December Holidays — Part 2

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Two feasts at the turning of the year, from one great book of days. In the second episode of December Holidays, Merry Hearth stays in Britain for the last week of December — first to England for Boxing Day, the day of Christmas-boxes and good cheer collected door to door, and then north to Scotland for Hogmanay, the last night of the year, when the whole country keeps open house. Both feasts come from a single guide: Robert Chambers, whose Book of Days (1864) gathered the customs of the whole British year. Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices. THE FEASTS 0:49 Boxing Day (December 26) — Robert Chambers, The Book of Days (1864): the Stephening of Drayton Beauchamp, where the parishioners claimed their feast at the rectory — and came in through the roof when the rector hid; then the Christmas-boxes themselves, their Roman roots, the rounds of postman, lamplighter, and dustman, and Boxing night at the theatres. 10:05 Hogmanay (December 31) — Robert Chambers, The Book of Days (1864): Scotland's great New Year — the sheet-swaddled children begging their oat-cake from door to door, the Orkney singers, the guisers in their paper mitres, and the Burning of the Clavie, the flaming tar-barrel carried through Burghead. Read by Merry Hearth, of the Christmas Company. Opening carol: "Jingle Bells." Closing carol: "O Little Town of Bethlehem." No music plays under the readings: in the Christmas seasons the carols sing at the open and the close, and the stories hold the middle alone. A note on the readings: Chambers wrote a whole year of customs, and these two entries also carry matter this season does not use — the martyrdom that opens St. Stephen's Day, a horse-bleeding superstition, and a period quarrel over who should give. What is read here is the feasts themselves: the giving, the singing, and the fire. December Holidays is KacheliTV's season of the world's December festivals, told from period sources that pass the same two keys as the whole catalogue: printed by 1929, by makers gone by 1949. KacheliTV — the world's folk tales and classics, read aloud. Old stories, new meanings.