York's hidden history: how we used to celebrate Christmas

IMAGINE Christmas without the tree, the turkey or the Christmas pudding. No Christmas crackers, tinsel or Santa Claus either. Many features of today’s Christmas festival were introduced during the 19th century.

Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, brought the Christmas tree here from his native Germany in the 1840s. Christmas cards came on the scene in the two decades between 1860 and 1880. Christmas Day only became an official holiday in 1834. Before that, it had been an ordinary working day. Boxing Day wasn’t made an official holiday until 1871.

Go back several centuries to the pre-Christian era, and you would find the early Roman occupiers of Eboracum (York) celebrating the festival of Saturnalia during the winter solstice. It was also a holiday in honour of the Sol Invictus or Unconquered Sun (the Roman sun god).This was a week-long orgy of self-indulgence held between 17th and 23rd December which also honoured the agricultural god Saturn.

After the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, emperors would prohibit rituals and the sporting games that once honoured pagan gods. Cultural change of this magnitude would have taken decades or even centuries to catch on and some of these traditions morphed gradually into the celebration of Christmas.

Later inhabitants of York, the Vikings, brought their own mid-winter festival celebrations with them to York in 866. They called it Yule, a word that’s still with us today. Their Yule festival celebrated the return of the sun and also involved a great deal of drinking and feasting. Yule celebrations lasted 12 days. It was the time of year when the Vikings believed that Odin, the father of gods, would ride across the night sky and visit them in their homes. Sounds familiar?

In many ways the medieval Christmas was quite different from what had gone before or what it was to become in later centuries. The 12-day period of Christmas was a religious feast, and the church mandated attendance at its services. But other days during the Christmas festival were also observed. The shortest day (December 21), which also happened to be St Thomas’s Day, was celebrated in York with the custom of the Yule Riding, when a disguised couple (Yule and Yule’s Wife) would carry a leg or shoulder of lamb and a cake of ‘purest meale’ through the streets of the city to the playing of music and the crowds throwing nuts.

Mince pies were a bit different in years past

One Archbishop of York had this tradition banned in 1572, but the York Waits with a crowd of followers continued to process around the city with their instruments. People decorated their homes with holly, ivy, and the mistletoe which was especially associated with fertility and protection against evil spirits.

At York Minster and several other English cathedrals there was the tradition of the ‘boy bishop’. Echoing the role reversal of the Roman Saturnalia, the choristers would choose one of their number to become the bishop from December 6 through until Holy Innocents Day on 28th, while the revered canons took the roles of choristers and altar boys. During the last day of his tenure, the boy bishop conducted the whole service and even preached the sermon. But it all became a bit raucous over time and that spoilsport Henry VIII decided to put a stop to it.

Another regular feature of Christmas up until the 1650s was the Lord of Misrule, the secular counterpart to the boy bishop. He was an official who was specially appointed to manage the Christmas revelries. By all accounts, things got a bit out of control here too with the Lord of Misrule encouraging people to engage in pranks, drunkenness and general misbehaviour.

So much of this ribaldry ended when that other spoilsport Oliver Cromwell decided to ban Christmas altogether when he became Lord Protector in the mid-17th century. Christmas went underground. But it returned with a vengeance in 1660 when King Charles II came back from his French exile.

Over the centuries, food and drink were central to Christmas celebrations, as they still are. The rich and privileged feasted on goose, venison, peacock, and boar’s (or wild pig’s) head. The poor had to make do with the lesser cuts of meat such as the offal which was often mixed with other ingredients and cooked in what was known as ‘umble pie’.

Incidentally, the first mince pies date from the early Middle Ages and were rectangular, not round, larger than we know them today, and contained finely minced meat as well as chopped-up fruit and a preserving liquid. There was wine for the wealthy and ale for the rest.

Gift-giving was also a part of Christmas, though the presents were usually exchanged at the beginning of the New Year. There was the notion that this was a time of year when acts of charity should be performed.

Modern Christmasses start on Christmas Eve and by Boxing Day, it’s more or less all over for us until New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. For our ancestors, the mid-winter festival was spread over 12 days or more. We should remember that England was overwhelmingly an agricultural country, and mid-winter allowed more leisure time than other months.

But like them, we still all need to try to make merry in this, the darkest time of the year.

Merry Christmas (when it comes)!

David Wilson is a community writer with The Press