"No More Twist!" But Much Snow and Caroling

A Cotswold Christmas, Sutton Publishing

I found the first one of these Sutton Christmas anthologies (A Worcestershire Christmas, if you care) at a library book sale several years back. 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 Cotswolds are an area in south-central/south-west England comprising the Cotswold Hills, a range of rolling hills  The area is famed for the English market towns and villages built from honey-colored stone. Agatha Raisin, protagonist of a series of modern cozy mysteries, retired to the Cotswolds; Laurie Lee's beloved home town, Shad (written about lovingly in Cider With Rosie, a.k.a. The Edge of Day) is located there; and the noble Mitford family (including a sister who was a Nazi and another who married a Fascist) had their home there. Lee and the Mitfords are both featured in these pages—passages from Cider With Rosie bookend the entries—along with reports of workhouse Christmases, tales of going caroling, several stories about the attraction of the Christmas "Fat Market" (the cattle brought to town to end up as Christmas dinner), several pieces about the old custom of mumming and giving the play "St. George and the Dragon" (St. George having been turned into a different king and the Dragon into a Turk in later plays); medieval pomp during the holidays (including a bishop who took his household goods on trips with him); the inevitable Christmas ghosts; letters home from the war (including a battle in Korea); and even an amusing story about a man listening to an old codger complaining about how cold and snowy and more Christmas-y the holidays were in his time (1870s) who researches the newspapers for that era and found the editors complaining of the same thing; and more.

There's even a visit to a Gloucester reproduction of the tailor shop in Beatrix Potter's charming Christmas fable, "The Tailor of Gloucester."

Photos, drawings, and woodcuts illustrate this fun volume that illustrate Christmas from the dark ages to the dark cold of the Big Freeze in 1963.