Dark Somerset: A Victorian Christmas to leave you battered and bruised

You’re thinking about carol singers, visits from pesky ghosts, huge turkeys and everything else you can vaguely remember from A Christmas Carol, right?

And you’d be…somewhat correct.

Christmas, as we know it today, is largely down to the Victorians and their love of the festive season. Traditional gifts for children included skipping ropes, toy soldiers and beer - and honestly, giving beer to children is one of the least problematic part of the festivities as enjoyed by the Victorians.

The day often started with the traditional game of hide of the pickle, where people hid a pickle made of glass deep inside the Christmas tree. If you were the first person to find the pickle, you were allowed to open your presents first.

There’s two stories about how this particular tradition came to pass.. One involves a soldier in the American Civil War, who originated from Bavaria, a region in Germany. The soldier was imprisoned and asked his jailer for mercy and something to eat. His jailer gave him a pickle, which gave the soldier the will to live on.

Another story involves good ol’ St. Nicholas. This story, from medieval times, takes a darker bend when two Spanish boys are murdered by an innkeeper. Their bodies are shoved inside a pickle barrel, but when St. Nicholas stops to take a respite at the inn, he finds the boys’ bodies.

Season's greetings from Victorian England (Image: Unknown)
St. Nicholas prays for the boys, and by a divine miracle and the purity of St. Nick, the boys are restored to their human forms. Imprisonment and murder, all very festive.

Once you’ve played a rousing round of Find the Pickle, it was time to move on to an infinitely more flammable and dangerous game - Snapdragon. The rules were simple - take a bowl and filled it with two dozen raisins.Pour brandy or rum onto the bowl, put it on the table and set fire to it. Then, players plunge their fingers into the bowl to collect as many raisins as possible, extinguishing them by putting them into their mouths.

If you lost the game (or your eyebrows, possibly), there was generally a forfeit to pay - kissing every woman in the room, complimenting a lady without using a word with the letter L in.

Still too dangerous? There’s always Blind Man’s Buff - still played today in many homes. Except, the Victorians being the Victorians did things differently - with one Victorian writer explaining  “it is lawful to set anything in the way for Folks to tumble over, whether it be to break Arms, Legs or Heads, ‘tis no matter.'

If you’re not keen on marking Christmas with a concussion and broken arm, there was always Flapdragon, a game where you place a lit candle into a jug of ale and try to take a sip without burning your hair, eyebrows beard, or accidentally setting your Christmas cards on fire.

Christmas cards were a newfangled thing for the Victorians. They first appeared when John Callcott Horsley (1817-1903), an English painter, designed the very first one for Sir Henry Cole, who didn’t have the time in his schedule to write out Christmas greetings for all his family and friends.

The idea eventually caught on but the original Christmas cards were often devoid of the robins, snowmen and Santas we see on them today.

Many of these cards featured fairies, flowers, and woodland animals as a promise that spring would soon come. But others were decidedly more morbid, with images of frogs fencing, dung beetles waltzing with toads, terrifying clowns,gun-toting dogs,  children riding bats, crows with human bodies sledging, and dead birds.

So, assuming you haven’t burned down your house or had food poisoning from the oysters at this point, what better way to round off the festivities than by bludgeoning small songbirds to death?

On Christmas day or the day after, the boys of a village would slaughter a wren with a stick, mount it to a broomstick, and march from door-to-door on December 26, asking for money or food. Apparently, it was supposed to bring prosperity and fertility, although clearly not to the poor wren.

So yes, the Christmas we celebrate today is Victorian in nature. Sort of. But thankfully it is a far cry from the terrifying festival of yore which would likely send you straight to A&E.