KEEPING CHRISTMAS 
 
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 GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L. 
 
 WITH A FRONTISPIECE 
 BY 
 
 E. WYLY GRIER, R.C.A. 
 
 TORONTO: 
 
 Hart & Riddell 
 1894 
 
Entered according to the Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one 
 thousand <ight hundred and ninety-four, by Messrs. HART &~ RIDDEI.L, at 
 the Department of Agriculture. 
 
KEEPING CHRISTMAS 
 
 "/Christmas comes but once a 
 \^ year" were the words ^miliar 
 and dear to English childhood. 
 They were uttered by the bands 
 of mummers who came into the 
 halls of the gentry on Christmas 
 Eve to exhibit their rude tradi- 
 disguises and play their uncouth antics, 
 earning thereby the half-crowns wherewith to make 
 themselves a merry Christmas. If you had traced 
 the pedigree of the mummers, probably you would 
 have found that they, like Punch, represented the 
 actors of some mediaeval mystery or morality play, 
 now fallen in its estate, since the Church of the 
 Middle Ages, with all its sacred pageantry and 
 dramaturgy, had passed away. Punch will die only 
 with Shakespeare, but the mummers probably by 
 this time the policeman of a refined civilization has 
 ordered to " move on." Besides the roughness and 
 absurdity of the exhibition, these fooleries enacted 
 by the lower class to amuse the upper class and 
 draw money from them did smack somewhat of 
 the old regime, and even reminded one a little of 
 
6 KEEPING CHRISTMAS 
 
 the Saturnalia of the Roman slave. More than two 
 centuries before, Puritanism had banished forever 
 the Lord of Misrule, under whose reign of tipsy 
 jollity and folly the lawyers of the Temple were 
 once fined for having failed to perform their cus- 
 tomary dance before the judges. The Lord of 
 Misrule, while he lasted, was kept up in a style 
 incredibly elaborate and expensive. Ke had a mimic 
 court, with officers answering to those of the real 
 court, and for a season ruled the realm of pleasure 
 as absolutely as the monarch whom he counter- 
 feited and for an hour supplanted ruled the State. 
 Mr. Francis Vivian, Lord of Misrule or Christmas 
 Prince in the reign of Charles I., spent £2,000, 
 equivalent probably to $100,000 now, on the main- 
 tenance of his mock dignity, besides his allowance 
 from the Crown. To all this the more serious and 
 austere spirit which was then gaining ascendancy 
 in Merrie England was fatal, and the Restoration, 
 though it brought back the May pole, failed to 
 revive such laborious and thoroughly antiquated tom- 
 foolery as the reign of the Lord of Misrule. " Our 
 Christmas Lord of Misrule," says Prynne, "together 
 with dancing, mascjues, mumnneries, stage-playing, 
 and such other Christmas disorders now in use with 
 Christians, were derived from these Roman Satur- 
 nalia and Bacchanalian festivals, which should cause 
 all pious Christians eternally to abominate them." 
 
KEEPING CHRISTMAS 7 
 
 The words are quoted in Mr. Hervey's " Book of 
 (Christmas," where all the lore concerning the Lord 
 of Misrule will be found. Prynne is right in con- 
 necting the reign of Misrule, morally at least, with 
 the Saturnalia ; it was not only a vast " spree," but, 
 like the Saturnalia, a temporary relief from the 
 rigidities of social arrangements and a sort of social 
 safety-valve at the same time. Another festival 
 which used to be kept in England when the writer 
 was a boy, and which had a strong and most 
 pathetic tinge of the Saturnalia, was the festival of 
 tiie chimney-sweeps on the tirst of May. Those 
 hapless boys, mostly parish apprentices, and the 
 lowest and most miserable slaves of civilization, 
 had that one privileged day of merriment and feast- 
 ing in the year. They used to dance on the lawn 
 round 'Jack in the Green," clattering their brushes 
 and wooden shovels, afi-er which they were regaled 
 by the charitable with beef and plum pudding. 
 Happily that caste of misery and degradation has 
 now ceased to exist. If the mummers have departed, 
 let us hope the "Waits" have not departed with 
 them. Their music was hardly an equival' nt, es- 
 pecially in the rural parishes, for the song of the 
 angelic choir heralding the nativity, which presum- 
 , -n"" ablfe it professed to reproduce. But its sound in 
 X' the dead of night made a strong impression, half 
 awful, half pleasant, on the ear of childhood. 
 
8 KEEPING CHRISTMAS 
 
 Sunday and Christinas are now pretty much in 
 the same position as institutions which have lost or 
 are fast losing their old theological basis, but rest 
 securely on a basis of another kind. It is impossi- 
 ble to insist on the obligation of keeping the 
 Jewish Sabbath, the day on which the Creator 
 rested after the six days' work of Creation : and 
 in fact we do not keep it, our Sunday being the 
 first day of the week and not the seventh. But 
 the Sabbath has glided into the Day of Rest, of 
 spiritual rest for those who are spiritually minded, 
 of rest at all events for all, and of Sabbath still- 
 ness after the noise and bustle of the week. The 
 French Revolutionists, when they undertook to make 
 new heavens and a new earth on the principles of 
 Reason and Rousseau, substituting the tenth day 
 for the seventh, found it would not do. Sunday 
 has ceased to be an article of the law, but it 
 remains an article of human nature. So it is with 
 Christmas. Christians in the Middle Ages thought 
 that they were keeping the actual birthday of the 
 Saviour, as they thought when they went on a 
 pilgrimage to Jerusalem that they saw the identi- 
 cal spots where the scenes of His Fassion had been 
 enacted and the Sepulchre in which He had been 
 laid. We know that the day of Christ's birth is 
 totally uncertain. Clement of Alexandria, a Father 
 of the second century, speaks of those who affected 
 
KEEPING CHRISTMAS g 
 
 to assign the day as " over curious," and his con- 
 fession of ignorance is decisive. All attempts to 
 settle the point by reference to historical landmarks, 
 to ecclesiastical tradition, or to the shepherd's calen- 
 dar are vain. Probably the time of the winter 
 solstice, the birthday of the year, was fixed on for 
 the nativity of the Sun of Righteousness. The old 
 Latin hymns seem almost to admit as much by 
 coupling the coming of the Saviour with the return 
 of light. Not only the day of Christ's birth but 
 the year is uncertain, and the French Revolutionists 
 had that fact upon their side when, proceeding to 
 regenerate chronology as well as society, they sub- 
 stituted for the Christian era that of the fancied 
 enthronement of Reason. Nevertheless, we let this 
 article of the mediaeval calendar stand, and still on 
 the traditional day celebrate the birth of Christi- 
 anity and of all that Christianity has brought with 
 it to society, to the home, and to the heart. Even 
 those who in this critical and sceptical age have 
 ceased to be Christians in name may celebrate 
 the festival of humanity. For they can hardly 
 deny that it was with Christianity that the 
 sense of a common humanity and of the brother- 
 hood of man with all its duties and charities, and 
 with the civilization which is grounded on it, came 
 into the world. A Greek philosopher might point 
 out the close fellowship which united mankind ; but 
 
10 KEEPING CHRISTMAS 
 
 that same philosopher pronounced slavery an ordi- 
 nance of nature, and when he spoke of mankind 
 probably thought only of the free. That there 
 were no hospitals or alms-houses before Christ may 
 not be strictly true ; but it is certain that there was 
 nothing in ancient civilization like the vast system 
 of Christian charities. The Comtist religion of 
 Humanity, though it presents itself as a new crea- 
 tion, is, as has been often and truly said, Roman 
 Catholic Christianity reproduced, with a new set of 
 saints, sacraments, and festivals. Those who cannot 
 keep Christmas Day as the holiday of a revealed 
 religion, may keep it as the holiday and the annual 
 renewal of human brotherhood, social beneficence, and 
 family affection. 
 
 Suppose some ^•estige8 and relics of heathenism 
 do mingle with our mode of keeping the Christian 
 feast: suppose the Yule log does represent the sacred 
 tire of pagan superstition, and remind us of the scene 
 in a Scandinavian hall, where our rugged progenitors 
 (juaffed their mead and sang their rude drinking 
 songs amidst the <^ 'ophies of wild tribal W!n\ Sup- 
 pose the mistletoe is the mystical plant of the Druid, 
 though it is difficult to see how the connection can 
 be traced between Druidism and ki.ssing. All this 
 only widens the circle of historic association and 
 makes the festival in a larger sense human. Even 
 the most ortiiodo.x among us have by this time 
 
KEEPING CHRISTMAS it 
 
 pretty well discarded the narrow theology, uncount- 
 enanced by any rational construction of the Gospel, 
 which puts the heathen out of the pale of salvation 
 and consigns them to the power of evil for not 
 having heard a word which was never preached to 
 them or believed miraculous events which had not 
 then taken place. We recognize the debt which 
 Christian Ethics owe to Socrates, Plato, Marcus 
 Aurelius, and Epictetus. We scout the monkish 
 morality which consigns virtuous pagans, with one 
 or two arbitrary exceptions, to eternal torments. 
 We have enlarged the bounds of Christendom to 
 the full compass of the designation "Son of Man." 
 
 It is in vain that the Puritan has tried to dis- 
 lodge the Papistical, Prelatical, and heathen Christmas 
 by substituting for it Thanksgiving Day. His 
 failure is almost as signal as that of the Jacobins 
 in their attempt to substitute the birthday of their 
 Republic for the birthday of Christendom. A holi- 
 day of any kind is always popular, and it is very 
 meet and right that we should express pious grati- 
 tude for the ingathering of the harvest. But who, 
 except the heirs of the Puritans, cares very much 
 about Thanksgiving Day ? With what tender and 
 hallowed associations is its name encircled ? Who 
 particularly wislies on that day to gather all whom 
 he loves around him, or calls up with special fond- 
 ness the image of those whom he has lost? To 
 
12 KEEPING CHRISTMAS 
 
 see a man eating his Christmas dinner alone at a 
 club makes one shudder. Would the sight of a man 
 eating his Thanksgiving dinner alone give one the 
 same shock ? Perhaps one who is not a New Eng- 
 lander or a Puritan underrates the intensity of 
 New England and Puritan feeling. But Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe is a New Englander, and she shows us in 
 her Poganicc how, when the burst of anti-Anglican 
 feeling connected with the Revolution was over, 
 Christmas, with its little Church pageantries and its 
 genial memories, stole back to its place in the 
 hearts of all but the most austerely Puritanical 
 portion of the people. The children even of the 
 Puritan minister cannot keep away. One thing is 
 certain. Thanksgiving can never, like Christmas, be a 
 feast of mankind or of Christendom, since the time 
 of harvest will always differ in different parts of 
 the world. Christmas, it is true, we are apt to 
 associate with winter, with snow, and with the 
 storms which, raging out-of-doors, endear by contrast 
 the bright fire and the happy circle within. But it 
 may be kept, and is kept, at once in England, in 
 America, in Australia, and in Hindostan. If the 
 supporters of Thanksgiving Day fling any stones at 
 Christmas on account of its association with a 
 sacred season of the heathen, the stones may be 
 flung back ; for nothing is more certain than that 
 the heathen were in the habit of ottering the first- 
 fruits to their gods. 
 
KEEPING CHRISTMAS 13 
 
 Let me say, however, that there have been two 
 occasions on which I have myself been made to 
 feel as warmly as any New Englander about Thanks- 
 giving. Both were in the time of the Civil War. 
 Just when the fury of the war was at its height, 
 and the North was intensely embittered by the 
 reports of the cruel treatment of its captive soldiers 
 at Andersonville, I visited the Prison Hospital at 
 Baltimore, in which a number of Confederate pris- 
 oners, convalescent as well as sick, were confined. 
 It happened to be Thanksgiving Day, and looking 
 into the dining hall 1 saw the tables plentifully 
 laid out with turkey and all the other good things 
 of the season, which had been sent in by the kind- 
 hearted enemies of the prisoners. The incident was 
 the more striking because nowhere was the rage of 
 parties so fierce as in the border city of Baltimore. 
 The other occasion was a Thanksgiving dinner party 
 in New England when, though the quarrel with 
 England about the Alabama was going on, and our 
 host was a fervent patriot, and had lost relatives in 
 the war, he gave as a toast after dinner, "The 
 President of the United States and the Queen of 
 England." 
 
 The native of old England, at all events, wher- 
 ever he may find himself, at the Pole or in the 
 Tropics, beneath the roof of home, on the wide sea, 
 or in the tented field, tries in some way to honour 
 
14 KEEPING CHRISTMAS 
 
 the season and its associations. A kinsman of the 
 writer, an officer of the army that entered France 
 after Waterloo, undertook on Christmas Day to make 
 a plum pudding for the Mess. He knew the ingre- 
 dients, but forgot that they swelled in boiling. So 
 he tied the cloth tight, and the Mess was presented 
 with a Christmas Pudding of the size and con- 
 sistency of a cannon ball. 
 
 The custom of giving presents at Christmas and 
 the New Year certainly cannot be acquitted of 
 heathen associations : it is too clear that etrennes is 
 derived from strence. An ancient ecclesiastical writer 
 consequently denounces the custom as "diabolical," 
 the religion of the heathen and everything per- 
 taining to it being supposed to be the direct work 
 of the Devil. The youthful recipients of the strence 
 will be inclined to retort the malediction. In ancient 
 times, as in modern, the gifts were accompanied 
 with good wishes for the coming year. The prac- 
 tice is too natural to call for any learned explanation. 
 With us it has been developed into a round of 
 visits on New Year's Day, of the formality of 
 which society seems to be growing a little weary, 
 so that the custom is likely to fall into disuse. We 
 shall have reason to be sorry for its departure if it 
 has served, as I have heard people say that it has, 
 to terminate, without the awkwardness of a formal 
 reconciliation, any misunderstanding or coolness that 
 
KEEPING CHRISTMAS 15 
 
 may have arisen during the past year. The end of 
 the old year, coming with the birthday of the 
 religion of charity, is a good time for writing off 
 from the ledger of the memory all the evil debts of 
 unkindness, and opening a new book of mutual 
 goodwill. 
 
 Nowhere is the spirit of Christmas, as it now is, 
 of Christmas as a feast of goodwill and affection., 
 apart from anything ecclesiastical, better embodied 
 than in Dickens' Christvuis Carol. Though on a 
 small scale, the Ckristnias Carol is perhaps the most 
 perfect work of Dickens' genius. To say that it 
 ought to be read in churches would be profane ; 
 but much is read in churches that is not so good 
 and certainly far less effective. By the social geni- 
 ality of his writings, the author of the Christmas 
 Carol and the creator of such characters as the 
 " Brothers Cheery ble " has done more than sermons 
 and dissertations to save the heart of society from 
 being poisoned by social regenerators wlio philan- 
 thropically preach class hatred, and all the purveyors 
 of malignity with whose venom the world abounds ; 
 and while we laugh or cry over his novels, we 
 hardly recognize the debt which we owe him on 
 this account. The description in Pickwick of the 
 keeping of Christmas Day at Mr. Wardle's, though 
 full ot fun, is not in quite so wholesome a strain 
 as the Carol. There is too much whiskey in it; as 
 
i6 KEEPING CHRISTMAS 
 
 indeed there is generally in the writings of Dickens, 
 who was in a perpetual state of revolt against the 
 rule of hypocritical fanaticism which he has pilloried 
 in Stiggins, and sometimes gives his enemy the ad- 
 vantage by running into excess. We may feast and 
 be merry without excess. Christ himself opens His 
 mission and performs His first miracle at a marriage 
 feast. Great changes appear to be impending, and 
 the day may come, as the Comtists think, when man 
 will be so refined and intellectual that he will re- 
 gard taking food as an ignominious necessity of his 
 material nature, and will retire to eat in secret. But 
 so long as the glow of physical enjoyment retains 
 its connection with the glow of feeling, the least 
 sensual of all physical delights will be our Christmas 
 dinner, and the Prohibitionist nmst be stern indeed 
 who will forbid us to drink the health of all 
 friends, present or abroad, on Christmas Day.