'Cheese, Apples, and Nuts, Jolly Carols to Hear'

“Christmas, too, is come, which always puts a rattle into my morning skull. It is a visiting, unquiet, unquakerish season.” 

Precisely what I disliked most about Christmas as a kid. I dreaded the compulsive visits to people I didn’t know and often didn’t like. I wanted to be home with my new toys and books. I concluded early that most adults, including parents, have no idea what to do with children. They treated us like inconvenient, costly-to-keep pests. In the passage above, Charles Lamb is writing to his Quaker friend, the poet Bernard Barton on this date, December 23, in 1822. It’s risky to read Lamb literally. He loved a drink, a game of whist and good conversation. He continues in his note to Barton:

 

“I get more and more in love with solitude, and proportionately hampered with company. I hope you have some holidays at this period. I have one day,--Christmas Day; alas! too few to commemorate the season. All work and no play dulls me. Company is not play, but many times hard work. To play, is for a man to do what he pleases, or to do nothing,--to go about soothing his particular fancies.”

 

Since 1796, Lamb had been the caretaker of his sister Mary, who had fatally stabbed their mother. For the rest of her life, Mary was periodically confined to what we would call a mental hospital. Since 1792, Lamb had worked as a clerk in the Accountant’s Office of the British East India Company, where he remained for thirty-three years, retiring in 1825 with a pension of £450. Money had always been tight and Lamb was a man built for convivial leisure. That’s how I have reconfigured my observance of Christmas since childhood. It’s a day when it’s easy to be generous and tolerant, a day without a Daily Planner.

 

Several years ago, while reading John Drury’s Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago Press, 2014), I learned of the poet and farmer Drury calls “the Elizabethan master of doggerel,” Thomas Tusser (c. 1524-1580). He is best remembered for his instructional poem Five Hundred Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557). Lamb loved good food and drink and would have appreciated these lines:

 

“Good husband and housewife, now chiefly be glad

Things handsome to have, as they ought to be had,

They both do provide against Christmas do come,

To welcome their neighbour, good cheer to have some;

Good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall,

Brawn pudding and souse, and good mustard withal.

 

“Beef, mutton, and pork, shred pies of the best,

Pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well dressed;

Cheese, apples, and nuts, jolly carols to hear,

As then in the country is counted good cheer.

 

“What cost to good husband is any of this,

Good household provision only it is;

Of other the like I do leave out a many,

That costeth the husbandman never a penny.”