Old Christmas

Rating:
Summary: Melancholy little "sketch"
Review: "But is old, old, good old Christmas gone? Nothing but the hair of his good, gray, old head and beard left? Well, I will have that, seeing that I cannot have more of him."

-- "Hue and Cry after Christmas," from the opening page of Old Christmas.

This book is what Washington Irving called a "sketchbook" -- a collection of impressions about something, gathered into a fictionalized story. It's a melancholy, fond evocation of fading English Christmas traditions of the author's time.

The story's simple: Irving sets himself in the English countryside, where he's travelling one Christmas Eve. At a country inn he runs into an old schoolmate, who invites him home to spend Christmas at the family estate. The friend's father, it turns out, dotes on all things Christmas, and has tuned his household to some of the more quaint and obscure English traditions celebrating the day. That lets Irving include lots of odd little bits and pieces of Christmas tradition, told through the old man, as part of his plot. The book covers a night and a day. The chapters are pieces of that time: the stagecoach ride is one chapter, then "Christmas Eve," and so on through "Christmas Dinner."

I read this every year lately, and it's a nice, low-key, sad and happy little way to mark the Christmases passing. Washington Irving wrote it in the early 1800s -- the dates of most of his "Sketch Book" are right around 1819 or 1820 -- and the story is mostly a reminiscence about even earlier Christmas traditions. Then it took until 1894 for this edition to be printed, with the illustrations by Caldecott. Later the facsimile edition I have was printed, in maybe the early 1980s... For a little book about Christmas past to have made it through all those years, and come down to me in this personal "sketch," is a glad thing. Coming back to the same copy year after year makes a nice little private tradition.

The text to this is available in a few places on the Web. That's an okay way to get to know the language, but a facsimile of the original book, with the illustrations, is still worth the few dollars it'll cost. The Caldecott who illustrated this is the one for whom the children's book award was named, among other things. You need to read this one next to the Christmas tree, not by the glow of a computer monitor.

Rating:
Summary: Quiet, pleasant reading of an Old English Christmas
Review: Very enjoyable reading for those who like to pull up a chair, have a cup of tea, and escape to a simpler, more elegant time. Those who enjoy Christmas stories, or Anglophiles who can never get enough of English history will enjoy this insight into an Old English Christmas from one who was there.