frei. Christmas fairs, like Christmas trees, are a German tradition – corrupted here to match the spirit of the age. |
| • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist | • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist |
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