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Tempting treats & festive feats: christmas shopping down the ages
00:38:57
Annie Gray journeys through the history of christmas shopping in Britain, from department store stunts to the must-have items for the dinner table
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- [00:01]
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Annie Gray
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Annie Gray
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Annie Gray
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- [02:00]
Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. As we get ever closer to Christmas, many of you will be heading out to the shops to look for the perfect presents. And this mad dash in search of festive gifts is nothing new. In today's episode, Annie Gray, the author of the bookshop the Draper the Candlestick A history of the High street, takes Emily Griffith on a tour of our festive spending habits. From the horrors of visiting a Victorian butcher's shop to enormous seasonal turkey parades and outrageous stunts involving elephants, we're going.
- [02:44]
To be delving into the history behind Christmas shopping. Now, today, Christmas shopping seems to be an almost essential part of the holiday season. Has it always been that way?
- [02:56]
Annie Gray
To some extent, yes, in that the festive period has always been a point in time where people ate more than they usually did and partied more than they usually did, and that meant buying more than they usually did. Christmas itself, not necessarily the focal point for gifts. So really, until the 17th, beginning of the 18th century, most people gave gifts at New Year and throughout the year as well. So there was a lot of reciprocal gift giving, things like the Mickle Moscow and things like that between tenant and landlord. But in terms of the festive season, it was New Year's Day, New Year's Eve, that kind of thing. But there were also the 12 days of Christmas, which for a lot of time, medieval period, through really again, 17th, 18th, even 19th century, the 12 days were celebrated in their entirety. And you'd usually fast up to that point. So Advent would be a time of fast and only eating beavers, 10 tails if you were rich, and stockfish if you were poor, so hitting it with a hammer for several days. But the 12 days were real time of real feast. So at that point, people would go out and they would buy loads and loads of stuff. And Christmas shopping, in terms of festive shopping, where people were already complaining about rampant commercialism and people profiteering in the Tudor period, so there were people complaining that orange sellers put their prices up just for Christmas and that kind of thing, Even in the 16th century, that.
- [04:13]
Podcast Host
Seems mad because we have it so much today as well. Why exactly do we give gifts at Christmas?
- [04:20]
Annie Gray
We always have done. And a lot of it is about celebration and a lot of it is about reciprocity. So if you look back at the feudal period and you go into the sort of. Even as far as the Tudor period, there is this idea that you need to cement your social relations by gift giving. So the kind of gifts that were being given were not the kind of, you know, I'm giving my gift to you because I like you, because you're my mate. It is things like giving gifts to the king because you wish to curry favor. So notoriously, there are lists of the presents given to Henry viii, to Elizabeth I, that kind of thing. And it might range from a glove all the way to food, you know, a whole Parmesan cheese at one point went off to Henry viii. And sometimes people give something really small as well. And they are equally noted because what they have given is what they can give. So A lot of it is actually about the sort of cementing social relations. And Grica's Christmas is a big period for festivities and a period where people are feasting each other. That is an obvious time to exchange gifts. But as I say, was the bigger one. I think that's all about bringing in the new year.
- [05:24]
Podcast Host
I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about the types of gifts people have given. You mentioned Parmesan there. We're in this age of being able to order online department stores, high streets. But before that, what could you give.
- [05:37]
Annie Gray
Whatever you wanted to? The book that I've written is obviously focusing on the high street. So I get going really in about 1650 and the first mention of Christmas gifts, as opposed to New Year's or generic gifts. They're the sort of first mentions of the 1720s. And one of the earliest ones is for a famous anodyne necklace for children, which was a teething necklace. And I think right from the beginning, when you start to get fixed shops and you start to get shops that are open more often than one day a week, I. E. The market, you start to get shopkeepers say, hang on, I can sell a few more things at Christmas. And as it goes hand in hand, the development of Christmas and Christmas gift giving and the development of shopping. And so Christmas has always been a big point for shopkeepers to make a bit more money than they might do in the rest of the year. But the range of things that were advertised as suitable for Christmas gifts is brilliant. I think my favorite is a portable fire engine which was advertised in the late 19th century. And it has a picture of a very well bearded man, excellent sideburns, kneeling on the ground in a full frock coat with quite a large cravat, with this portable fire engine, which it says is as bought for Windsor Castle, Osborne House, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's one of those sort of pump action things, you've got like a barrel and then a handle on top, so you've clearly done that. And this Blake's kneeling on the ground and not only is he really putting out the fire badly because he's aiming at the flames and not the base of the fire. Also, like the rest of the room is quite grand because clearly it's aimed at quite a grand place. And I'm just left going, I'm assuming that the fire started from a candle on the bedside table, but why does it look like a tree? And how come the bed hangings aren't on fire yet? And Personally, I have more questions than perhaps I'm supposed to have, but my biggest one is like, why would you buy a portable fire engine for someone for Christmas? Surely this is the kind of thing you just have in your servants hall. It's not like a gift for the footman or. I have so many questions. But everything was for Christmas. You know, lawnmowers, firebacks, far, far more than we might think today. If it was on sale, it was great for a Christmas present.
- [07:36]
Podcast Host
I mean, so many options to pick from. On that note, what have been some of the must have toys or the smash hits?
- [07:45]
Annie Gray
One of the biggest areas for Christmas gift giving was gifts for servants. And they were always really practical. So it was things like fabric to turn into your gown for the next year. It would be useful gifts like, I mean, you've got a range of cookery books called A present for. So you got a present for a serving made by Eliza Haywood. Painting sets, that kind of thing. Things that were supposed to innovate your servants to the next level and help to educate them when, as I suspect, Mason, which just been like, can I have an extra bit of money? A lot of the gifts were strange. I mean, the Christmas gifts from. I talked about Victorian period, really, with servants. But if you go forward to the 1950s and 60s, the Christmas gift lists still survive for the Churchill family. So they gave a lot of different gifts at Christmas and some of them were personal gifts and some of them were things like knitted shawls or practical things. But quite clearly, by the time they got about halfway through the lift, they just gave up and just started giving everybody two quid. So I think money's always been one of the really popular ones as well.
- [08:44]
Podcast Host
I bet you must see some really bizarre gifts that people have given there as well.
- [08:49]
Annie Gray
A lot of them are boring. With the Churchills, it's paperweights and things like that. And obviously we only know the kind of things that people. Well, first of all, we don't know whether any of the stuff that was being advertised by the shops, whether that was actually ever given as a gift. The other way you can look at it is by looking at what people did get for Christmas. And I've never come across anyone getting imported fire engine. But food is one of the hugest ones, and particularly Yorkshire pots, which were. The Yorkshire Christmas pie, which was a pie that was probably my height. I mean, I'm not very tall, but, you know, this was a pie that developed the late. In the late 18th century. And it was. I kind of think it was like the size of a small family car. By the time you've read the recipe, Francatelli's got a recipe for it. And it's got a turkey and several hares and a load of partridge and some pheasants and some geese. And I know you force me and you just kind of pack it all in there and then the picture of it is enormous. And then you bake it for. I mean, we made one once on a TV documentary I did, and we baked it for about eight hours and it never cooked in the middle, partly because we kept opening the oven to see if it had cooked. So of course it cooled the oven because we were doing it in a coal fired oven. When we cut it open, it had gangrene in the middle, so it was oozing green. And absolutely re. Partly as well, because it had not been fridged, it had been sealed with a bit of lard and kept cool, but not very cold because it was too big to go anywhere. So, you know, and I think those are the kind of difficulties people were genuinely encountering with their Yorkshire pies. But they were gifts and they were associated with Christmas. And Dickens talks about his footman putting his back out, bringing one into the house at one point. So pie is a really, really big thing in the past. And I think it's one of those things that is both a really practical gift and a really, really stupid gift. How do you get it into the door? How do you eat it?
- [10:32]
Podcast Host
Do you want to eat it, is the question, based on my experience.
- [10:36]
Annie Gray
You really, really don't, is all I can say. The idea is nice, but maybe not the reality. I mean, Queen Victoria, for her Christmas dinner every year, she used to have a sideboard. I mean, she obviously had gargantuan amounts of food, but the sideboard would always have on it a massive game pie that was, I don't know, probably the half a meter tall or something like that, and half a meter across. It's huge. And then a really tiny little woodcock pie, which was sent across by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland every year. And there was a brawn as well as rolled old fashioned brawn. So rolled piece of pig and then a barren of beef, which was basically the entire cow with the tail still on, which curls in the pictures of it over its back and then has the date on it picked out in flowers. So I think, you know, I'd be all right with the little woodcock pie, but I think the big piece. No, just. No.
- [11:27]
Podcast Host
Yeah, no, it's something else. Something else entirely.
- [11:31]
Annie Gray
It's a lot. It's a lot to cope with, I feel.
- [11:34]
Emily Griffith
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- [11:50]
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- [12:18]
Podcast Host
Okay, we've covered Christmas gifts. Obviously, food is a huge thing as well. Historically, what has been on people's Christmas shopping list?
- [12:28]
Annie Gray
Meat. Really very much meat. I mean, for most of the past, the majority of the population were involuntary vegetarians because, quite frankly, no one could afford meat. So at Christmas, meat was what you wanted to eat. And in the medieval period, a lot of gift giving was meat. So it would be landlords giving their tenants meat. And as you go forward in time, what you find is butchers in particular is. I mean, butchers and Christmas, they go together, like I say, Camembert and quince cheese or something, but that was really esoteric and the kind of thing that only I'd come up with the Victorian period. Butchers in particular. The displays were incredible and the pictures of them are incredible. And this was a period where Britain was urbanizing very rapidly. So 1851, Britain becomes the first urbanized nation on the planet. So more people live in towns than cities. That means that more and more people are buying their meat from an urban butcher, which means. And you've got a lot of butchers. I mean, butchers are all over the high street. I live currently in a very small town which now has one butcher, three or four supermarkets. And in say, 1983, it had 10 butchers, of which three were just pork butchers. And it was a trade which a lot of women practiced as well or ran the butcher shops. So lots of butcher shops. And especially at Christmas, they would be festooned with carcasses. So turkey was a meat that a lot of people had at Christmas. If you were rich, you didn't have it as your prior one. Nobody had it as their primary meat because turkey's not very nice to eat. And it's spectacular, but it's not that great. But there was a big craze for having turkey as some part of your meal, or goose, partridge, pheasant, hares, also quite popular, anything gamey. So all of these things, but particularly turkeys, would be imported to London, then they would walk down a lot of the time in the 18th century, they'd be walked from Norfolk. Later on it was on the carriage and then later on still it was on the trains and you get this enormous flocks of birds coming down to London and then they would be hung up for, obviously, with the heads on, feathers on everything. None of this plucked nonsense, no naked bird. It would look really weird. So. And you'd hang them up on your butchers. So if you look for pictures of Victorian butcher shops, particularly at Christmas, you can't see the shop for the amount of dead stuff, not just in the window, but on the walls and on the roof and hanging from the chimney. And a. God knows how they got it all down at the end of the day. Most, I assume, didn't, although a theft would be a problem. Some butchers had sort of racks of stuff where they'd be lowered into the basement overnight and so they could be kept cool. And then a pulley system to bring all the stuff back up again the next day. Tremendously sophisticated shop window mechanisms. So you'd approach your butcher and it would look furry. I mean, it was this sort of. People used to describe the way the British ate at Christmas as having hetacombs of meat, just unbelievable amounts and just carcasses. And carcasses. You know, you've got sawdust on the floor to soak up any blood and you go inside and it would smell like a kind of quite monkey cat, I think, because you've got the smell of the fur and the smell of the carcasses and this fresh tang of blood. And that is your Christmas meal. It is, and it is such sensory overload. And I think from a modern perspective, we would be appalled walking past these places and seeing everything. But the point was, of course, the Victorians were much more connected to where things came from. So they knew that their turkeys didn't just come sitting in a little plastic package with a nappy on the bottom. They would see it hanging up with its feathers out and its head like this, and the same with all the other meats. So that's a long answer, particular question about what people ate at Christmas. But it's all about the meat and the Christmas pudding as well. Christmas puddings, which again, people would go out and buy from their grocers and the grocers Advertised Christmas puddings and Christmas sausages and Christmas this and Christmas punch. But mainly it's meat.
- [15:58]
Podcast Host
Was that true as well? For early appearances, if you go back to the Tudors, presumably still incredibly meaty.
- [16:04]
Annie Gray
Do you want meat? If you can get it? I mean, it has a lot on the Christmas table. So a lot of what we think of today as Christmas food is just winter food in the past. So we think of Christmas pudding. Well, that's plum pudding, really. And plum pudding was eaten throughout the winter because the ingredients were there all year round, because also the ingredients were expensive. Dried fruit was imported, spices were imported, and then it needed a long cook. So plum pudding, as it started, was a relatively wealthy dish. So you also had things like sugar work on the Tudor table. You'd have suckets which were fruit in syrup or in sugar. You might have loads of almonds, so marzipan, March Payne, that kind of thing. You'd have pies because, again, they're time consuming. They're amazing. You might have a salad, a winter salad in the Tudor period. So perhaps pickles and again, dried fruits and leaves and that kind of thing. And then by the time you get to the 17th century, fresher salads are more in, but still lots of pickles in the winter. And the idea would be it would be unbelievably spectacular. It would be a real feast for the eyes, and you would put into there all the flavors of feasting. So everything that was. That was expensive. I think one of the reasons today people smell things like cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg and mace, and they go, oh, it smells like Christmas. Is because those spices were associated with winter food and with rich people's food in the past. And as everything to do with winter became slowly more and more to do with Christmas, then we started to see them as Christmas foods. Not winter foods, but they're Christmas foods. Mince pies, another huge thing. But again, they involve meat to start off with. So it's meaty, very meaty.
- [17:35]
Podcast Host
Aside from perhaps then the butchers and maybe the grocers, where else might you be shopping historically for your Christmas needs?
- [17:44]
Annie Gray
The biggest place, actually was the market. And that's true all the way through to the 1960s. And high streets go hand in hand with markets. You cannot imagine a high street without a market. Today, obviously, plenty of high streets don't have markets or have very limited markets. But the high street was where how the high street came out of the market. And for most people, the market was where you headed. And there are some Lovely Victorian pictures of people shopping at Christmas markets. And again today, we think Christmas market, and you think, oh, little huts with little fairy lights around them and, you know, nutcrackers inside and some mulled wine. That's always a bit disappointing. But a Christmas market in the past was just a market that happened to be open at Christmas. And often the shops would be open on Christmas morning at least. And I think anyone who's read Dickens, Christmas Carol will remember that scene with the ghost of Christmas Present where they walk through the market and the high street on Christmas morning and everything's open and they're buying things and you go. I think he describes Spanish onions peeping from their skins, like sly friars or something like that. It's a beautiful piece of prose. So you go there and then you would also obviously go to your grocers, your. So they're selling spices a lot of the time, dry goods, your Christmas pudding. If you're buying that, you go to your greengrocer because you want to go and get your potatoes if you're having them. Not by any means a bigotry, but you might also buy some Brussels sprouts. They came in in the 1830s. Asparagus, very popular for the rich on the Christmas table. Jerusalem artichokes, again, very popular for the rich. Palestine seep, which was what Jerusalem artichoke ended up being made into. Very, very popular. You have fruit, you need a lot of fruit. You've got beautiful fruit on the dessert course in the 18th and 19th century, and even before then, you'd be putting fruit into things like fruit pies and also your banqueting course, that kind of thing. I mean, you'd go to all the shops. Some of the early big shops, as they were known, so later became department stores, they had food halls as well. William Whiteley, when he started his food hall back in the late 19th century, the local butchers were so enraged by this that they threatened to burn him in effigy. So you might, if you're wealthy, go along. And Whiteley's is one of those places that advertised itself as the fact that you could get anything. The advert there was. You can get anything from a pint of fleas to an elephant. And apparently they were both orders that had come in. So you might well go along there to get the extra bits for your Christmas table at that point as well. And of course, you've got all the other accoutrements of Christmas, like crackers, cards, they all come in during the Victorian period. The tree, you go and Buy your tree, usually from a seller on the street, but you might then go and buy Christmas decorations. If you go through forwards, and I'm booming around all over time here, if you go through to the 1920s, Woolworths cornered the market in cheap Christmas decorations. And one of the things that they sold very, very well and became known for were little glass, German Christmas ornaments, baubles for the tree. So because they had a price promise, they had to keep everything under a certain level and they could sell those very cheaply. So if you think about what we now put on trees, a lot of that is due to Woolworths in the 1920s.
- [20:38]
Podcast Host
This very much leads me onto my next question for you. When did Christmas become so big, such a commercial phenomenon?
- [20:46]
Annie Gray
Oh, the late 19th century for Christmas. If you look at history of global history of Christmas in Britain and you go through from the Judah period and it's a big thing and it gets a bigger thing, and then you get the Civil War and everyone goes, oh, no, Christmas, no, absolutely not doing it. No, no, don't worry about it. Behind closed doors. But we're not going to talk about that. And the Puritans are going, really, it's just another religious festival. It's not. I mean, they never actually banned Christmas. They never banned Christmas pudding or any of that stuff, but fair to say, not a big thing. And then it comes back with a bang and everyone goes, yay, Christmas. And then all the rich go, oh, my God. It's a bit plebeian, isn't it? It's like everyone just gets drunk. I mean, ew. So you get this sort of divergence where the rich are kind of celebrating it in a muted way behind closed doors and not really talking about it. And those slightly lower down the social scale are going, yes, get in time off work. We don't want too much time off work, though, because we won't get paid. So you get a dwindling of the amount of holiday you get, but also an explosion in the level of drunkenness. And then, of course, the Victorians, this is a very whistle stop tour of Christmas. The Victorians, then in the 1840s go, Christmas. It's become a bit pants. So they start to talk about how Christmas should be about the family, not just adults getting drunk and how maybe there should be a bit less alcohol involved. And they reinvent Christmas games and they reinvent a lot of the traditions. And the Germanic Christmas tree takes off, partly because Queen Victoria and Prince Albert put this massive picture of themselves in the Illustrated London News. With their kids around the tree and, you know, Victoria's beloved mother, who she hated standing there. It's all a complete fake. It's just like every family Christmas picture ever. It's that tense moment before dinner when you're all still getting on with each other, but you're not sure you will be for another three hours. That's that picture. But the nation goes, tree presents kids. Yes. So you get this kind of reimagining, I suppose, of Christmas and a dampening down of some of. Some of what it used to be. And by the end of the Victorian period, by the 1870s, 1880s, when you start to get big shops and you get a lot more established high streets as well, that is a period where you really, really start to see Christmas as a huge thing. That's the point where the post office first start to say the Christmas post is a thing. That's the point where you start to get extra staff taken on to deliver Christmas cards. It's the point where you can buy Christmas cards really easily in shops. I mean, the first one, infamously, was in the 1840s, but they didn't take off to the 1870s, 1880s. Also at that point, you get the after Christmas sale coming in. Sales go way back. But the after Christmas sale, which of course for a lot of people is Christmas, that's when that comes in. So you get all of this kind of fake sales stuff where, you know, you. All the trash you haven't been able to sell for the rest of the year, you put on the shop floor. And depending on the shop, that's a big thing too. The other thing at that point is you start to get window displays specifically for Christmas. Again, this is part and parcel of the story of the big shop or the department store. You know, window displays are a thing, but at Christmas, they're really a thing. So the point that the police are regularly being called to take people away from the shops or move them on in the 1870s, 1879, I think it is, Lewis's of Liverpool put in the first Christmas wonderland, which is the precursor, of course, to all of those Santa's grottos that we end up with. And in the 1930s, that's when you start to have to go and meet Father Christmas on pretty much every high street in Britain. The shop in Brighton called Wade's, which apparently was the best in Britain. So it's really that late 19th century period into the 20th century. And I would also just say, actually the 20s and 30s is when you see Christmas pudding Peak, because that's the point where the British government is aggressively promoting the idea of the Empire as being Britain. So if you buy imperial ingredients, they're British ingredients, and they come up with this recipe from the then Royal Chef, Henri Sedar, for the Empire Christmas pudding, which uses stuff from across the Empire, they make a giant one, they parade it down the high street in London. And so you can go and see a Christmas pudding parade. So your kind of key answer is really 1870 to about 1940.
- [24:37]
Podcast Host
So I think when you think of Christmas shopping, there's that image in your mind of Miracle on 34th street going and meeting Father Christmas. The parades, obviously, that's based in the US and we're largely talking about the UK here, but you just think of these fantastic department store stunts, the iconic window displays. Could you tell us more about how Christmas shopping became such an experience and what effect that had on generating even more festivity?
- [25:08]
Annie Gray
The stunts are amazing. So I've really fell into a beautiful rabbit hole of just. It was glorious. When I was researching big shops, particularly I would say, between the wars and up to the 1950s, people were brought into these places and they were very, very good at putting on a show. And I think one of the things people do tend to forget about, certainly in the modern discourse about the high street, is the fact that the high street might be defined by retail, but it is always about so much more than shopping, and spectacle has always been part of it. So going to look at those Christmas windows, some shops still do it. If you go up to Betty's, which is a very small chain of caf in York and Harrogate and Norvellton and around there, they unveil their Christmas window with a grand unveiling every year. And you go along and you drink hot chocolate or mulled wine and you see whatever beautiful Sugarcraft sculpture they've made that year, and there's a curtain that draws back. And if you go along to that, it's lovely. It's an amazing atmosphere. And other shops do still sometimes have a grand unveiling, but nothing like it used to be. So the stunts were really part of getting people in, and they were great. Benthall's in Kingston, there's quite a good archive attached to Bentalls, so it's a particularly good place to look for some of these stories. They used to have a Christmas circus every year, so they had things like lions in store that would be kept in the lift shaft overnight. They had elephants, so many elephants on the high street. They would have elephants that would be part of the circus. They'd be brought up from Chessington and they would parade down the high street and on one occasion, one of them pooed in the doorway of the shop next door. So the shop had to be closed. It caused a great Ferrari. I mean, it wasn't just the big shops. Lipton's. Thomas Lipton, who was a Glaswegian multiple retailer, so he'd been to America, seen the kind of way Americans sold, come back to the UK and said, right, I want some of that. He opened up a chain of grocery shops aiming at the working classes, and his big thing was the Christmas cheese. So he would advertise in the window that he'd got Christmas cheeses for sale that would use the milk of 200 cows, necessitated the work of 100 milkmaids, and weighed over 13,000 pounds. And then he'd hide gold coins in them and he would have these cheeses paraded on the backs of elephants to the shop. Of course, the police were all over this. Oh, my God, not again. And then you would. You would buy your chunks of cheese and if you were lucky, you'd find a gold coin. So, you know, these are stunts that were both. They were very profitable. He sold a lot of cheese off the back of that. But they got into the newspapers and they generated headlines and they started people thinking about Christmas as a chance to see spectacle, to be entertained out of the home. And, I mean, you've got pantos and things like that happening as well. The development of that is a different story, but there's a lot of crossover, because if you were a big shop or even if you were a high street, you wanted to attract some of that pizzazz. Today we have the Christmas light switch on as a big thing, or sometimes we do. It's one of those things that's getting canned through councils not having that much money. But in some cities, the Christmas light switch on is still a big thing and it's a way of getting people in. One of the things you see constantly is this juxtaposition of retail and spectacle. And, of course, if people are there, they're going to spend money. But it's also actually, there is this sort of sense of doing something, of giving something back, of a genuine desire to make Christmas kind of fun.
- [28:13]
Podcast Host
It must have been such an experience to have seen some of these things.
- [28:18]
Annie Gray
Oh, goodness me, yeah. I mean, you don't get a sense of it really, from the surviving pictures and newspaper reports. Most of the pictures of the things are either sort of Sketches in things like the Illustrated London News or there's quite a few pictures from the 1960s of Christmas Parades with Father Christmas on a cart being wheeled through various small towns with all the shops in the background and loads of people turning out to see Father Christmas. And there is this sense of pent up joy and I think, you know, I don't want to be a gramped about it. And also to be fair, back in the day they were selling Christmas cards in October and people were complaining it was too early. But we do see Christmas decorations on the shelves now in August and by the time you get to December you're like, oh my God, it's kind of over. Right. So I think the fact that a lot of these things happened later and they were more spectacle led meant that there was a bigger sense of anticipation occupation around Christmas then and a lot more things were slightly more seasonal. You couldn't buy Christmas pudding throughout most of the year and or mince pies in, you know, July. I mean you could make them. So yeah, I think that idea of gotta wait for something and when we get there it's genuinely going to be absolutely massive must have been pretty cool.
- [29:25]
Podcast Host
Now you mentioned earlier about Queen Victoria posing for the papers with her family, all looking very lovely, all looking very festive. Festive and charming. So what was the role of advertising in boosting Christmas shopping?
- [29:39]
Annie Gray
Massive. You start. I mean newspapers and the kind of spread of newspapers and magazines is again another whole story tied up with print culture and censorship and all those things. But you get a growing number of weekly magazines and newspapers throughout the 18th century and syndications as well. So stories can be written centuries indicated at to local newspapers and print culture explodes massively in line a lot of the time with the price of paper decreasing. You know, it's practical things like that and trains, meaning that you can get newspapers out. But you know, adverts have always been a part of these things and they're not adverts necessarily as we would see them because a lot of the time it's three or four lines in a newspaper or the best ones I really like, which just says things like Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, all the way down the page and then the bottom it will say get your Christmas tea from. And there's the grocer. Then again, I looked, it's not the sort of glossy massive page adverts, but when you're looking for them in newspapers, you tend to see them in the Victorian period start I would say around the end of October and sort of gather in pace in November. So even then there's this idea that actually by the time you hit December, you've already started doing your Christmas shopping and started planning where you're going to go. And a lot of the adverts were incredibly lurid. I mean, some of them really were. They just said Christmas, buy whatever it was, and some of them weren't. And I think the other thing that does play into this idea of Christmasness is things like the stuff that I would call almost advertorial content or puffs. So the Illustrated London News, particularly good at that. You know, they ran things on shopping excursions in South Kensington, for example. Now, to me, that feels like an advertorial because what they're doing is they're promoting three different big shops in South Kensington, so Derrien, Toms, Barkers and Pontine Things, all of which were actually owned by the same person. But you've got these beautiful pictures of people shopping on those streets and it's telling you how to shop and where to go and where the bargains are. You also get things like the Tube start to advertise for Christmas shoppers and how easy it is to get into London on the Tube in the late 19th century. So a lot of the things that we think of as relatively modern, they're all getting going then, from whether it's transport or the best places to shop or the best bargains to be had, or the best Christmas presents for this person, that person and the other. And of course, recipes being published in newspaper papers and things like that, some of which are going to be sponsored by a local shop or written by someone who's trying to flog cookbooks. So it's all there.
- [32:02]
Podcast Host
I think we sometimes have this idea in our mind that for Christmas, what we have today is really, really quite modern, when actually it seems to have a much longer history where we're slowly building up more and more.
- [32:16]
Annie Gray
Yeah, I think the Christmas we have today is both very modern and very not modern modern, but it's not as old as we think it is. So, for example, the Christmas dinner we have today is modern because that idea of just having turkey, raised potatoes, Brussels sprouts, vast amounts of sides and then trifle or something afterwards, cheesecake, whatever it is. A lot of people don't have Christmas pudding anymore. That is a post war development. Turkey was not the dominant meat for a long time. The idea of getting all of your family together in one place really was only an aspiration, if that for most of history, because, you know, most people worked as servants. So you can't bring your daughter and your son back to the family abode because A, it's too small, and B, Maud is cooking Christmas dinner for Lord and Lady Whatnot and Dick is off sailing the seas as a naval officer or whatever he is, you know, so that aspect is very modern and that idea, I think gift giving has got really big in the last few decades, much bigger than it ever was before. It was always intended and always sort of seems to have been relatively muted. And you look at pictures of people with their gifts, gifts in the past, and they've got four or five things around them. It's not that they've just been given, I don't know, something that's worth three or four hundred quid in the equivalent, then if they've got a doll and a chocolate bar and a satsuma or whatever it is. So from that point of view, I think Christmas has become very overblown in that aspect is modern, but the seeds of it becoming really overblown, really commercialized, all about present giving and lots and lots and lots of people telling you to buy, buy, buy, and then go to the sales. That definitely goes back to the late Victorian period. And of course, the roots of Christmas being a celebration are much, much older. So many of our traditions are new. And I think even things like the kind of schizophrenic dieting that you get over Christmas, where it's eat, eat, eat, eat, eat. Oh, my goodness me, look, it's the 26th of December. Diet, diet, diet, diet, diet. That is really a 1930s thing, but I would say that it's got worse and worse and worse. So. But again, you know, that idea of, right, eat, feast and be merry and now go on a diet, is that's that. That that's older than you think it is as well.
- [34:09]
Podcast Host
As a final question to you, what are some weird and wonderful Christmas shopping traditions or habits that you think we should bring back today?
- [34:19]
Annie Gray
Oh, goodness. I'd like to just bring back spectacle, actually, because I think we've talked about most of the traditions. I'd like to bring back an unveiling of big windows and late night shopping as well. I mean, summer shops do do late night shopping, particularly for Christmas, but there's something about, and I'm not a huge fan necessarily of Christmas, I think that it's an interesting time of year and it can be very problematic for a lot of people. And I'm always wary of kind of extolling Christmas too much when for some people it's a genuinely very lonely and a trying time of year. But I think that idea of not spending money but of spending time with people, looking at things, looking at windows, shopping, yes, maybe. But time, that's the thing I think we sometimes lack. So it sort of seems a little bit sort of saccharine and sweet to go. No, I think what we need to do is bring back the idea of spending time with people. But actually, I think that's one of the things we lack. And parlor games. I mean, my goodness me. But decent ones. 18th century parlor games involving brandy and currants and fire. Not 19th century parlor games involving pinching someone's nose and trying not to laugh.
- [35:28]
Podcast Host
That was Annie Gray, a food and social historian. Annie also joined me on the podcast recently to discuss her latest book, the Bookshop, the Draper, the Candlestick, A History of the High Street. You can find a link to that episode in the description of this one. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.