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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