`An Old and Quaint Christmas Song'

The mousy brown book on a bottom shelf on the third floor of the Fondren Library at Rice University almost eluded me. Before I checked it out, the last stamped due date was Aug. 1, 1987. Pulled from its dusty lodging, bound in vivid oxblood buckram, it revived and appears less mousy. Songs of the Nativity: Being Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern, Several of Which Appear for the First Time in a Collection was edited by William Henry Husk (“Librarian to the Sacred Harmonic Society”) and published in London by John Camden Hotten (“74, Piccadilly”) in 1868. The bookplate at the front shows it was given to the library in memory of Mrs. George Seaman by Beatrice Harrison in December 1951. Someone tucked a small newspaper clipping, browned almost to oxblood, between its pages. Like the book, it’s English in origin (“favour” and “finance of Blackburn Bishopric” on the reverse), and here is the pertinent matter:

“Here (writes a correspondent) is an old and quaint Christmas song which might very well be used to start the fun of the `after dinner proceedings.’ It is a memory-tickler, and though I cannot trace its origin or its tune, its recital would most probably lead to the singing of other roundelays of a similar nature. It is called the `Twelve Days of Christmas’:

“On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Twelve bells a-ringing, eleven bulls a-beating,
Ten asses racing, nine ladies dancing,
Eight boys a-singing, seven swans a swimming,
Six geese a-laying, five goldie rings,
Four collie birds, three Breton hens,
Two turtle doves, and the part of a mistletoe bough.”

Who wrote this? Who, in some English Yuletide past, was pleased enough to clip and preserve it? How did the volume and clipping end up shelved in a university library in Houston? And who placed the bit of newspaper between pages 180 and 181, both of which are indelibly stamped with coffee-brown stains in the shape of the newspaper clipping? On page 181 appears Husk’s introduction to “The Twelve Days of Christmas”:

“This piece is found on broadsides printed in Newcastle at various periods during the last hundred and fifty years. On one of these sheets, nearly a century old, it is entitled `An Old English Carol,’ but it can scarcely be said to fall within that description of composition, being rather fitted for use in playing the games of `Forfeits,’ to which purpose it was commonly applied in the metropolis upwards of forty years since. The practice was for one person in the company to recite the first three lines; a second the four following; and so on; the person who failed in repeating her portion correctly being subjected to some trifling forfeit. The lady who was the favoured recipient of the gifts enumerated must have required no small extent of shelf or table room for their accommodation, as at the end of the Christmas festivities she must have found herself in possession of twelve partridges in pear trees, twenty-two turtle-doves, thirty French hens, thirty-six colley [i.e. black] birds, forty gold rings, forty-two laying geese, forty-two swimming swans, forty milk-maids, thirty-six drummers, thirty pipers, twenty-two dancing ladies, and twelve leaping lords; in all three hundred and sixty-four articles, one for each day in the year save one. This piece is now printed for the first time in a collection of carols.”

Writing two years before Dickens’ death, the Librarian to the Sacred Harmonic Society permits an inadvertent peek into the novelist’s domestic world. Husk is a jolly, earnest writer whose enthusiasm for music, Christmas and English folkways almost makes up for his limitations as a prose stylist. Here’s how he chooses to introduce readers to his collection: “Christmas! – What a multitude of associations crowd into the mind at the mere sight or mention of that word!” and so on.

A modern reader is struck by the continuities Husk documents, and by how much a 21st-century American Christmas is 19th-century and English in origin. Fourteen of the songs Husk reproduces I know by heart or nearly so. He includes seven short lyrics published in 1648 by Robert Herrick (of “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” fame), including:

“Come, guard this night the Christmas pie,
That the thief, though ne’er so sly,
With his flesh-hooks don’t come nigh
To catch it

“From him who all alone sits there,
Having his eyes still in his ear,
And a deal of nightly fear,
To watch it.”

Husk then appends a recipe, dating from 1394, during the reign of Richard II, “For to make a moost choyce paste of gamys to be eaten at ye feste of Chrystmasse.” The ingredients include “Pheasant, Hare, and Chicken, or Capon, of each one; with two Partridges, two Pigeons, and two Conies; and smite them in pieces, and pick clean away therefrom all the bones that ye may, and therewith do them into a foyle [crust] of good paste, made craftily in the likeness of a bird’s body, with the livers and hearts, two kidneys of sheep, and forces [forced meat, finely chopped and seasoned] and eyren [eggs] made into balls….” Thus, Yorkshire pie.

Our dual responses to Christmas, reverent and earthy, soulful and corporeal, seem quintessentially human and contradictory. In his wonderful essay on comic English postcards, “The Art of Donald McGill,” in a passage having nothing to do with Christmas, George Orwell diagnoses our bifurcated condition with precision. Read the whole thing but here’s a pertinent excerpt:

“Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a `pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with `voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth.”

Merry Christmas.