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The Official Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook

can fall on any day from December 20 through

December 23. Early in the fourth century, under

the reign of Emperor Constantine, Christianity

became the dominant religion of the Roman

Empire, and in the year 336, Christmas was for-

mally celebrated on December 25 for the first

time, a date some scholars believe was chosen in

order to diminish the popular pagan celebrations

that filled those calendar weeks. Christmas would

not become a major holiday of Christianity for

another six centuries, however.

Mumming, which has its origins in Saturnalia

and goes back a millennium in Britain, was a

popular practice for everything from Samhain,

the early Gaelic festival that became All Hallows

Eve and All Saints’ Day, to a thirteenth-century

Christmastime wedding at the court of Edward I.

During the Christmas season, it called for dress-

ing up in elaborate costumes—so elaborate the

mummers would not be recognizable to those

who knew them—and going door-to-door in

the neighborhood or in a nearby village. If the

mummers—also known as “guisers”—were wel-

comed into a home, they would typically perform

a dance or song or skit to the delight of their audi-

ence, who would then try to identify their clev-

erly disguised visitors and offer them food and

drink. This custom had a dark side as well, with

wandering bands of drunken, masked mummers

reportedly engaging in inappropriate behavior,

which prompted the banning of mummery by

Henry VIII for a period.

By the eighteenth century, mummers were

formalized in traveling theater troupes that per-

formed plays everywhere from village squares to

concert halls.Today,the village of Bampton in the

Cotswolds, which was used for a number of out-

door scenes in Downton Abbey—the library stood

in for the entrance to the Cottage Hospital and

the vicarage for the exterior of Isobel Crawley’s

house—has a resident mummers troupe that per-

forms each year on Christmas Eve.

Early Nordic and Germanic peoples had

their own winter solstice festival called Yule (or

Yuletide, for Yule time). A central part of the

celebration, which drew on an earlier tradition

of bonfires, was the Yule log (it was an actual log

and not the buttercream cake made to look like

one we know today), which was dragged from

the forest, carved with wishes and spells, ignited

with a piece of the Yule log saved from the pre-

vious year, and then left to burn for twelve days

to ensure good luck and prosperity in the coming

year.By the seventeenth century, the tradition had

migrated to England, as illustrated by this excerpt

from “Come Bring the Noise,” a carol by English

poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674):

Come bring the noise,

My merry, merry boys,

The Christmas log to the firing;

While my good dame, she

Bids ye all be free,

And drink to your heart’s desiring.

With the last year’s brand

Light the new block, and

For good success in his spending,

On your psaltries play,

That sweet luck may

Come while the log is a teending.

This tradition of which Herrick writes was

still widely practiced, albeit on a smaller scale, in

Edwardian England and is visible at Downton,

where a Yule log crackles in the fire not far from

the family’s grandly decorated holiday tree.