A Fenland Christmas, compiled by Chris Carling
Alan Sutton Publishing has a series of these "Christmas anthologies," the first which I bought at a book sale several years ago. Now I try to pick them up used when they're a dollar or under, with the postage as the bulk of the purchase. I had two others picked out originally, then decided to get this one and A Lakes Christmas because of thoughts of Lord Peter Wimsey and Beatrix Potter, respectively.
Peter Wimsey makes his appearance briefly in a very short excerpt from The Nine Tailors, which takes place in the fen country, an area of England that is very like Holland in that it has lowlands tamed by dikes and sluice gates and worked by windmills. Because of the abundance of water, there are many essays about skating and other uses of the canals (including a sermon stating Job was probably a skater). The collection begins with, appropriately for a British Christmas collection, a ghost story about a woman awaiting visitors. The other offerings are mostly nonfiction essays from the early 1800s all the way to the 1980s on subjects as varied as butcher shops at Christmastime, larks and pranks of the choir members of King's College (who do the "Nine Lessons and Carols" each Christmas Eve), children's memories of lean but merry holidays in the early 20th century, kids' festivities on Plough Monday (the first workday after Epiphany; the celebrations sounded a lot like trick or treat), and even gift suggestions from 1896!
You might wonder why so many books are needed when there's only one England, but each shire has its own landscapes and geographical features as well as its own customs and literature. A fens Christmas is as different from a Lakes Christmas as one can get.
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