Survivals from paganism had been so successfully blended with Christian observances that even the Church had come to accept the admixture. The Twelve Days were the chief period of annual holiday- a sensible recognition of economic realities in a rural society, as well as a compromise with popular tradition. The first chapter in the story may conveniently be closed in 1043, when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the first time spoke of December 25th as “Christmas” instead of “midwinter” or “midwinter’s mass.” By the eleventh century the main elements in the Christmas tradition, which the Normans inherited, had been established. And a Christian background was provided for the feasting, the telling of tales, the nunstrelsy, the games, the wassailing, and the jousting, with which the Twelve Days were marked. Even though the people still performed their traditional dances in the precincts of the church at Christmas, at least they came to church to do so. Alfred and other Kings joined with the ecclesiastical authorities in prescribing that the Twelve Days should be kept as a period of festival and abstention from work. Until it had consolidated its position, the Church was obliged to acquiesce in the continuance of many pagan observances but, as time went on, it was able to effect a synthesis between the old and the new in which the grosser customs had no place. He was to be careful not to alarm the people by interference with heathen ceremonies, and the Pope specifically advised him to allow converts to kill and eat large numbers of oxen to the glory of God at the Christmas festival, as they had formerly done to the Devil. The story of the English Christmas from the Conversion to the Conquest, however, is epitomized in the instructions which Gregory the Great sent to Augustine. There is a tantalizing reference to the heathen “Yule” in Bede, but for the most part it is necessary to rely on surmise. Little is known about the midwinter observances in Britain upon which Augustine and his successors sought to superimpose the Christian feast of the Nativity.
The eating and drinking, always an important feature of Christmas observances, are directly descended from these primaeval banquetings and other customs that with greater or lesser certainty can be traced to pre-Christian origins include the use of evergreens, the telling of ghost stories, and some of the traditional games. For the present, it is enough that the festivities derived less from Christian sources than from the pagan midwinter celebrations at the time of the December solstice, which had the promotion of fertility as one of their chief purposes. Those who like to pursue institutions to their ultimate sources may, if they wish, trace the origins of the English Christmas to the beginnings of human society. The English Christmas was largely reshaped in the nineteenth century, but to understand what happened it is necessary to look back to the “old” Christmas out of which it developed.
In fact, Christmas was on the eve of a rejuvenation, as a result of which it was to gain a popularity hardly paralleled in its long history.
He was one of several nineteenth-century writers-among them William Sandys and other antiquaries-who recorded the traditional observances in an attempt to save them from the oblivion that seemed imminent. Chesterton called the “feudal Christmas”-Christmas as it had been kept by Sir Roger de Coverley and was romanticized by Sir Walter Scott. Many of the games and ceremonials of Christmas have entirely disappeared, and like the sherris sack of old Falstaff, are become matters of speculation and dispute among commentators.” Irving himself painted a memorable picture of what G. “One of the least pleasing effects of modern refinement,” wrote Washington Irving in the Sketch Book (1819-20), “is the havoc it has made among the hearty old holiday customs.
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