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Optimo dierum! – Ancient winter festivals
By Alex Wakelam | @A_Wakelam It should come as no surprise to most that the festival of Christmas, as practised by Europeans, did not come into existence at this time of year by itself. Long before the supposed birth of the Nazarene, ancient cultures celebrated a number of winter festivals. Nor is this acknowledgment necessarily a new…
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The Late Medieval Christmas Feast
By Eleanor Russell This article forms part of Doing History in Public’s Christmas series, which this year looks into patterns of consumption at Christmastide. Like today, the most spectacular and anticipated part of the medieval Christmas was not the Mass, then mandatory, but Christmas feast, an event which offered not only an opportunity to celebrate…
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Christmas Shopping in the Seventeenth Century
By Carys Brown | @HistoryCarys In October 2004, Christians, trade-unionists, and the festively-inclined rejoiced at the introduction of the Christmas Day (Trading) Act. Ever since then it has been illegal for large shops to be open on Christmas Day; workers theoretically have the chance to rest and spend time with loved ones; Christians can celebrate the…
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Festivity amid the fighting: Christmas on the British Home Front in World War Two.
by Elly Barnett – @eleanorrbarnett By Christmas 1940 almost all of Britain’s major cities had been hit by extensive bombing raids, amongst them the devastating London Blitz of September and the destruction of Coventry in November. 24,000 British civilians had died, and families were displaced as children were evacuated from cities and parents went to…
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The Cancellation of Christmas
Philippa Carter (@extispicium) In The accomplisht cook (1660), the English chef Robert May recommended to his readers a feast ‘to be used at Festival Times, as Twelfth Day [of Christmas]’. All the budding cook had to do, May explained, was to construct – in pastry – a castle, a ship laced with gunpowder, a wine-filled…
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