Decking the Halls

Evergreens were powerful pagan symbols because, at a time of year when most plants were dead, they remained green and even bore fruit. Nevertheless, it was considered bad luck to bring evergreens into the house, or to decorate, before Christmas Eve. Furthermore, Christmas greenery had to be taken down on Twelfth Night (Epiphany) Jan 6^th. There is some dispute, however, about disposal. In some regions of Britain, the evergreens were fed to cattle because it was considered unlucky to throw Christmas greenery on the refuse heap or burn it. In others, unmarried women supervised the burning. A steady flame meant a steady husband in their future; a sputtering fire portended an ill-tempered mate.

Fir Branches

During the Middle Ages, Europeans hung fir treetops upside down in their homes to symbolize the Holy Trinity and evoke a blessing on the house. Brits followed a different tradition. They wove hoops of ash, willow or hazel and placed figurines of the Holy Family in the center. These “sacrementals” were then blessed by a priest and hung up. Visitors would embrace their host/hostess beneath the wreath as a demonstration of goodwill.

After the Reformation, sacrementals were abandoned and plain old evergreens branches were hung instead. It may have been around this time that the pagan symbol of peace—mistletoe—was added. Thus was born the kissing bough.

Kissing Bough

To the Romans, a kiss beneath the mistletoe ensured a couple’s fertility. The custom of the man plucking a white berry with each kiss and giving it to the woman is thought to have been a symbolic promise of him giving her a child. Mistletoe berries were carried by ladies who wished to conceive. Unmarried women slept with mistletoe beneath their pillow so they could dream about their future husbands.

Before the advent of the Christmas tree, kissing boughs were central to holiday decorating. During the Regency they were simple structures, nothing more than a branch of mistletoe tied up with ribbon and hung from the ceiling or doorway. Not until the mid-19^th century did the kissing bough become an elaborately decorated ball.

Nativity Scene

St. Francis of Assisi was the first to create a three-dimensional nativity scene. In 1220, he set up a straw-filled manger between a live donkey and ox. Three years later, he commissioned an inanimate nativity and had it erected in a cave near Greccio, Italy where he held Christmas Eve mass.

How popular crèches were during the Regency is difficult to ascertain. Like so many traditions banned during the Reformation, nativity scenes no doubt fell out of popularity until the Christmas revival of the Victorian Era.

Yule log

The custom of burning the massive trunk of an oak tree this time of year predates the birth of Christ. The tradition came to Britain with the Vikings, to whom the burning of the Yule log was a symbol of the sun’s rebirth. When the church established Christmas in the 4^th century, however, fire came to represent the Son of God.

Nevertheless, superstitions about the burning of the Yule log persisted. A piece of the previous year’s log had to be used to kindle the new one. Ashes from the Yule log were mixed into livestock feed to make the animals fertile, dropped down wells to assure good water, scattered over fields and the roots of fruit trees to assure a bountiful harvest. If the Yule fire went out before it’s time, bad luck would be visited upon the house. A headless shadow cast by the Yule fire meant that person would die in the new year.

Jane Austen never referred to a Yule log in any of her books, but she and other Regency writers did wax enthusiastic about a great blazing “Christmas fire.” At a time when coal was the popular fuel and there was no central heating, this extravagant expenditure of resources likely gave everyone a great deal of "comfort and joy."

Christmas/Yule candle

Fire represented the rebirth of the sun to pagans. The Romans decorated their Saturnalia holly wreaths with clay figurines and candles. They lit tall waxed papers as votive offerings to Saturn. For the Vikings and the Celts, the winter solstice was a fire festival. They burned great bonfires on the hills to drive away the darkness.

With the advent of Christianity, people placed candles in the window at Christmas time to light the Christ Child’s way to their home. A single large Yule candle came to represent Christ himself as the light of the world.

In 1817, it was customary to place the eighteen-inch Yule candle on the dinner table Christmas Eve. The head of the household would light it after dusk and, once lit, it couldn’t be moved. When the time came to extinguish the candle, it had to be snuffed, not blown out. The Yule candle was lit every day during the Twelve Days of Christmas. Like the Yule log, a piece was saved to light the Yule candle the following year.

Sacred Evergreens

For pagans, the winter solstice was a frightening time. The sun seemed to abandon the earth to perpetual darkness. In an effort to reassure themselves of the sun’s return in the spring, the Celts brought evergreen sprigs and boughs indoors. Chief among the plants were holly, ivy and mistletoe.

Roman
During Saturnalia, the Roman winter solstice celebration, they honored the god Saturn by decorating their homes and businesses with sacred holly garlands and wreaths. They also gave their friends holly wreaths festooned with candles, clay figures and sweets.

Mistletoe—the magical “golden bough” carried by Aeneas and adorning Diana’s sanctuary at Nemi—also figured heavily in these celebrations. No Saturnalia was complete without a kiss beneath the mistletoe to aid fertility. Romans drank it as an aphrodisiac, and used mistletoe to cure cancer and tumors.

Ivy was sacred to Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry. Romans painted his likeness and carved him with a crown of ivy on his head. Bacchus played an integral role in Saturnalia festivities.

Norse
The Vikings believed the sun was reborn at the winter solstice. They celebrated with a twelve-day Yuletide festival throughout which they burned the massive truck of an oak tree. But Norsemen particularly revered the mistletoe that grew on that mighty oak. According to their mythology, mistletoe could resurrect the dead. It also was a symbol of peace. To encounter an enemy beneath a tree upon which mistletoe grew was the equivalent of meeting under a white flag.

Celt

The Sacred Grove was at the center of the Celts’ spiritual world. They believed their race sprang from it. And at the center of the Grove stood the oak tree, which represented the cyclical nature of life. The oak ruled the portion of the year when the sun shone the longest, while holly ruled the darker side. It was considered bad luck to cut down a holly tree, or to burn its green branches. The Druids advised people to take holly into their home during the winter as shelter for fairies and elves. But it had to be removed by Imbolc in February or the homeowner risked misfortune. The Celts believed holly had protective qualities against poison and ghosts. If one threw a stick of holly at a wild animal, it would become docile. To hang a branch outside the house protected the dwelling from lightning.

Mistletoe was particular sacred to them. Five days after the new moon following the Winter Solstice—roughly New Year’s Eve/Day—the Druids brought two white bulls to an oak tree in the Sacred Grove. A priest in a white robe climbed the tree and, using a golden knife, cut mistletoe from it. The sprigs were not allowed to touch the ground because, by its very nature, mistletoe was neither of heaven or earth. The bulls were then sacrificed and the mistletoe distributed. The sprigs were taken home and hung over the door as protection against thunder and lightning, and to ensure the fertility of crops and animals in the new year.

Mistletoe was the symbol of the Oak King and believed by the Celts to magically grow from the excrement of the thrush which ate it. (Mistel is the Anglo-Saxon word for dung, and tan is the word for twig—dung on a twig.) Pagans took mistletoe as a ritual drink. Its pollen was found in the stomach of an Iron Age cadaver excavated from a peat bog at Lindow Moss in 1984.

Oaks are not the only home for mistletoe. It attaches to fruit trees, particular the apple, and can be found around York on lime, poplar and hawthorn trees. Until the 18th century, York Cathedral conducted a Mistletoe Service on Christmas Eve that granted universal pardon to anyone who attended.

Irrespective of York’s Mistletoe Service, the evergreen was banned from churches as a pagan symbol. Christians believed Christ’s cross was fashioned from a mistletoe tree and that God’s revenge was to turn it into a parasitic plant. Nevertheless, mistletoe continued to be used as a secular holiday decoration, particularly in the kissing bough.

The Holly and the Ivy – ancient battle of the sexes

Where holly protected against witches and ghosts, ivy drew bad luck. It wasn’t allowed indoors except around Christmas, and then only if accompanied by holly. The word holly is an adulteration of the word holy. Christians believed holly’s prickly spines symbolized Christ’s crown of thorns, its red berries His drops of blood. During Henry VI’s reign, every house was decked with holly and ivy in the winter, especially at Christmas.

The Contest of the Holly and the Ivy, a carol from that period, came to exemplify long-held beliefs that holly was a masculine plant and ivy a feminine one. In the holly and ivy carol, holly is depicted as a virile hunter, while ivy is the archetypal female—submissive and shy as she “stands without the door.”

holly and his merry men they dance and they sing
Ivy and her maidens they weep and they wring…

The nature of the holly brought into a house at Christmas was believed to determine who held sway in the new year. Holly with really prickly spines meant the man of the house would dominate. Smoother holly meant the woman of the house would have her way.

Regency Christmas Traditions: The Origins of Christmas

'Tis the season when we reminisce about the origins of Christmas. As a Regency author, I’m particularly interested in the holiday traditions practiced during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries in England. Many of the customs and observances actually originated with non-Christian cultures.

In an effort to convert the people of those cultures, the church appropriated pagan holidays and superimposed saints days and other religious events over them. Perhaps its most brilliant strategy was to establish December 25^th as Christ’s birthday—Christ mass—when, according to biblical accounts, Jesus was born in the spring.

Roman

This was the time of year the Romans celebrated their god Saturn in a festival called Saturnalia. It ran from December 17 to December 23^rd. Temples were festooned with garlands and candles. The senate closed, no criminals were executed and students enjoyed a holiday from school. Saturnalia was marked by the making and giving of presents, the sharing of food and drink, and a great deal of merry making. Roles were reversed; slaves pretended to be masters and masters had to serve their slaves.

More important, between 274 and 390 A.D., the Romans worshipped the sun god Sol Invictus. They celebrated December 25^th as his Dies Natalis Solis Invicti—birthday of the unconquered sun.

Norse

The Vikings celebrated the twelve-day winter festival of Jōl (Yule) around the winter solstice in late December. Jōl means “wheel,” which is how the Vikings perceived the seasons.

They believed the winter solstice was the height of their father god Odin’s wild hunt across the skies on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir, a hunt which began on the Autumnal Equinox and ended at Beltane. Father Odin had a different aspect for every season of the year. In December, he was an elderly man in a long cloak with a flowing white beard. Norsemen believed the veil between this world and the next was thinnest at the winter solstice. The spirits of their ancestors walked abroad.

Celtic

For the Celts, this was the time of year when the Oak King of summer and Holly King of winter fought for dominance. And while they battled, the sun stood still. (solstice is derived from the Latin word sol, which means sun, and sistere, which means to stand still.) They built stone circles and mounds to precisely mark when the winter solstice occurred. The Celts fashioned wreaths and garlands from sacred evergreen plants (ivy of the Oak King, holly of the Holly King, and magical mistletoe) and decorated their homes to remind themselves that life would return to their forests and fields in the spring. They rang bells and sang songs to drive away evil spirits. 

It is important to note that, for most pagan cultures, the winter celebration lasted longer than a single day. It is therefore no accident the church established Christmastide/Yuletide as running from Christmas Eve until Twelfth Night (Epiphany) on Jan 6^th.