Wilt thou be mine, Love--aye or no?

In 1819, the poet Charles Lamb wrote of February 14th: [T]his is the day upon which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on…to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell-wires.

Lamb was speaking of a custom that dates to at least the 15th century. The oldest known valentine written in English was discovered among the Paston Letters in the British Library. Margery Brews penned it to her fiancé John Paston in 1477:

Right reverent and worshipful and my right well-beloved valentine, I recommend me unto you full heartedly, desiring to hear of your welfare, which I beseech Almighty God long for to preserve unto his pleasure and your hearts desire.

Prior to that discovery, the oldest valentines in British possession were those of Charles, Duke of Orleans. Orleans wrote more than sixty to his wife in France over the course of his twenty-five year incarceration in the Tower of London following the Battle of Agincourt in 1415:

Wilt thou be mine? dear Love, reply--
Sweetly consent or else deny.
Whisper softly, none shall know,
Wilt thou be mine, Love?--aye or no?

Many examples of Victorian valentines have survived, but what did the earlier ones look like?

Usually homemade, they were hand-painted and decorated with lacy paper, ribbons, gold leaf, satins, silks and exotic feathers. Enterprising publishers took advantage of the craze by printing chapbooks of verses. Publications like The New English Valentine Writer by J. Turner (1784), and Every Ladies Own Valentine Writer by J. Roach (1797) addressed all levels of intimacy and even provided responses to their own poems.

According to Mr. Lamb: In these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart—that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears…it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations than an opera hat." Some were on the "finest gilt paper with borders--full not of common hearts and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest stories of love from Ovid and older poets...
 

In 1667, Dr. Samuel Pepys wrote: This morning, came up to my wife's bedside, I being up dressing myself, little Will Mercer to be her Valentine; and brought her name writ upon blue paper in gold letters... Two days later, Pepys visited Mrs. Pearse and was given a valentine by her little girl. But here I do first observe, he wrote, the fashion of drawing mottos as well as names, so that Pearse, who drew my wife, did draw also a motto...'Most courteous and fair'...
 

In her article for Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1901, Millicent Olmsted provides a glimpse at a particular style with which we all are familiar--the cut paper valentine. According to Ms. Olmsted, they were folded and delicately cut with saw-tooth edges, then opened and filled in with written sentiments. The one shown here is very old, ragged, yellow and limp. It was sent to Permillia Wainright in New Jersey, and bears on the back of it her initials and the date, 1783. During the decades, the valentine has fallen to tatters and has lost a narrow outer ring that bore the inscription: "Round is the ring that has no end. So is my love to you, my friend."

(Olmsted goes on to describe a puzzle purse valentine from 1790. To see what it looked like, click on Nancy's Puzzle Purse Valentine in the resource list below. The one Ms. Rosin shows from 1816 fits Olmsted's description. To read the verses, click the Boston Evening Transcript link to Come Be My Valentine, or refer to Olmsted's Cosmopolitan article.)

Other popular valentine designs: acrostic -- first letter of each verse spells a vertical word pinprick -- holes were pricked in a pattern with a needle or pin stencil rebus -- pictures drawn to convey a word, like an eye for the word "I" loveknots

It seems odd that, in all Jane Austen's letters and stories, she never refers to Valentine's Day. Most Janeites believe Frank Churchill's gift of a pianoforte to Jane Fairfax in Emma occurred on February 14th, but Austen doesn't say so. Perhaps her opinion of valentines more closely resembled that of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice:
 

"I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!"
"I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love," said Darcy.
"Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away."
 

Resources:

Valentine's Day, Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb, 1819
Love's Labour Found, BBC News, February 14, 2000
Two Letters from Margery Brews to John Paston in February 1477, The ORB:On-Lone Reference Book for Medieval Studies
Victorian Valentines: Part 1, Candice Hern, February 1,2003
Valentine Puzzle Purses, Origami Resource Center
Nancy's Puzzle Purse Valentine
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, the Globe Edition with introduction and notes by G. Gregory. Smith, London 1905, MacMillan and Co. Ltd., p. 465
Chapbooks: Definition and Orgins
Valentine Writers, Victoriana Magazine
The Festival of Love by Millicent Olmsted, Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Illustrated Magazine, Vol. XXX; November 1900-April, 1901; Millicent Olmstead, p. 372-380
"Come Be My Valentine", Boston Evening Transcript, March 20, 1899; p. 7
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918; p.44

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Merry Christmas versus Happy Christmas

I've always been intrigued why the British say "Happy Christmas" and we in the US say "Merry Christmas." An internet search revealed that, prior to the 1830s, “Merry Christmas” was the more popular salutation. The term “Merry Christmas” dates to at least 1565, when it appeared in The Hereford Municipal Manuscript: 
 

And thus I comytt you to god, who send you a mery Christmas...

The phrase “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” appeared in a 1699 letter from Admiral Frances Hosier to Robert Smith, a storekeeper at the Deptford dockyards in Woolrich, England. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol solidified the phrase in 1843 when, at the end of the story, Ebenezer Scrooge wished Cratchet, “A merry Christmas, Bob!”

In terms of oral tradition, “Merry Christmas” was around in the 16^th century West Country carol, “We wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

A little tougher to track is “Happy Christmas.” It isn’t an entirely British phrase, however. In 1823, New Yorker Clement Clark Moore wrote the classic Christmas poem, A Visit From St. Nick/Twas the Night Before Christmas which concludes with:

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

(It is interesting to note that, in some later editions, the phrase was changed to “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.” For what reason, no one is sure.)

By the late 19^th -- early 20^th centuries, “Happy Christmas” had become the more popular phrase in England. Perhaps for the same reason Queen Elizabeth II prefers it. “Merry Christmas” implies drunkenness and a bubbling over of festivity.

The association of merriment with Christmas can be found as far back as Sir Thomas Elyot’s 1548 Dictionary:

.…as the vulgare people saie, Reste you mery.

That sentiment is echoed in the Christmas carol, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” first published in William Sandys’ Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern in 1833.

The word “merry” didn’t start out associated with revelry. It derives from the Anglo-Saxon word myrige which meant pleasant and agreeable rather than jolly. Or perhaps Happy Christmas gained in popularity for the simple reason that greetings in general begin with the word “happy” – happy birthday, happy holiday, happy new year. To say “Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year” just doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like the other. But as a stand-alone phrase, "Happy Christmas" is consistent with long-standing salutatory customs.

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The First Christmas Card

As the above image demonstrates, the first commercial Christmas card sported the phrase, “Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year.” It made its appearance the same year Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published. Sir Henry Cole, a British civil servant who had no time to pen personal greetings to family and friends, commissioned the English painter, John C. Horsley to create the triptych card. One thousand of them were printed in black and white, then hand-colored. (Horsley’s card was based on the 18^th century custom of schoolboys creating “Christmas pieces” for their families. This elaborately decorated stationery sported written messages that showcased the boys’ penmanship.)

But no matter which phrase you prefer—the one another Cole by the name of Nat so aptly crooned in 1946:

Although it’s been said

many times, many ways,

Merry Christmas to you.”

Or the great John Lennon sang in 1971:

And so happy Christmas

we hope you have fun

The near and the dear ones

The old and the young…

Wishing you and yours all the best of the season. And God bless us, every one!

Bonfire Bangers on Guy Fawkes Night

Halloween is a collection of traditions that have come down from pagan harvest festivals with a layer of Christian icing spread over the top. The secular aspects of the holiday often are overlooked. Perhaps the most important is the Gunpowder Plot.

When Elizabeth I took the throne in 1533, England was wracked with religious upheaval. Her successor and sister, Mary, had attempted to reimpose Catholicism on their subjects. Elizabeth restored the Church of England but religious unrest continued to simmer for seventy years. It boiled over in 1605 when a dozen Catholic revolutionaries attempted to blow up King James I and his entire government.

Gunpowder Treason and Plot

The plan was simple—pack an abandoned coal cellar beneath Westminster with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder the opening day of Parliament, November 5, 1605. It was enough to level nearby Westminster Abbey and most of the buildings in the Old Palace complex. Everyone was scheduled to attend that day, including James I and members of the royal family. His children, however, would not be there. The conspirators planned to kidnap them and set up nine year old Princess Elizabeth as their puppet queen.

The man chosen to lay the charges and light the fuse was an explosives expert from York, Guy Fawkes. Fawkes had spent ten years fighting for the Catholic cause in the Dutch Revolt.

On November 4^th he took to the cellar beneath Westminster and patiently awaited the dawn of what he believed would be a glorious Catholic coup.

Alerted to the plot by an anonymous letter, government officials searched Westminster and the buildings around it. They found Fawkes in the cellar guarding what looked like a pile of iron bars, stones and timber. When questioned, he claimed to be the servant of the man in whose name the cellar had been rented.

The officials went on with their search but came up empty-handed. Around midnight, they returned to Fawkes and discovered he had in his possession a tinder-box and a dark signal lantern. When they dug beneath the pile he guarded, they found the barrels of gunpowder.

Fawkes was taken to the Tower of London where a confession was tortured out of him. He eventually named his co-conspirators. They all were tried and executed in January, 1606.

Parliament subsequently decreed that parish churches conduct a thanksgiving service every November 5th. (The tradition lasted until 1859.) Given the association with gunpowder, as well as the closeness to the pagan fire festival of Samhain on November 1st, Guy Fawkes Night was soon marked with bonfires and fireworks.

During the week leading up to Bonfire Night, children constructed effigies of Guy Fawkes out of old straw-stuffed clothing. The effigies were then burned on the bonfire. Before the event, the children went around the community begging “a penny for the guy.” Money collected was spent on fireworks.

And what celebration could be complete without food? Bonfire Parkin—a cake made of oatmeal, molasses and ginger, and Bonfire/Plot Toffee became popular Guy Fawkes Night treats. But no Fireworks Night party was complete without the Englishman’s favorite—bangers (sausages) and potatoes roasted in the bonfire.

Today, every opening session of Parliament is preceded by a symbolic search of the basement by the Yeoman of the Guard. In 1834, fire damaged the actual cellar in which the gunpowder was discovered. The cellar was totally destroyed when Westminster was rebuild in 1840.

Please remember the fifth of November

Gunpowder treason and plot

I see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

Guy, guy, guy

Poke him in the eye

Put him on the bonfire

And there let him die.