A Christmas Cornucopia: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Yuletide Traditions

by Mark Forsyth

Picture a man sitting beside a dead tree. He is indoors and wearing a crown. From the ceiling hangs a parasitical shrub that legitimates sexual assault. He is singing to himself about a tenth-century Mittel-European murder victim using a sixteenth-century Finnish melody. Earlier, he told his children that the house had been broken into during the night by an obese Turkish man. This was a lie, but he wanted to make his children happy. Far away, in the high Andes two Peruvians are punching each other very hard indeed. And nobody thinks that any of this is odd.

There’s a lovely story about a Tokyo department store, back in the days when Christmas was unknown in Japan. The head of this store had heard rumours of a Western tradition that involved a massive shopping spree and he wanted to introduce it to Tokyo. So he sent some of his staff to investigate, and the result was that on Christmas Eve the shop’s main window was decorated with a huge Santa Claus nailed to a cross.

We dress love up as a wedding, and death as a funeral, so that we can see them both.

Christmas has for sixteen hundred years been viewed as a festival that has lost sight of its True Meaning.

you ask, is a spinning top with letters on its sides. And a peep-show box in that more innocent age was a box with a magnifying glass in the side through which you could see little painted wonders. In the twentieth century some bright and drooling spark had the idea of putting dirty pictures inside, and eventually somebody decided to shove a whole woman in there. This is called Progress.

According to the church calendar, the Christmas period begins at dusk on Christmas Eve and lasts for twelve days to the feast of Epiphany when the Magi arrived.

One day, Santa Claus came to England and ate Father Christmas. That may sound rather odd, but you have to remember that Father Christmas is a completely different person from Santa, or at least he was until he got eaten.

Something brief ought to be said here about the idea that Coca-Cola created the Santa Claus we know and dressed him in red and white. They didn’t. It’s as simple as that.

There is, though, a much better and more scientific theory for why Rudolph was teased by the other reindeer. You see, Rudolph is transsexual. Rudolph in all the original illustrations has horns at Christmas. Male reindeers shed their horns during the winter. Rudolph, right from the earliest depictions in the Montgomery Ward colouring book, has a full set of antlers. Rudolph is female.

In fact, the only birds that we in Britain absolutely never hunted were robins. It has always been bad luck to kill a robin, hence the nursery rhyme. Hence also evolution. Robins on the Continent are very shy birds, robins in Britain are notoriously unafraid of humans and tend to bother us when we’re doing the gardening.

So the Tudor Christmas was basically a great big twelve-day party when the poor got to eat well, the peasants got to play at being lords and everyone went on a semi-psychotic crusade against birdlife. And then – as so very, very often in this book – the Puritans happened.

1. Scrooge represents everyone who works in the city, that’s why it never actually says what job he does. You may think that he’s a slum landlord or a money lender, but though there’s one brief mention of a debt towards the end of the book, Dickens never, ever specifies. (If you’re absolutely positive that you remember a specific trade, you’re probably thinking of the film version with the Muppets.) 2. The opening scene has Scrooge complaining that he has to give Bob Cratchit the day off, thus ‘picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!’ Because unlike the old rural idyll in the yules of yore, city workers could work all year. Gone are the twelve days of idleness. 3. Then the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge back to his childhood in the countryside, because Scrooge is the archetypal Victorian with a rural past and an urban present. 4. When we go back in time to Fezziwig’s party, when Scrooge was a young man, we find that Christmas used to be fun, but now it’s not. 5. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge that Bob Cratchit, who is poor, is planning to eat goose. He also shows him that all the good Christmases occur indoors. Whether it’s the Cratchits or Scrooge’s nephew or miners on the moor or lighthouse keepers (though I concede that lighthouse keepers can’t very well spend it outside). 6. When Scrooge has changed his ways, the first thing he does is buy Bob Cratchit a turkey, because turkey is better and more expensive than goose.

There are also No Brussels Sprouts. Brussels sprouts first appear in an English recipe book in 1845 in Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza Acton. They were meant to be buttered and eaten on toast. I have tried this and you shouldn’t.

But the etymological meaning of Christmas is Go Away, Christ, and as the etymology of the word etymology is true-meaning, that must be the true meaning of Christmas.

Or you may have wished for an explanation of the Catalan Caga Tio, an odd log-like creature with a face that poos out presents on Christmas Eve, but only if he is savagely beaten. I too would like an explanation of the Caga Tio.

For children, Christmas is everything they might be given; for an adult, Christmas is everything we have lost. This is a truth that was as clear to Charles Dickens as it was to George Michael.