Christmas Greetings and New Year’s Wishes

A Christmas message from 1882. Photo by the UK National Archives via Flickr.

If you are celebrating today, Miss Moppet and Lady Moppet would like to wish you a very happy Christmas. If not, we wish you all the very best for 2011.

The Empire Christmas Pudding

Making the Empire Christmas Pudding: artwork by F.C. Harrison produced for the Empire Marketing Board, 1926-39. Photo by The National Archives UK via Flickr.

This lovely image was commissioned by the (British) Empire Marketing Board in the late 1920s or 1930s. It’s a beautifully balanced composition, the pale background setting off the rich colours in the foreground, the red, blue and green of the cook’s outfit picked out in the ingredients on the table. Her marcel waved bob and the Arts and Crafts design of the chairs put this firmly in period, as does the packaging, especially the blue sugar bag at the far right. Still lifes were traditionally an opportunity for artists to display their skills at depicting different textures: the reflection of the window on the beer bottle is sharper than the reflection on the inside of the mixing bowl, and the spiky surface of the grater makes a wonderful contrast with the smooth surface of the baking apples.

And here is the recipe! Supplied, apparently, by the royal chef.

Following independence, many of these countries became  members of the Commonwealth, which describes itself as:

a voluntary association of 54 countries that support each other and work together towards shared goals in democracy and development. The world’s largest and smallest, richest and poorest countries make up the Commonwealth and are home to two billion citizens of all faiths and ethnicities – over half of whom are 25 or under. Member countries span six continents and oceans.

The Empire Christmas Pudding recipe is, naturally enough, in imperial units. I have some cookbooks in imperial (Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) and some in metric (Nigella’s Domestic Goddess). I am happy to use either and only run into problems when a recipe lists both and I forget which I’m using halfway through!

For those of you who cook in metric, here’s a Christmas Pudding recipe by Australian blogger Marg (The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader). The recipe makes 12 small puddings.

Virtual Advent Tour 2010: Fortnum & Mason’s Christmas Windows

Photo by Rachel Lovinger via Flickr

Every year during Advent, I like to pay a visit to one of London’s most famous stores, Fortnum & Mason. Founded in 1707 with the profits from royal footman William Fortnum’s sale of half-used candles from the royal household (it was a mark of status at this time to have fresh candles every day, and yesterday’s stubs were the servants’ perquisites), it caters to royalty, the carriage trade and the tourist trade.  Most famous for their food hall, Fortnum’s also sell clothing, accessories and household goods. At F&M you can buy both macaroons and candles shaped and coloured like macaroons.

Looking down into the food hall. Photo by surprise truck via Flickr.

 

In the nineteenth century Fortnum’s became famous for their prepacked hampers – no shoot or visit to the Great Exhibition was complete without one. They remain extremely popular and make useful containers when the contents are eaten!

The Lord Mayor's Show 2007. You can see the famous hampers on top of the delivery cart. Photo by Matt Brown via Flickr.

 

Inside the store, with a carrier bag in their signature eau de nil. The beehives on the roof are painted the same colour. Photo by Julie Kertesz via Flickr.

I don’t do much of the Christmas shop at Fortnum’s because as high as the quality is, the prices are high to match, and with the exception of own-brand products, many of the groceries can be bought more cheaply at Waitrose. But I do like to go if only to look at their windows. Fortnum’s windows are the best designed in London, and at Christmas they outdo themselves.

This year they recreated paintings in the National Gallery. This was my favourite – based on Hendrick Avercamp’s A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle (c.1608-9).

 

Photo by Herry Lawford via Flickr.

Here are some of my favourite themes from past years:

 

Theme of 2008: The Snow Queen

Photo by BePak via Flickr.

 

Photo by BePak via Flickr.

In addition to the ‘storytelling’ windows, there are always some for product display.

 

Photo by BePak via Flickr.

 

Photo by Juan Ordaz via Flickr.

The detail is extraordinary – and so is the impression of depth and space given in what is quite a confined area.

 

Theme of 2006: Alice in Wonderland

Photo by Draconiansleet via Flickr

 

Photo by norbypix via Flickr

 

Photo by norbypix via Flickr

 

Photo by norbypix via Flickr

Other stops on today’s Advent Tour:

Becky (One Literature Nut)

Jane (Life @ Number 8)

Lorren (The Story Girl)

Michelle (Galleysmith)

 

My post for the 2009 Virtual Advent tour, on vintage Advent calendars

 

Time and Tide and Buttered Eggs wait for no man: The Box of Delights, by John Masefield

The Box of Delights is a 1935 children’s book by John Masefield.  It’s a sequel to The Midnight Folk (which I haven’t read) and in both books the central character is Kay Harker.

On the way home from his first term at boarding school, Kay meets a mysterious Punch and Judy showman, Cole Hawlings, who warns him that, “The Wolves are Running” and seems to have magical powers – he finds Kay’s lost railway ticket and somehow knows that he will be having buttered eggs for lunch.  Later Cole entrusts him with the magical Box of Delights. The Box gives its owner the power to shrink to a tiny size (“go small”), get places at lightning speed (“go swift”) or both at once.  It’s also a portal into the past (Kay goes back to the time of the Trojan Wars in search of another time traveller) and into a kind of parallel universe.  The villain of the book, Abner Brown, is after the Box and will stop at nothing to get it.  He’s also determined to prevent the millennial Midnight Mass due to be held at Tatchester Cathedral from taking place.  In the run up to Christmas Eve, clergy begin to disappear.  Kay and the four Jones children, Peter, Susan, Maria and Jemima, who are staying with him for the holidays, have to keep the Box safe and use it to solve the kidnappings (or scrobblings, a word Masefield coined in The Midnight Folk).

In the best tradition of children’s mysteries, the adults disappear early on and the police are no help whatsoever.  And as usual, the protagonist is not the most interesting character – that would be Maria Jones. Maria is eminently quotable.  She gets kidnapped at one point (“I’ve been scrobbled just like a greenhorn.  I knew what it would be, not taking a pistol.”) and this is part of her account of it:

“They turned on a little light in the taxi roof and I saw that they had put me a pot of tea and some cold ham and some bread inside the taxi, so I thought, ‘Well, nothing like keeping one’s pecker up,’ and so I made a hearty meal.”

“Was there any knife with the food?” Kay asked.

“No such luck,” she said.  “I had to eat it with my fingers.  I’d have soon hacked my way out if they had left me a knife.”

“Weren’t you afraid of the food being drugged?” Jemima asked.

“No, that never occurred to me,” Maria said.  “I’d been through a good deal of mental strain and had to restore my nervous force.”

This is a book where the sense of the past is strong even in the parts set in what was then the present day.  Early in the book Kay takes a short cut

through Haunted Lane as it was called, which was a way he did not like, for it was a very dark lane of old houses some of which were still marked with red crosses on their doors to show that within them, two centuries before, someone had lain sick of the plague.

However, there’s plenty of modernity in the mix.  “Christmas ought to be brought up to date,” Maria says, “it ought to have gangsters, and aeroplanes and a lot of automatic pistols.”  In this book there are gangsters, cars, aeroplanes and cars which turn into aeroplanes, as well as a lot of delightfully old-fashioned magic, both black and white.  In this scene villain Abner Brown buys a snowstorm from a witch:

He lifted his left hand in a strange way and, instantly, an old, old crone was thrust through the floor by little red hands, towards him.  She looked so old that she might have been a thousand years or more: nose and chin almost met; her face was the colour of old wood.  She seemed terrified of Abner.

“What d’you want with me, Master?” she said.

“I want a storm out of the north and the east, ” Abner said, “with snow.”

“I can’t give it.  I can’t give it,” the old woman said.  “You ask too much.  I can only sell a storm for a great sum – a bag of amethysts.”

[They haggle over the price and settle on a quarter bag of amethysts].

[Abner] produced from his pocket a little canvas bag which did contain amethysts: Kay saw the stones as he emptied them out.  A very meagre quarter of the bag was handed to the old woman, who produced in turn from her pocket a little leather bag tied with three strings at the mouth.

“Don’t open more than two of those strings,” the old woman said, warningly, “or you may be sorry.”

John Masefield was Poet Laureate, and the book is full of passages I wanted to stop and read over again.  Here’s one of them:

It was a grim winter morning, threatening a gale.  Something in the light, with its hard sinister clearness, gave mystery and dread to those hills.  “They look just the sort of hills,” Kay said to himself, “where you might come upon a Dark Tower, and blow a horn at the gate for something to happen.”

It was when I read this that I began to wonder if Masefield had influenced Tolkien.  The comparative passage that sprang immediately to mind was this one from The Hobbit (1937):

Now they had gone far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse.  Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees.  On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people.  Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn.  Mostly it had been as good as May can be, even in merry tales, but now it was cold and wet.

But it’s also reminiscent of Frodo and Sam’s arrival at the Black Gate of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.  I found other parallels with Tolkien: there’s a wood which, like Mirkwood or the Old Forest, ‘looked curiously forbidding and evil’ and the wolf attack Kay witnesses at a Roman camp has similarities both to the wolf attack on Bilbo Baggins and his companions and that which the Company of the Ring endure in Hollin.  In both cases the wolves are not just hungry animals, they are agents of evil, and the attack focuses on a circular place of refuge.  While the two authors are telling very different stories, Masefield makes England seem just as mysterious and magical a place as Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

As a contrast to the dangers the children face in The Box of Delights there is the safe haven of Kay’s home Seekings and beautifully festive descriptions – this is the Bishop of Tatchester’s Christmas tree:

Its bigger boughs were decked with the glittering coloured glass globes which Kay so much admired.  The lesser boughs were lit with countless coloured electric lights like tropical fruits: ever so much better, Kay thought, than those coloured candles which drip wax everywhere and so often set fire to the tree and to the presents.  At the top of this great green fir-tree was a globe of red light set about with fiery white rays for the Christmas Star.

The Box of Delights is long for a children’s book – over 400 pages in early hardback editions – and not as plot-driven as The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia.  There are excursions which, while fun to read, don’t have much to do with the plot.   It’s a sequel without much backstory, so it might be better to read The Midnight Folk first.  Having said that, there wasn’t a page which disappointed me – apart from the very last two.

Bottom line: Magical vintage Christmas story.  Slightly spoiled by a cliched ending but don’t let that put you off reading it.

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I borrowed this book from the library

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This book counts towards:

It’s the first of three books I want to read for this challenge.

 

 

Inside Moppet’s Christmas Cracker

This was the joke inside Moppet’s Christmas cracker:

We were using up two different sets of crackers this year, so some of them had questions instead of jokes:

Art historian Moppet did not know the answer to this question.

Moppet got some colouring pencils in her cracker, and a picture to colour in.

Moppet (35) and her brother (31) coloured this picture in by themselves.

This was done by Moppet’s brother, with no help.

My First Advent Calendars: Virtual Advent Tour Day 23

This was my very first Advent Calendar.  Yes, I kept it all these years.  In fact I used to keep all my calendars and put them up year after year until I went to university.  Eventually I had to purge them – so the Muppet-themed calendar, and many others, went, but I did keep two and this is one of them.  There is no artist’s credit for this beautiful image, but in the bottom left-hand corner you can see:

Appropriately for a first calendar there are Bible quotations on the inside of the windows, telling the Christmas story.  Here’s window 1:

Windows 15, 16 and 17 describe the visitation to the shepherds:

And here is window 24.  As a child I could never understand why there were 24 windows and not 25…my mother had to explain to me that this was an Advent calendar, and Advent ended on the 24th.

I had never noticed the stars scattered in front of the stable doors until I scanned this detail.

My second Advent calendar took the same subject but used a bit of artistic licence to depict Bethlehem deep in snow:

More of the doors are missing from this one.  (It creates a beautiful effect when held up to the light.)

Again, I couldn’t find a signature but it seems to come from the same maker:

And some of the details, like the cookies spilling out of a basket, do look German:

But my favourite detail is this:

I had a special interest in the Kings as our eldest cat, a golden tabby, was named Casper.  She was actually named for Frank Casper the footballer (because in her youth she dribbled well) but I thought she was named for King Caspar who was more familiar to me growing up.

Looking at these calendars takes me back to more innocent times.  Times when there was still a West Germany.  When a little girl could be made happy just by opening a door to find a picture of some fruit and a Bible quotation.

But all things come to an end, even Communism, and in due course chocolate Advent calendars began to appear in the shops.  After that my brother and I had two every year, one with pictures and one with chocolates.

One Christmas my cousin, feeling peckish, decided to snack on my brother’s Advent calendar.  He counted on being well down the M6 before the theft would be discovered, but unluckily for him my aunt and uncle stayed on an extra day.  Cue a huge row!

Indeed, times have changed.  I attended my friend’s daughter’s Nativity Play last week, and while some of costumes were familiar (the angel’s frocks and tinsel headgear were exactly the same as I had when I was five) it was less Nativity Play, more Primary School Musical.  There were lots of songs and not the traditional kind like Away in a Manger (which I loathed actually).  The school was nothing if not ambitious: the drama of the birth of Christ wasn’t enough for them and they had gone for a musical with a storyline around the Star of Bethlehem being reluctant or unable (not sure which) to shine – until the entire school sang, Shine, Star, Shine, that is.

Shine, Star, Shine

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Extras!  Here are links to the two short stories on the site, both of which feature Lady Moppet and are set at Christmas.

Adventures in Time Travel: Undercover at the Court of Henry II

Lady Moppet’s Twelve Days of Christmas

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This post was brought to you by:

Teaser Tuesday: The Box of Delights by John Masefield

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Am I the only one who keeps thinking ‘that would make a good teaser’ when reading a book?

This week’s is The Box of Delights by John Masefield and I was spoilt for choice.  I couldn’t decide between two, so here they both are:

It was a grim winter morning, threatening a gale.  Something in the light, with its hard sinister clearness, gave mystery and dread to those hills.  “They look just the sort of hills,” Kay said to himself, “where you might come upon a Dark Tower, and blow a horn at the gate for something to happen.”

 

As they entered the little street, it was so dark with the promise of snow that the shops were being lighted.  They were all decked out with holly, mistletoe, tinsel, crackers, toys, oranges, model Christmas trees with tapers and glass balls, apples, sweets, sucking pigs, sides of beef, turkeys, geese, Christmas cakes and big plum-puddings.

Lady Moppet’s Twelve Days of Christmas

Hello everyone.

While we’re waiting for the next instalment of my latest adventure I wanted to share this Christmas story with you.  You can find it here and I hope you enjoy it.

Wishing you all the best for the holidays, whether you are celebrating anything or not.

Lots of love from Lady Moppet.

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Image from Karen’s Whimsy