Christmas As It Was

A Shropshire Christmas, compiled by Lyn Briggs

I found my first volume of the 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. Every time I found a book from this series, I bought one and have now managed to accumulate all of the regional ones. 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.

Like A Hertfordshire Christmas previously reviewed, this one is a bumper issue of old Christmas lore, mostly of Christmas as it was celebrated from 1850 through the 1970s, and little repeated material as in a few of the other books. Shropshire is on the border of England and Wales, and contains such famous cities as Shrewsbury, Telford, Ludlow, and Ellesmere, and several famous writers and artists came from the area, including A.E. Housman, poet; Wilfred Owen, World War I author and poet; and Randolph Caldecott, artist. (The Shire in The Lord of the Rings is reportedly based on Shropshire and Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mystery stories are set in Shrewsbury.) Housman, Caldecott, and Cadfael are all represented in this collection, and the famous Dick Whittington, "three times Mayor of London," supposedly was a "Salopian boy." ("Salop" is the ancient name for the Shropshire region.)

But the best bits in this book are just regular reminisces from "regular people": from creeping downstairs to find apples, nuts, an orange, and small toys in your stocking to the windows of the poulterers' shops filled with all sorts of geese, turkeys, and other game to carols born in the Shropshire hills to the story of a servant married (but not living with) a wealthy man obsessed with servants to homely Christmas celebrations in cottagers' huts and middle-class homes.