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Feature by Susan Jellis The ‘Service of Nine Lessons and Carols’, broadcast from King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, on Christmas Eve is heard every year in countries around the world. Most of what is sung and read at this church service is traditional and familiar – so familiar that most people probably don’t even think about how rarely the words and phrases are heard in any other context. From the very first Christmas card to the end of festivities in January, the festive season throws up a host of old-fashioned and season-specific vocabulary. Christmas greetings ‘Merry Christmas’ say all the posters, adverts and Christmas cards. A well-known Christmas carol starts with the line: ‘God rest [=keep] you merry, gentlemen'. Merry in this case means happy and cheerful, rather than slightly drunk. Jolly has a similar meaning and also sounds rather old-fashioned; it tends to be used in songs (as in the line given in the title of this article) because it rhymes with that essential Christmas evergreen, holly. Literary and old-fashioned–sounding short forms such as ’tis (=it is) and ’twas are also found in Christmas songs and poems, for example in the famous American Christmas poem by Clement Clarke Moore: ‘ ’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse’.1 As the festive season becomes a time of more general celebration, rather than being specifically about Christmas, more neutral greetings are gaining popularity. Season’s greetings is perhaps the most common, and is only used for Christmas and New Year. In the US, Happy Holidays plays the same role, and ‘What are your plans for the holidays?’ will be interpreted as a request for information specifically about Christmas. In an advert for Coca-Cola®, shown on British TV one autumn not so long ago, the phrase ‘holidays are coming’ proved quite confusing, as ‘holidays’ on its own does not immediately make those of us in the UK think of Christmas. Instead, we think of school holidays or summer holidays. The Christmas period Advent is the period of four weeks before Christmas Day. In shops, it’s likely you’ll see signs saying ‘Only 20 shopping days before Christmas’ or ‘Countdown to Christmas’ to remind you that you need to start shopping for presents and food. You may well buy Advent calendars or Advent candles, showing the days from December 1 to 24. Noel (also Noël, and the more old-fashioned, ‘Nowell’) may appear on Christmas cards and packaging, or in songs. It is the French word for Christmas, but is not an alternative for it; you’d never say ‘We’re going to my parents for Noel this year’. In songs and on cards, it’s common to see the Christmas period as a whole described with the old-fashioned term ‘Christmastide’ At the end of the festive season, Twelfth Night on January 6 is traditionally the last day of Christmas celebrations covering ‘the Twelve Days of Christmas’. There is a famous song, often illustrated on Christmas cards, that starts: On the First Day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree and goes on to name a different gift for every one of the twelve days. January 6, the twelfth day, is called Epiphany in the church calendar and is associated with the visit of the Three Kings who, in the Christmas story, brought gifts to the recently-born Jesus. To describe the whole period, there’s also Xmas, Chrimbo and Chrimble. Xmas is a common and widely-used informal term for Christmas, usually in writing, for example on cards or in adverts. The X represents the Greek letter ch in Christ. Chrimbo and Chrimble are very informal terms for Christmas. Winterval is a term that, in recent years, has been used especially in advertising. Gifts and presents As the Twelve Days of Christmas song suggests, Christmas is a time for giving something to family and friends. It may be a present or a gift - there is no significant difference between the two. Sometimes, one or the other is used just to avoid repetition. Gifts are perhaps more likely than presents to be formal and official: The Three Wise Men are usually described as bringing gifts rather than presents; foreign Heads of State bring the Queen gifts; you might give a colleague a gift when s/he leaves the company. Shops and advertisers also like to use the monosyllabic term gift. It is more often used in compounds than present is: gift shop, gift token, gift voucher, gift catalogue, and gift wrap, though birthday present, wedding present and Christmas present are common compounds. Gifts can also be small and informal, however. Children used to get small presents / gifts in a Christmas stocking hung up to be filled while they were asleep. Many still do, but would certainly expect this as an extra! Shops often advertise stocking-fillers (US stocking stuffers), the kind of small gifts / presents that are put in stockings. The often-used phrase Christmas is coming (from which ‘holidays are coming’ derives) appears in an old rhyme: Christmas is coming The rhyme refers to the fact that Christmas is regarded as a time for giving a gift to charity, or to people who work for you. In the UK, a Christmas box is a small gift of money given to people such as postmen, dustmen and milkmen who regularly visit your house; December 26, known as Boxing Day, was traditionally the day on which these gifts were given. Christmas fare The formal or old-fashioned word fare, which is usually used to refer to food from a restaurant or food shop, is also used to refer to the special foods eaten at Christmastime. The rhyme mentions the traditional Christmas dinner goose being fattened up for eating (‘the goose is getting fat’), though it is often now a turkey, and may simply be called a bird, especially in cookery books. The bird, of course, comes with all the trimmings; various sauces and other small items of food that are traditionally eaten with it. The phrase, however, has escaped from the Christmas table into the wider language and may be used to describe anything that is decorated or embellished, e.g. a sound system with all the trimmings. After the bird is carved and eaten, the wishbone may be pulled. Traditionally, two people pulled on either end of the Y-shaped bone and the one who broke off the larger half made a wish; in the days when eating a chicken, turkey or other bird was relatively rare, pulling the wishbone was probably quite a ceremony. Apart from Christmas pudding and cake, the other well-known Christmas speciality is mince pies, made from pastry and mincemeat. In the past, these small pies were made with meat, as the name suggests, but they are now made with dried fruit, as are the pudding and the cake. Another rhyme says: Christmas comes but once a year Cheer is a literary or old-fashioned term for ‘a feeling of happiness’ and it is often associated with the feelgood factor that advertisers want Christmas to evoke – Christmas cheer. This term also has a euphemistic or jokey use, referring to alcohol, ‘a cup of good cheer’. You might be asked ‘Will you take a glass of Christmas cheer?’, in which case mulled wine might be one of the drinks on offer. The song We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New year includes the phrase ‘bring us a cup of good cheer’ and also the line ‘good tidings we bring to you and your kin’. Tidings is an old or literary word, meaning news, which is used especially in carols and songs to refer to the good news of Jesus’ birth: glad/good tidings, joyful tidings or tidings of comfort and joy. Wassail, now heard only in Christmas songs, was a greeting meaning ‘good health’. To wassail was to celebrate, go carol singing and probably take more than one cup of good cheer as the wassailers went from house to house, singing and drinking to the health of the owners. Christmas decorations The holly and the ivy The old song mentions two of the usual plants used for decoration at Christmas, holly and ivy; among the greenery (or US greens) there is also mistletoe and branches of fir. Many shops and homes have a Christmas tree, especially a spruce, which may be draped with fairy lights, baubles, and tinsel and have on the top either a star or a doll dressed like a fairy. The phrase ‘the fairy on the Christmas tree’ is occasionally used in general language to mean something similar to ‘the icing on the cake’ (=something that makes something good, even better), or to mean an unnecessary or unnoticed extra decoration, or even perhaps something rather old and past its best. The Father Christmas story Out of a long European tradition of St Nicholas (sometimes pictured with a white beard and a red robe) giving gifts to children, eventually rose the figure of Father Christmas or Santa Claus, also sometimes called Kris Kringle in America. The story was helped along by Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas. Father Christmas’ image seems to have swept across the world, but as he is a relative newcomer, there isn’t much traditional language associated with his activities. However, several lines from the poem have developed a life of their own outside the Christmas period, especially: ‘not a creature was stirring’; ‘what to my wondering eye did appear’; and ‘Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night’. The main components of the Father Christmas story include:
Santa Claus has become a commercial giant as he is a stimulus for giving gifts and therefore spending money. Work colleagues or groups of friends may hold a Secret Santa, where each person buys a gift for one of the others in the group without revealing who the gifts are from. Santa’s grotto often appears in shops before Christmas, allowing children to visit him. The grotto is often designed as a small cave, with decorations to suggest his cold northern European home, such as icicles and snowflakes. The idea of Father Christmas, however, has spread out during the 20th century to virtually every country in the world, and can be considered universal, at least as far as commercial interests are concerned. Santa Claus’ sleigh, meanwhile, is traditionally pulled by a team of reindeer, including Rudolph who, according to the famous song, guided the sleigh with the light from his red nose. Saying that someone is ‘like Rudolph’ suggests that they too, have a red nose – possibly because they are cold, or because they have had too much to drink. If something is ‘as obvious as Rudolph’s nose’, it is very clear or visible indeed. The Christmas story Many carols retell parts of the story of Jesus’ birth, known as the Nativity, and in doing so, retain the old language of earlier translations of the Bible into English. Part of the message of the story is that Jesus was born in simple and poor conditions, with words used to convey this low status like lowly, humble, and mean; none of these words are of starred frequency in MED. Nativity plays performed in schools and churches, or a nativity scene (a model representing the story) have a traditional cast of people and animals including:
Many elements of this story are referred to, sometimes unconsciously, in other contexts, just as you often find quotations from Shakespeare’s plays used in general language. A group of people who advise or are expert on something might be described as the ‘wise men’. The phrase ‘no room at the inn’ (=no space available) is just one of the many that derive from the Christmas story. Auld Lang Syne The festive season traditionally ends on January 6, but before then come New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. In the past, they were much more important in Scotland than Christmas itself, and as a result, the Scots have produced an extraordinary cultural export – the song traditionally sung as the old year gives way to the new, Auld Lang Syne. Twenty years ago on my first visit to China, I was walking with some excitement on the Great Wall, accompanied by the usual loudspeaker music, when I gradually realised that the Chinese sounds were actually resolving into the tune of Auld Lang Syne. Two years ago, we sang it at the farewell ceremony of another Chinese gathering and I’ve sung it in many other countries too, in traditional fashion with crossed arms and holding hands with the people next to me. This Scottish song and the fossilised language of its refrain, celebrates and remembers old friends; it has travelled around the world and become almost as much a part of world language as the universal term ‘OK’. 1 A Visit from St. Nicholas, Clement Clarke Moore, written in the early 19th century, often popularly called The Night Before Christmas 2 A ‘Yule log’ is a large piece of a tree, traditionally kept burning all over the Christmas period. More often nowadays it is a chocolate cake made to look like a log of wood. |
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Feature