Holidays - Seasons Greetings!

What price Christmas one hundred years ago! Turn back the clock to 1870 and see what the newspapers have to offer. Here in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Christmas advertising is at a discount. The shops are there (”at the sign of the bear, ram, dog, bell, anchor, seal, book…”); you can see for yourself. What more do you want! But don’t get splashed. Water Street is not yet cobble-stoned, and, with heavy horse-drawn traffic churning up the mud, it needs all the crossing-sweepers it can muster. However, it has been up to date with gas lighting these twenty-five years. You can see the lights on street poles being turned on after sunset by the lamplighter with his long rod. So you can shop at night almost as well as by day for your Christmas presents from among leather card cases, writing desk boxes, jet jewelry, inkstands, snuff boxes, scent caskets, concertinas, Parian figures, vinaigrettes, reticules; from among dolls, balls, pistols, swords, tops, whistles, Noah’s Arks for little Ebenezer, Hannah, Luke, Sophia, Hugh, Matilda, Lucretia or Selina.

Oh, Santa Claus has come to town
With large supply of new goods;
They say he came the chimney down
And landed then at Blackwood’s.

Stockings will be hung up for toys and with luck an annual orange but the Christmas tree has not yet come into its own.

At the booksellers, Chisholm’s for one, you will find Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Samuel Smiles’s Self Help, Ingraham’s Prince of the House of David, the Waverley Novels, books by A.L.O.E. (A Lady of England), Routledge’s Boy’s Annual, At the South Pole, and bound volumes of Cassell’s Magazine, the Leisure Hour, the Sunday at Home, and Chatterbox. If you subscribe to magazines, the Lady’s Friend or the Saturday Evening Post offers as premium the steel engraving “Taking the Measure of the Wedding Ring”, “a gem of art”, while Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly gives with every subscription a “large and magnificent Parlor Steel Engraving ‘The Picnic on the Fourth of July’ “, and it supplies full-sized patterns with every number.

For a really special gift, what about getting your likeness taken at J.P. Wood’s Photograph, Ambrotype and Ferrotype Gallery, exquisite and delicate beyond engraving, your ‘very shadow’, and ever so superior to those old-fashioned silhouettes. You can wear your new dress of fine Angola wincey, the goods bought at Finlay’s and made up at home on Raymond’s Family Sewing Machine. Gentlemen would look well wearing one of the new-fashioned hats which are “bell-crowned and carry a rim of two inches and a half wide, with an upward tendency”.

Christmas is a time of good cheer. We see in the Public Ledger that the City of Halifax has lately arrived with a large supply of beef, mutton and poultry for the holiday season while E. M. Archibald has on hand “Turkies, Geese, Ducks and Sausages” along with a recent consignment of confectionery ex Balclutha from Greenock, viz, Pineapple, Lemon, Toffy, Acid and Fruit Drops; Honey and Paradise Balls; Peppermint Lozenges and Conversation Sweets. What mouth would not water, too, at the thought of one of Lash’s Christmas Cakes! The shops will do well this year; there is more money stirring after the past season or two of good ‘voyages’, following the “hungry sixties”.

The city churches can be depended on for Christmas music, performed for the most part on reed organs, Mason and Hamlin or Estey, as replacing the earlier pitch-pipe, violin, bass viol, flute, seraphine, harmonium while Gower Street Church has had the first pipe organ in a Methodist Church these ten years. At the Roman Catholic Cathedral the devotional attraction of a Christmas Crib with figures of infant, virgin, St. Joseph and shepherds, “the whole brilliantly illuminated and surmounted by an arch of evergreens” is open after last Mass on Christmas Day.

In this year of 1870 the weather is seasonable. By the 18th of December there are two or three inches of snow down and “the tinkling of the merry sleigh bells gives substantial evidence that it is being appreciated by ladies and gentlemen who can afford to indulge in this excellent recreation.”

Christmas Day turns out fine and bright after hard freezing on Christmas Eve, the wind west, high, and with a little ground drift.

Skaters have their choice of Victoria and Avalon Rinks, both of which advertise ample skating space, with Bands playing twice a week, and the Victoria Rink offers accommodation for visitors in an extended Promenade and new wide gallery. Some skaters are favoring the Skeleton skate which screws to the boot, their ‘made to order’ boots, while many still depend on the wooden sole skate with metal runner and straps. There is always pond skating of course. Any untoward broken bones will call to mind Peter Brennan, bonesetter, operating quite successfully with his block and tackle, and a glass of Jamaica rum, for anaesthetic (provided by the patient).

Christmas at St. John’s this year will lose much of its sparkle for many in the absence of the British garrison. The Imperial Troops have been recalled by the British Government. The battery of Royal Artillery in garrison here embarked last month for Bermuda via Quebec and Halifax on H.M.S. Tamar. No more will the red coats stage the military pageantry of the Tattoo, lend color to parades and balls, or their support to Grand Evening Concerts and theatricals. Only a year or two ago “Officers of the Garrison” were putting on melodramas and farces at Fisherman’s Hall, Queen Street, just as Officers of the Garrison and often “Young Gentlemen of the Navy” had been in the habit of doing for decades past.

Christmas mummering, too, has been more to the fore in the past, when some twenty years ago the St. John’s play, The Tragedy of St. George, was performed before Governor Harvey by gaily dressed, beribboned actors. However, increased rowdiness of mummers in and out of the processional Christmas parade led to disguised mummers being put down by law.

No more would the mummers as bedizened ‘fools’ flagellate bystanders with whips and inflated bladders, or as ‘oonchucks’ (men in women’s clothing) thrash all and sundry, no more would the monster hobby horse, round which mummers skirmished, frighten maids and children. The worst of the murmuring saturnalia over the Twelve Days of Christmas had come to an end. There is still milder house visiting in disguise with often boisterous antics part of the game until unmasking when food and drink are the order of the day.

Perhaps only mummers could keep up the Twelve Days of Christmas in traditional roistering style. St. John’s is quieter even to dullness in 1870; soldier less, mummer less, it has to find less spectacular outlets through which to celebrate the festival of Christmas.

Some Christmas evening then, in your home over the family shop, you may find yourself lighting the lamp, putting your feet up on the fender of Gear’s Gothic Grate before the fire and finishing Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne, a Christmas present, though you wonder if you shouldn’t be reading Lady Montagu’s Letters from the Levant out of the Athenaeum Library. But there, it is still the holiday season and some license may be allowed even if not all the license once enjoyed by mummers.

I spent the winter in St. John’s, intending to be ready in May to set out again on my coasting survey, and examine the rest of the shores of Newfoundland in search of mineral wealth and productions. During the latter part of November and the first two-thirds of December there was dull disagreeable weather, with occasional snow-storms and frost, interrupted by thaws.

During the latter part of December, and the whole of January, the weather was beautiful, the air clear, with sharp frost and snow on the ground, but no very intense cold. The harbor was never once frozen over, although the brooks and ponds gradually became fast. This was the season of general holiday. The lower orders ceased work; and, during Christmas, they amused themselves by what seemed the relics of an old English custom, which, I believe, was imported from the West of England, where it still lingers.

Men, dressed in all kinds of fantastic disguises, and some in women’s clothes, with gaudy colors and painted faces, and generally armed with a bladder full of pebbles tied to a kind of whip, paraded the streets, playing practical jokes on each other and on the passers by, performing rude dances, and soliciting money or grog. They called themselves Fools and Mummers.

The merchants and higher classes shut up their books and neglected their various employments, and amused themselves with sleighing parties to various points where the roads were open; while a general series of dinner parties commenced, varied now and then by an evening party and a dance. There was an amateur theatre, the profits of which were devoted to charitable purposes… in which their several parts were well sustained both by the actors and the audience. There were, moreover, two public balls, for charitable institutions, that were well got up and numerously attended. In short, there was no lack of amusement, till the preparations for the sealing voyage began, towards the middle of February, to draw off the attention both of masters and men to the more serious business of life.

When I was a boy, Christmas was a time of great rejoicing and hilarity. It was kept up for twelve days, during which there was ball-playing, wrestling matches and games of various kinds. In every house was placed on the table a decanter of rum with a very large sweet cake, baked in a Dutch oven or a large iron bake-pot. Those who could afford it, in addition to rum, had also gin, brandy and wine placed on the table. All visitors were expected to help themselves.

Then there were the mummers - those who went around by day and those who went around by night. The day mummers - the men had white shirts over their clothes, trimmed with ribbons, with fanciful hats. Each man had a partner - a man dressed in women’s clothes. Into whatever house they entered they recited their lessons, ate and drank, had a dance, their own fiddler playing the tunes. The night mummers were dressed in the most grotesque manner: some with humpbacks, cow hides and horns projecting, with hobby-horses, small bags of flour, which they used to throw over their followers. Then there were the boy mummers, who went around day and night. On two Christmases I had John Bemister as a partner. He acted as the Duke of Wellington, and I personated Oliver Cromwell.