How we lost the seasons

So, what are you doing with your Christmas decorations? Still up? Did the tree get put out on 2 January? Maybe you’re holding out until the Twelfth Day, on the basis that it’s bad luck to have the decorations up after that? Or are you going out on a limb and keeping your holly, bay and ivy up until 2 February, Candlemas? This last is in fact the correct answer for traditionalists; prior to Victorian times, people kept the Christmas season going, along with the greenery, right up until Candlemas. Mind you, given that Christmas trees only caught on with Prince Albert, pre-Victorians didn’t have the problem of pine needles dripping all over the carpet.

The gap between the Christmas season as now celebrated, and how it once was, sums up something of the gist of Nick Groom’s beguiling book, The Seasons. For, as he points out, if Christmas now ends long before the Twelve Days that the sixth-century Council of Tours prescribed for the celebrations, it also starts long before Christmas Eve, which used to be the beginning of the party season — preceded by Advent, a time of fasting. ‘The season of Christmastide has, in other words,’ he observes, ‘shifted forward, as if it now expresses an impatient and premature desire for gratification. The result is that there are two cold months of winter following Christmas.’

This inversion of the Christmas season is just one of the ways this book documents in which contemporary Brits — or rather, English — have distorted or discarded the traditional course of the seasons, which once gave shape to people’s lives. There were two aspects to the cycle of the pre-industrial — actually, the pre-20th century — year, as described here. One was the rhythm of agricultural work, which imposed its character on each season; the other, closely bound up with it, was the round of the Church’s year — the saints’ days, fasting and feasts.