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27

Christmas Traditions

CHRISTMAS ENTERTAINMENT

In the past, Christmas entertainment was a dec-

adent and often mischievous affair, but by the

Edwardian period, such costly and boisterous

practices were no longer popular and families were

establishing new traditions. At Downton Abbey,

playing charades was a Christmas Eve tradition.

Other families might have preferred card games

or performing a skit or play, or there could be

music and singing.The New Year’s hunt, a driven

pheasant shoot (as birds are flushed into the sky,

hunters rotate among ten stations,each with a dif-

ferent terrain), is another Downton

tradition. Everyone would be clad

in tweed, rifle under the arm, ready

to practice this ancient aristocratic

pastime reminiscent of the wild

boar hunts of medieval days. The

shoot would be followed by a lun-

cheon at the shooting lodge, yet

another longstanding tradition of

the season.

CHRISTMAS CAROLS

In season 5, episode 9, we see the

Crawley family and their staff gather

together in the great hall before the

Christmas tree to sing carols. The

tradition of singing carols at home likely dates

back only a century or so, but Christmas carols

themselves—or at least hymns with Christian

themes—are much older. Some of the earliest

Christmas carols documented in England are

found in a 1426 work by John Audelay, a priest

and poet living in the western part of the country

who recorded the words to twenty-five “caroles

of Cristemas,” most likely songs sung by local

wassailers of the time.

Roughly a century later, in the Tudor period,

caroling became popular, and even Henry VIII

was known to have sung a carol or two. Most of

the songs were religion based, though some were

secular and spoke of hunting and feasting. For

example, the then-popular “Boar’s Head Carol”

describes the tradition of hunting a wild boar and

ceremonially parading its head at the Christmas

feast. This is most certainly a carryover from the

pagan and Nordic customs of sacrificing animals

to implore the gods for a prosper-

ous New Year, a practice Christians

assimilated into their own cel-

ebrations. By 1521, Christmasse

Carolles, one of the earliest printed

collections of carols in England,

was published in London by Jan

van Wynkyn de Worde, a German

immigrant.

With the arrival of Puritan

rule in the mid-seventeenth cen-

tury, Christmas festivities, includ-

ing caroling, were banned as

being impious. A century later,

the Victorians set about reviving

many old Christmas traditions,

including the singing of medieval carols. In his

1833 Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern,

author William Sandys despairs that celebrating

Christmas is “on the wane” and offers up some

eighty carols,including some “specimen of French

Provincial Carols,” probably in an attempt to

make the idea of caroling more attractive—and,

given the French connection, even fashionable.



Please be careful on

Christmas Eve if you

do decide to drink.

You’ll get plastered on

a sniff of sherry.



Paradise.

~ SEASON 5, EPISODE 9

Official Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook

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