Befanissima - Michelle Lovric

In Italy, children put their stocking out not on Christmas Eve but the night before January 6th, the Christian Feast of the Epiphany. Here’s one version of the traditional Italian poem about the Befana, the gap-toothed old hag who patrols the world on her broomstick that night, searching out youngsters.

La Befana vien di notte,
con le scarpe tutte rotte,
col vestito tutto blu, la Befana viene giù.
Viene giù dal caminetto con un sacco pieno zeppo.
Ai bambini buoni buoni caramelle e confettoni.
Ai bambini cattivoni solo cenere e carboni.

The Befana arrives by night
in shoes all tattered and torn,
all dressed in blue, the Befana comes down.
She comes down the chimney with a sack packed full of stuff.
For the good, nice children, there are sweets and candy.
For the bold, bad children, only ashes and coal.

This week, I asked an enchanting little Venetian girl, Martina, what she expected in her stocking that night - coal or candy?

‘Have you been good all year?’ I inquired. 'Really good?'

With engaging honesty, she told me, ‘Così così.’ So-so.

I happen to know she received candy.

In shops all over Italy, the end of the Christmas season is signalled by the arrival in the shops of gap-toothed witch dolls on broomsticks, each hag bearing a stocking (“calza”) full of sweets, sometimes in the form of black, glittering sugar-coal.

The link with the Christian calendar is that this is the date when the Three Kings came to the Baby Jesus, with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Modern children, of course, prefer sugar.

There are many versions of the Befana story, but most agree that she was an intensely house-proud woman who hosted the Three Kings on their way to Bethlehem. In the usual story, she was invited to join them but claimed that she was far too busy with sweeping the house – hence her broomstick. But afterwards she was sorry, and went out to find the Holy Infant. She never did, and still roams the earth on her broomstick, looking for Him, and meanwhile distributing gustatory justice to children all over the world.

We do everything differently in Venice. It is not just that you sometimes see a Befana made entirely of garlic cloves at the Rialto Market. Or that the Befana often goes by the name ‘marantega’ in Venetian dialect. This is a word that could be translated a number of ways but I’ll go for ‘miserable old bezzom’. The maranteghe are the wailing widows of Venetian society, the diffusers of bad news, the walking death-notices, the scandalmongers and the mealy-mouthed mistresses of schadenfreude.

But the greatest difference between the Italian and the Venetian manifestations of the old bezzom is this: in Venice the Befana arrives not down the chimney but by water.

And she’s a man in a drag. Or five men in drag.

 

 

The Regata della Befana is organised every year by senior members of the most ancient rowing club in the city, the Bucintoro. The club is named after the glorious golden boat used during the Republic to take the Doge out into the lagoon to drop a golden ring into the water, symbolizing Venice’s marriage to the sea. Napoleon disposed of the boat, stripping down the gold for cash to feed his army, at the same time he arranged the burning of the golden book of Venetian nobles under a ‘Liberty Tree’ in San Marco.

But back to the Befana ... At ten am, every January 6th, not at all punctually, the maranteghe, splendid in mop caps, handknitted shawls and long dresses, climb into boats in which an erect broomstick has been has been fixed.

They pole through the limpid Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge. In the bridge’s curved ‘armpit’ (there is probably an excellent architectural word for this, but a sunny armpit is what it looks like), a choir splendidly dressed in red warbles a welcome. Less welcome to the ears of the spectators are the interminable addresses by various interested parties broadcast on a squealing microphone.


This year the man addicted to the microphone announced 30 seconds of silence for the German tourist who lost his life just at this spot during the summer. But of course the tourists did not understand, and talked right through it. Indeed, some young tourists showed their most brutal side, elbowing older people off slippery pontili because they clearly felt so entitled to get that one essential photograph for their Facebook page. All too often one witnesses these 'scontri' or culture clashes between the dwindling Venetian population (now down to 57,000) and the vast tourist population - which numbers 352 for every local.

After the poorly observed silence, other boats begin to arrive, some with Santas, some with more witches.

Finally came the boat with the traditional stocking of the Befana, bulging with either coal or caramelle. Since I last saw the Regata della Befana, the stocking has been upgraded to a handsome red damask that looks rather like Smaug when coiled up on the deck.

The stocking was, as ever, hoisted up to the arch of the Rialto Bridge and dangled there in triumph while the choir sang its heart out.

Members of the public were offered crunchy galani biscuits, mulled wine and thick hot chocolate.

And that was the Regata della Befana done for another year.

Another magical happening marks the Epiphany in a grander part of Venice. At the Clock tower on Piazza San Marco, three model kings totter out of a door heralded by a trumpeter. They make a gesture of respect to the Madonna and child, and then disappear through another door, not to be seen again till next January 6th. There’s a video here.

But most magical of all for us this year was the evening before the Befana, when a group of friends met in an engineer’s studio at Ca’ Rezzonico to paint and draw a collection of ‘art’ stockings. In a way, we were replicating the idea of the Compagnie della Calza, the guilds of young men devoted to fashion and poetry, who sported fanciful, highly decorated stockings, as seen in the paintings of Vettor Carpaccio and others. It was these noble young men who founded Venice’s Carnevale, which originally featured erotic poetry readings and games. The ‘Companies of the Fancy Stockings’ feature in my children’s book, The Fate in the Box, and it was nice to come to grips with them not just in words but in pictures.

Our ‘opere’ were exhibited in the window for the whole day of the Befana, to bambini buoni buoni and bambini cattivoni alike.

Photos by Michelle Lovric and Jenny Lovric

Befana poem courtesy of Elena Romano

Stockings by Ross Frassanito, Claudia Marturano, Elena Romano, Susie Palmarin, Jenny and Michelle Lovric

Michelle Lovric’s website

'Joyeux Noel', by Clare Mulley

Earlier this month I was invited to contribute to a three-hour festive marathon; Channel 5’s ‘Greatest Ever Christmas Movies’ special, which was shown on Christmas Eve. As I went in to the studios, Aled Jones came out. My specialist subject was war films. War may not typically be associated with the Christmas film feel-good factor, but it led to some merriment in our house as we tried to work out whether Christmas had featured in The Eagle Has Landed, Downfall or The Hurt Locker. In the end it turned out there was only one war film among Channel 5’s festive top 40 list: Christian Carion’s very beautiful French film Joyeux Noel from 2005, about the Christmas truces down the Western Front in 1914.

The Joyeux Noel poster (2005)

Joyeux Noel is a visually stunning film, with wonderful music – not least the singing of ‘Stille Nacht’ and ‘Ave Maria’ between the trenches. However it does rather romanticize this most powerful moment of peace and humanity amidst one of the most violent episodes in modern history, the First World War. When it was released, the New York Times film critic, Stephen Holden, neatly declared that the film was ‘as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth’. But while it is tempting to write off Joyeux Noel as purely Christmas feel-good, with a narrow focus that does little to help widen our understanding of this remarkable moment in the war, the film does prick interest in the truly extraordinary story of the 1914 Christmas truces.

Joyeux Noel is pegged around a rather feeble love story. A handsome and feted German opera singer has been drafted to the front. His beautiful wife, who hails from the same trade, has negotiated his return from the trenches for the night of Christmas Eve so that they can duet at the officers’ party. Our hero then forgoes a night of peaceful romance to dutifully return to the front, prompting his wife to follow. As far as I am aware, there are no reports of female opera singers performing at the Christmas truces, but the premise certainly provides lots of powerful cinematic and surround-sound opportunities. However, despite this, and a few other historical inaccuracies, the fundamental premise of the film, the most apparently unbelievable thing of all, is entirely true – there were a series of unofficial ceasefires down the length of the Western Front, during which the men who had been killing each other one day put down their arms, climbed out of their opposing trenches, and met in no man’s land for a day of shared Christmas peace.

German soldiers of the 134th Saxon Regiment
with men of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment
in no man’s land, Christmas 1914

At the start of the Great War, as it was then known, there were several localized cease-fires and some fairly accepted codes of conduct among soldiers of both sides. In late 1914, the first winter of the war, 101 British women wrote an ‘Open Christmas Letter’ to the women of Austria and Germany, hoping to promote peace. Pope Benedict XV followed their lead, calling for an official Christmas truce, sadly without success.

Nevertheless, on 24 and 25 December 1914, around 100,000 troops stopped fighting along the length of the Western Front. As in the film, along some stretches of the trenches, German soldiers set up small Christmas trees, lit with candles. Carols were sung collectively by the men of both armies, and some later met to exchange uniform buttons, photographs and gifts of wine and Christmas puddings. Over the following days the fallen were retrieved and buried in peace, religious services were held and, if not refereed football matches, there were at least informal kick-arounds.

The ceasefires were not official policy, and they were not ubiquitous. In some places the peace lasted just one night, in others several days. Some soldiers were shot under cover of the truce, and along much of the front there was no cessation of hostilities at all. Most commanders opposed the truces as did, famously, one young corporal of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry called Adolf Hitler. But the truces did take place, as hundreds of letters from both sides of the front testify.

Letter from Major Hawksley, Warwick Regiment,
27 December 1914

‘The Germans were quite friendly with us’ Lance Corporal Cooper of the 2nd Northampton’s wrote home. ‘They even came over to our trenches and gave us cigars and cigarettes and chocolate and of course we gave them things in return.’ ‘Fancy shaking hands with the enemy!’ scribbled Private B Calder of the 6th Gordons, ‘I suppose you will hardly believe this, but it is the truth’. Despite attempts at censorship the British press were quick to cover the story, some more sentimentally than others, and many quoted the soldiers’ letters. The Times endorsed the men’s lack of malice, and The Mirror regretted that the ‘absurdity and tragedy would begin again’.

The Daily Mirror: 'A Historic Group;
British and German soldiers photographed together'

Like most of those articles, Joyeux Noel is a film with an intimate focus. It does not consider the political or military causes, or wider morality, of the First World War. At most, it hints at the later public swell of feeling to never let such an atrocity happen again, which led to the establishment of, among other organisations, the League of Nations, the Save the Children Fund, and the German Youth Hostel Association, the latter founded by a returning soldier who had taken part in the Christmas truces. There is also a poignant reference to the failure of this movement, when the Iron-Cross holding German commanding officer mentions that he is Jewish.

Essentially however, Joyeux Noel is a statement about the insanity of war, the shared horror of trench warfare and, above all, about the men who found humanity in this least human of situations. Its message, that war is dehumanising, and that even our soldiers must not be made to demonise their enemies, is sadly still relevant today. With its sentimental romance, it might not make a list of top war films, but it does Channel 5 credit to include it in their Christmas list. Films about snowmen can be beautiful and important, but war, and peace, should be remembered at Christmas too.

www.claremulley.com

Seasonal Drinking by Imogen Robertson

My Dad making sure Christmas goes smoothly.

I’m glad to say that my family tend to get on very well, particularly at Christmas. After considering this for some years, I’ve decided it’s because we start the day by drinking Champagne Cocktails. So, on that dubious premise, here’s my personal guide to festive drinking for History Girls:

1. Champagne Cocktail

Now I know this is just a Robertson Christmas tradition, but it’s a great tradition so I feel it only right to try and spread the word. Cocktails are an American invention - thanks, guys - and were regarded with a sort of delighted fascination when they crossed the pond in the 19th century. There is a sort of drooling delight in the way the British papers report on these strange American mixed drinks. In 1884 they list with palpable relish the huge range of cocktails available at the American Bar of the International Health Exhibition, London. A medal was awarded to Plymouth Gin at the same event, by the way. That sounds like my kind of Health Exhibition. Still, the Champagne Cocktail was King. It is described as a ‘capital soother for a sore head and coppery tongue.’ Which is true, and probably why it works for us in Darlington on Christmas morning. 

Mr Gladstone was offered one in 1888 when he visited the United States Exchange in the Strand. After drinking it he offered a general invitation to the people of the Republic to write to him, giving his address as ‘Mr Gladstone, England’. Which is the sort of thing I do after a cocktail.

2. Mulled Wine

Ok. Back to more traditional Christmas fare. Well-ish. It is the mulled wine that Fred lifts to drink the health of his Uncle Scrooge in ‘A Christmas Carol’, and it’s certainly associated with Christmas now, but basically I think the British were always up for the idea of mulling something whenever the weather got chill. 

John Hutton’s Dictionary of Modern Slang in 1859 defines to mull as to spoil or destroy, which seems a bit harsh in this context, though maybe that depends on what you think of posset. 

Let me explain. For Elizabeth Raffald in her mid-eighteenth century cookbook, mulling wine involves a lot of egg yolks as well as sugar, nutmeg cinnamon and optional orange peel, to create a drink that is ‘hot and pretty thick’ to be served with toast, so her mulled wine is basically boozy custard.

Please tell me there's booze in that cup.

By the mid-19th century recipes are offered with or without eggs, so the ‘egg-nog / posset’ tradition separates from the ‘adding spices and sugar to anything alcoholic’ tradition of mulling as we know it now in the UK. Possets were regarded as health drinks, which is perhaps why in the early 19th century mulled wine seemed to be the drink of choice for men who went in for ultra marathons. Well, at least it was for a Chairman named Spence who in 1801 went 42 miles in the space of eight hours at a ‘kind of trot or half-run’.  He had three rests of a quarter hour each when he took a little mulled-wine. In 1806 a Shropshire man was similarly sustained during his attempt to walk 142 miles in 30 hours. Neither news item states this is the 'with egg' version of mulled-wine, but it would make sense. Obviously it was the drink of champions - a sort of 19th century version of those protein shakes beloved by modern sports fiends.

3. Punch

Now degraded to a nasty neon concoction left at office parties to provoke the prankster and trap the unwary, it was the high holiday drink of the 18th century country squire. In 1792 he was already thought of as a creature of a former age, mourned over thus in the Annual Register: ‘[He] never played at cards but at Christmas when a family pack was produced from the mantle piece, was commonly followed by a couple of grey hounds and a pointer and announced his arrival at a neighbour's house by smacking his whip or giving the view halloo. His drink was generally ale except on Christmas, the fifth of November or some other gala days when he would make a bowl of strong brandy punch garnished with a toast and nutmeg.’ Again with the toast! Reminds me of my days drinking in Russia, when the locals repeatedly told me vodka could do you no harm if you had a bite of black bread after every shot. They were wrong.

4. Spiced ale / Wassail!

Laurie Graham has got ahead of me in this excellent post, but I can’t resist adding this 1784 account from a correspondent to The Gentleman’s Magazine: 

‘In that part of Yorkshire near Leeds where I was born, and spent my youth, I remember, when I was a boy, that it was customary for many families on, the twelfth eve of Christmas […] to invite their relations, friends and neighbours to their houses, to play at cards and to partake of a supper, of which minced pies were an indispensable ingredient; and after supper was brought in the Wassail Cup, being a large bowl, such as is now used for Punch, filled with sweetened ale and roasted apples. I have seen bowls used for this purpose that held above a gallon. A plate of spiced cake was first handed about to the company, and then the Wassail Bowl, of which every one partook, by taking with a spoon, out of the ale, a roasted apple and eating it, and then drinking the healths of the company out of the bowl, wishing them a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. […] I am of opinion that the custom was very ancient, but from whence it arose, or why the mixture was called Lamb Wool, I do not at present pretend to account.’

Karel Van Mander III

5. Nappy to finish

I apologise, ‘nappy’ was just slang for strong ale, but mentioning it here means I can quote this, and having found it, I must. It’s from a volume called ‘The Oxford Sausage’ of 1772.

Meanwhile then, make us Statesmen happy 

This Christmas with a Cup of Nappy: 

Bring forth your punch, your strong, and stale 

The shivering Newsman's sure regale: 

Nor let the authors of these rhymes 

Find your hearts - harder than the times.  

Cheers! 

Merry Christmas, folks. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

'Christmas - Ritual and Remembrance' by A L Berridge

We used to have my grandparents over for Christmas Day. I didn’t realize my grandfather was nearly blind or that his deafness dated from the Somme, and can only remember the frustration of watching ‘The Towering Inferno’ while he sat four inches from the screen and turned round after an hour to ask in a hoarse whisper, ‘Is there a fire?’

Yes, I hate myself now. But it wasn’t only my grandparents’ own history that I missed, and I was always puzzled when at the end of the meal my grandfather would raise his glass and make a solemn toast to ‘Absent Friends.’ The gravity whizzed straight over my childish head, and it was many years before I realized we weren’t just drinking to family in Canada for Christmas, but to people who were actually dead.

It seemed a strange way to celebrate what should be a happy occasion, but Christmas is a time of ritual togetherness, and when everything else is the same we feel more acutely the sense of what is lost. The first Christmas after bereavement is terrible, with every little treat an aching reminder of those no longer there to enjoy it, but as time goes on the season becomes a pleasure rather than a pain, a way of keeping our loved ones alive and with us in memory. This year (as every year) I’ll be preparing sprouts and stuffing to the sound of 'Carols from Kings’, and smiling at the memory of my father.

But there's more to this than any one individual's recollections. Ritual is a repetition of acts performed in the same way over the long parade of years, and in its performance we are opening the door to history. That the Commons doors should be slammed in Black Rod’s face at the opening of Parliament derives from the 17th century, that the Lord Chancellor should sit on the ‘Woolsack’ goes back to the 14th, and when we see these things done then we’re watching history.

We saw it in July when the board at Buckingham Palace announced the birth of Prince George. We can see it every day – in the lowering of a flag, the wearing of a Judge’s wig, the Changing of the Guard. When a Latin Grace is recited at High Table, when monks chant Plainsong, when a bugler plays the Last Post, then we are hearing it too. And when we take communion, or drop a penny in wishing well, or even say ‘Bless you’ to someone who sneezes, then we’re not re-enacting history, we’re living it for real.

Popular wishing well in Kyoto

It’s perhaps this last which matters most to historical novelists. It’s true we spend our time recreating worlds profoundly different from our own, but when we want to engage our readers’ emotions then we concentrate most on those things that are the same. Love, death, friendship, betrayal – everyone can identify with these, and empathize with those characters who experience them. I would argue that the same is true of ritual.

Obviously it’s harder in some periods than others. Not many of us have actually poked about in an animal’s entrails as a means of foretelling the future, and I can’t say I’ve ever made an offering to Athene, but even in the classical civilizations we can still recognize the familiar seeds of actions we perform today.

When someone ‘tempts fate’ by a careless remark I may not say ‘Absit omen!’ and ‘spit in my bosom’, but I might well cry ‘Don’t say that!’ and jump to touch wood. Different actions, but when Robert Graves described a character doing this in ‘I, Claudius’ then the jolt of recognition was just the same.

And as the centuries roll on it gets easier and easier. There are Christian churches where the readings still come from the King James Bible (1611) and the communion service is conducted by the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. There are (secret) places in England where Morris Dancing isn’t a re-enactment, but continuation of a tradition handed down from generation to generation to keep alive the pagan ritual. My own favourite annual Fair is the one at Bampton in Devon, which has been going on even before Henry III granted its Charter in 1258. It’s not a quaint re-enactment like a Victorian ‘Christmas Fayre’, it’s a real county trade-meet which has quite simply never stopped. 

The Bampton Mummers at this year's Charter Fair

Ritual has a way of surviving, particularly when it’s fun. I doubt we’d really bother to ‘Remember, remember the 5th of November’ if it didn’t have fireworks and a bonfire thrown in – but we do, and it’s one of our strongest links to the past. In the Sussex village of Lindfield they even have a Guy dressed like Fawkes himself and the Lindfield Bonfire Society lead it to its doom with 17th century speeches and cries from the crowd of ‘Down with Popery!’

But it’s not just Guy Fawkes we remember now, any more than it’s only Christ we think of at Christmas. The ritual has entered history in its own right, and ‘Bonfire Night’ links us to other centuries simply on the grounds that we have all celebrated the same thing. I remember experiencing a moment’s ‘double-take’ when Sergeant Timothy Gowing in the Crimea wrote of the Battle of Inkerman (5th November 1854) ‘That was keeping up Gunpowder Plot with a vengeance!’

It can even apply beyond the specific event being commemorated. Bonfires and fireworks were around long before Guy Fawkes, but it was my experience of November 5th that made it easy for me to write about them. Describing a display in 1640’s Paris for ‘In the Name of the King’ I had to remember that the fireworks were white rather than coloured, and arranged mainly in static set pieces, but the effect on the crowd was one with which we’re all familiar. They made the same noises of ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’, and my rustic narrator noted with wonder how ‘men with hardened faces and swords on their hips turned suddenly into children.’ 

From Claude Lorrain's Firework Series (1637)

But in Europe at least, the biggest ritualized event has got to be Christmas. Traditions vary between countries, and some have faded altogether, but the ritual is still so powerfully laden with memory that for many people it’s become something to avoid. Divorce, bereavement, a reaction against an oppressive religion – hotels do a roaring trade on December 25th as customers flee the haunting shade of Christmas.

It has the power to touch us like nothing else. This little video of Christmas in 1914 is only two minutes long, but it contains one image that hits me like a kick in the stomach.

For me it’s the hats. The tins of pudding are unfamiliar to me, as alien as the trenches themselves, but those hats are identical to the ones that fall out of crackers at every Christmas table in Britain. Their remembered flimsiness is suddenly so vivid that the jollity becomes unbearable, everything so real and immediate that I want to reach into the screen and grab the men out of it, anything to save them from the horrors that only we know lie ahead.

And Christmas is full of such ambushes, each a little sensory pool of memory to trap the unwary. The glittering decorations, the trees and fluttering candles, the taste of turkey and mulled wine, the smell of cinnamon and mince pies, the tearing of paper, the sound of carol singers, a Salvation Army band, the snap of crackers and the laughter of children. Even (heaven help us) bloody Slade. Memory catches in every particle of it, and the older we get the more we find nothing has been lost. If ritual is the doorway to the past, then on Christmas Day it’s gaping wide open.

And to history too. Mince pies may no longer contain meat – but a recent culinary experiment proved that few could tell the difference between the modern pie and those created by Mrs Rundle 160 years ago. Health-and-safety may have killed the idea of charms in the Christmas pudding, but crackers still contain their substitutes – just as they in turn are the modern equivalent of ‘pulling the wishbone’. It’s true that many of our Christmas traditions date back only as far as the 19th century and Dickens, but some are far, far older, and carols like ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ are mediaeval in origin. The sole surviving manuscript of ‘Adam lay ybounden’ is dated to the fifteen century, and the song itself is believed to be even older. Listen to such things, and you won’t be going back just to your own youth – but to the childhood of Henry Tudor.

Fragment of the surviving MS of 'Adam Lay Ybounden'

That doesn’t always help when we’re writing about places with their own traditions, but my own favourite Christmas ‘ingredient’ is universal to all the so-called ‘Christian countries’. It’s rarer now, and whether we personally experience it depends entirely on the town or village in which we live, but to me it’s the most magical of sounds, and one that spans the years like no other. In 17th century Paris it would have been uttered most dominantly by the voices of Marie, Jacqueline, Gabrielle, Guillaume, Pasquier, Thibaud and the Sparrows, but the same kind of sound rang out from besieged Sevastopol in 1854, and can be heard today in every city in Europe. 

This sound. This. You don’t need to be Christian to appreciate the gladness of this, or to share in the experience that’s been enjoyed across the centuries by rich and poor alike. This is the very sound of history, and if December 25th takes us back down the tide of memory, then in my mind it does so to the sound of Christmas bells. 

***

A L Berridge's much less sentimental website is here.

Her shameless appeal to Christmas charity for soldiers without graves is here.

The rest of her is probably somewhere else scoffing mince pies.