A Derbyshire Christmas, compiled by Robert Innes-Smith
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. These contain short excerpts of Christmas/Christmastide passages from various British novels, memoirs, and poetry books, with the action taking place in the shire denoted in the title.
Derbyshire is just south of Sheffield, England (famous for their knives), and this volume is crammed full of mostly reminisces and diary entries from the 1840s through the 1940s, the most famous of the correspondents being Dame Edith Sitwell, the poet, and her younger brother Osbert. There is only one verse in this volume, which is very rare, unfortunately it has to do with fox hunting, but then it's a touching tale of how Lord Harrington's hounds, turned out for their first hunt after he died, went straight to his grave as if called. There are a couple of other hunting memories, and the rest are more salubrious, from how Christmas was celebrated in a great country house, including the festivities "downstairs" among the servants; a couple of accounts of Christmas in the workhouse which are much more cheerful than George R. Sims' pathetic verse tale; diary entries from Edith Sitwell and an account of Christmas by Osbert; only one ghost story, but it's an amusing one; a medieval tale at Haddon Hall; different recountings of old customs like caroling, "Thomasing," guising, mumming, and the St. George and the Dragon play; and even Christmas letters from D.H. Lawrence, who called Derbyshire home.
One of the more interesting volumes in that it includes many personal accounts from the POV of different ages and different eras.
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