We can thank the young Queen Victoria and her Prince Albert for our concept of 'Christmas Joy and Caring'. To them we owe our celebration of Christmas Day as a hallowed family holiday. There was little joy in Christmastide when Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Christmas Day was dull working day for all but the rich and noble and not celebrated as a national holiday. It was the new Queen Victoria and her beloved Prince from Germany who brought sparkle and light into the ordinary home at year's end by promoting their own Christmas at Windsor Castle in 1841 as a family holiday celebration. In doing this, they identified and gave crucial royal impetus to a journalistic call for a new spirit of Christmas harmony and reconciliation. Their family initiative was to be emulated and transported by her subjects across an expanding Empire in the years to come.
Christmas in England had not always been drab. Tudor Henry VIII was as lavish in his patronage of song, dance, pageant and feasting during the Twelve Days of Christmas. But his patronage had less to do with the Feast of the Nativity on 25 December and more to do with the Feast of Epiphany on 6 January. This was the English sovereign's traditional identification of spiritual kinship with the Three Kings.
This tradition originated 400 years earlier in the annual demonstration of royal power and munificence at the royal banquets organised by William the Conqueror to impress his assembled nobles, prelates and ambassadors. By the turn of the 16th century 500 years later, this Palace tradition of Twelfth Night pageantry and feasting had been entrenched as a 'Royal Spectacular'. On this day, the Sovereign, suitably robed and crowned, led his subjects in giving and receiving gifts; processing in state to the Chapel Royal where he reenacted the manifestation of the Magi to the infant Christ and their offerings of gold, frankinsense and myrrh. After this Chapel Royal ceremony, which lingers on to this day in truncated form, the King would preside over the most sumptuous royal banquet and entertainments of the year.
We have 12th century records of King Henry II, last of William the Conqueror's Norman dynasty, giving his court jester a position for life to perform saltum, siffletum et pettum, (a leap, a whistle and a fart), at his annual Christmas banquets at Woodstock Palace, (where the Duke of Marlborough's magnificent 18th century Blenheim Palace now stands), near Oxford. Some 200 years later, William Langland in his Piers Plowman wrote of minstrels contributing a pettum to harmonise with their piped melodies for the delectation and merriment of patrons at such festivities. But all merriment, (together with the pettum as musical expression), was axed with the head of King Charles I in 1649. His beheading by Oliver Cromwell and his regicide followers marked the onset of 11 years of Puritan rule and the suppression of the Twelve Days of Christmas.
