Boy Bishops, Christmas at the Pub, and Other Stories

A Herefordshire Christmas, Sutton Publishing
I found my first Sutton "Christmas anthologies" (A Worcestershire Christmas, if you care) at a library book sale many years back. When A Surrey Christmas turned up at a subsequent sale I realized this was a series. I think the coronavirus emergency made me a little crazy this year; every time I found a book from this series for less than five dollars with postage, I bought one and managed to accumulate ten (or is it eleven?). These contain short excerpts of Christmas/Christmastide passages from various British novels, memoirs, and poetry books, with the action taking place in the shire or historical era denoted in the title.

The Herefordshire edition of this series is as crammed with Christmas as a traditional Christmas pudding is crammed with raisins. There's an account of caroling in Fownhope, another of wassailing the apple trees (Hereford being noted for its orchards and its cider) in ancient and modern times, a long chapter on traditional Christmas customs, several entries about the old custom of "Burning the Bush" (thirteen piles of brush were set afire around a farmer's fields and then one of them, the Judas pile, snuffed immediately; the rest of the piles, representing Christ and the remaining apostles, burned to give the farmer good luck in raising a crop in the coming year), the story of a ghost encounter, a tale of a good-hearted eighteenth-century landowner in "Tales of Old Ross," even a couple of accounts by children of their Christmas day haul. Recipes featuring cider (natch!) are included, as well as some others, there's Christmas poetry from John Masefield and Thomas Traherne, and even an excerpt from Masefield's classic children's Christmas novel The Box of Delights (a six-part BBC production of this story was a staple for years on Nickelodeon in the 1980s).

Photos and vintage illustrations round off this satisfactory volume!