This is the final volume of the Sutton Christmas books from the different shires of England that I've been collecting for several years now (not the last book in the series, just the one I bought last). Not sure why this is in a different format: a much smaller volume with teeny-tiny print and photos as compared to the others, but once again a series of short excerpts from Cornwall-set novels, nonfiction articles, and poetry set at the Christmas season, complete with the Cornish dialect ("z's" for "s's," for example).
Much commentary about guising, which would probably terrify the cross-dressing religious whackos showing up on the news: Christmas past was a time of men dressing up as women, women dressing up as men, and lots of costumes. It was, as you'll read, also a lot of drunken revelry. Still, happy childhood memories pop up with children happy to get an orange and an apple in the Christmas stocking, full butcher shops, and the occasional snowstorm, plus people making merry at the workhouse.
The small format of this volume makes it hard to see the historic photos. A pity.
Christmas Past, Brian Earl
Brian Earl has been doing the "Christmas Past" podcast for six years now; it's an enjoyable excursion into the traditions of the Yuletide season. This book distills some of his most popular episodes into print; it's excellent for a gift book for someone who's curious about where our Christmas customs come from. I have several books like this (Ace Collins, Clement Miles, Tanya Gulevich, etc.), but this has updated information and also includes modern traditions—most prominently about classic television Christmas animation, but the chapter about the snow globes was fascinating, too.
As Earl points out, a lot of the traditions go back so far that it's difficult to track down exactly where they started. However, I am puzzled by his chapter on "The Twelve Days of Christmas." It is indeed a "forfeit" song, sung for party games, not a Christian metaphor, and I remember singing about "colly birds" (rather than "calling birds") from when I learned the song in the 1960s, but at one point it states "On days six through nine, we have pipers piping and drummers drumming." Actually day six is the geese and day seven is the swans, it's days eight through twelve that are interpreted as other things than birds. (Hallmark's answer to the "five golden rings" in their recent "12 Days of Christmas" ornament set was to make the fifth day a ring-necked pheasant.) I'm not sure how that error made it into the book.
Otherwise, if you've never read a book about the history of Christmas, this is a good place to start; Earl has a nice chatty writing style, and the book is supplemented with illustrations and photographs (which I wish were in color rather than retro black and white) and cheery graphics.
