Festive fare from hill and dale

SCHOOL was a different thing at Christmas, and very nice too. We were given crpe paper to make hats, lanterns and crackers and Mrs Archer would provide us with a sweet or a nut to put in the cracker.

Then we decorated the school ready for a really splendid children's tea in the afternoon, which was usually followed by a lantern slide show in the evening for the parents, which was also very enjoyable. It was always a bit dull and unwelcome coming back home to Low Birk Hatt afterwards.

Strange to say, I didn't really like carol singers. There was something rather eerie about people turning up unexpectedly around the door and starting to sing. When I was small I would creep into a corner.

I suppose the best Christmases I knew happened over at Clove Lodge where Mr and Mrs Atkinson and Miss Hind would always make a special thing of it. They had a juniper bush which was placed in the hub of a cartwheel covered in crpe paper. We would decorate it with pieces of cotton wool for snow and one or two other nice things like those shining coloured balls.

Solitary Daleswoman Hannah Hauxwell

AT Christmas they'd be fighting like hell to get into t'Phoenix 'cos all t'boys used to go in there. Everybody had to sing or say a poem or a monologue, else you'd put summat in t'kitty.

All the Nelson Eddy songs, and Irish songs mostly. They'd sing The Kerry Dance and get everybody going. And then I used to sing Danny Boy and Mountains Of Mourne. And they made a song up about the lodging house, it had 36 verses.

Walmgate resident Terry Kilmartin

SEGUIN, Confectioner from Paris, in the Minster Yard, York.

Makes and sells all sorts of dry and wet sweetmeats, apricots, green gages, pears, apples etc. Comfits of all kinds, perfumed ginger, carrimum, raspberries, carraway, images and sugar-boxes. All sorts of biscuits and macaroons, as made in Paris.

Advert from York Courant, December 11, 1764

I REMEMBER one Christmas Eve, me and my father, we had nothing like, and he says, "Is tha wakken, lad?" I says, "Aye. What for?" "Well," he says, "we'll have to got t'scaur this morning to get us our Christmas". That was at five o'clock...

Well, when we gets down the cliff on the scaur, we picks our cuvvins winkles. And, coming up, we'd getten a turnip apiece in our pockets, little turnips pinched from a farmer's field. We sat on the grass.

T'knives came out, and we peels the turnips, and Joe pulls his spoon out of his pocket and starts scraping. My dad says, "By God, Joe, tha's fetched thi spoon?" "Aye," he says, "I have nae bloody teeth."

John William-Storry recalls cuvvin-picking on the North Yorkshire coast in about 1905

IN the early years at the Hall, on Christmas Day, I would go to work at 7.30am to call Sir William and Lady Worsley and open up the house. Then go back home for my breakfast, open our own family Christmas presents and then return to work to do breakfasts and start the preparations for lunch...

It was usually a turkey of about 25 pounds which Sir William always carved, followed by plum pudding.

The routine was for candles to be lit, the curtains drawn, and I would enter carrying the flaming pudding. Those flames. What a job, trying to get them going and keep them alight! The introduction of vodka with the brandy made it somewhat easier.

Hovingham Hall butler Ronnie Marshall

...THEN it was Christmas Eve and everything in the cowhouse was different. Not in any physical way - I was still reluctant to leave the comfort of a log fire and face the dark, searching cold outside. I still skidded and slid and clashed buckets, and as usual, feared for my ribs as I forced them between the walls and the cows' bellies to dump food under their noses.

But something had changed. There was a new sense of uplift, a heightened awareness, the knowledge that my surroundings wouldn't be so very different from that stable long ago.

There must have been the same animal warmth, the same sweet animal smell, the same sounds of animals breathing, chewing and rustling hay.

Even the light would be similar - the soft glow of burning oil. I gave sincere thanks for that moment of sharing.

Crouching on the low three-legged stool next to Bluebell I gave myself up to an orgy of carol singing. By the time I had finished Blue and Rhoda and moved on to Rosie it was to find that she - a notorious one for holding back her milk and thus forcing us to fight for every drop - had been so transported by my singing that she had already let it down and flooded the floor.

Who said that cows are musical?

Westwath smallholder Joyce Fussey

Extracts from...

Seasons Of My Life: The Story Of A solitary Daleswoman by Hannah Hauxwell with Barry Cockcroft (Century); Humour, Heartache And Hope: Life In Walmgate by Van Wilson (ARC); Advert reproduced from the Keeping Oof Christmas 1760-1840 by Peter Brown (York Civic Trust); Yorkshire Fisherfolk by Peter Frank (Phillimore); The Butler Remembers by Ronnie Marshall; Cows In The Corn by Joyce Fussey (Robson Books)

THE companion CD to Van Wilson's book about the dance band era in York is out now. Called Rhythm & Romance, "this is something of a rarity because it is the first time that most of this music has been available to the public," said Van.

It covers music from most of the major dance bands of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, including the Rialtonians, the York Trumpet Twins, the Bob Brown Trio and Johnny Sutton And The Modernaires.

The CD costs £5.99 and is available from Borders, the Barbican bookshop and by post at York Oral History Society, c/o 15 Priory Street, York YO1 6ET.

Updated: 09:01 Monday, December 22, 2003