rthstewart | In which Ruth almost but not quite outs herself

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In which Ruth almost but not quite outs herself

Been there, done that, got the turkey coma (and a search at 11:30 PM last night for a grocery store that was still open and had fresh turkeys to accommodate my swelling gust list. Yes, I cooked 2 turkeys this year as my list went from 7 to 15).

We have a tradition that everyone at the table must identify a book or movie that was moving, interesting, or memorable in some way. Two years ago at Thanksgiving, I went on and on about Roald Dahl and the Irregulars in Jennet Conant's book (and TQSiT was the result). Last year I blathered about the Kladstrup Wine and War book (which I used for Maenad of the Maquis)..

This year, it was gay giraffes, same sex paired albatrosses, and Biological Exuberance and that remarkable wikpedia entry. Apparently I was hilarious and articulate. But really my wine soaked guests had difficulty getting passed the "OMG GAY GIRAFFES?" We were very loud. Good thing the kids were watching Jurassic Park. I consider myself a pretty dull person in real life. It's pretty funny when the stories you tell about the fic you saw in a porn challenge involving Pepsi and Coke and John Major and QE2 are memorable enough that people remember them the following year.

Happy Thanksgiving if you celebrate it. If not, I hope you had a lovely day. I am grateful to all my imaginary friends.

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Two years ago, we'd invited my husband's parents, grandmother, sister & family to join us for Christmas. They got stuck behind a freak snowstorm on Christmas morning - couldn't get out of their village. So Chrismas lunch ended up being just the two of us and a twelve-pound turkey.

And speaking of being in the UK and Christmas, since you ARE here. I was going to pepper the F-list with questions but if you and

wellinghall have a moment (and it is fine of course if you do not) but I am trying to research British Christmas traditions and then try to dial it back to the 1940s. I've found some great things about dancing and singing in the living room -- though I couldn't figure if there were radio broadcasts of music or if people played the piano or records. Also, I learned about everything be rationed and dipping your greens in epsom salts and festive beets and carrots on the table. Among the things I was wondering -- I assume that churches are all behind black out shades and no lights (I know I read that somewhere). But do people go to church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? And which is normally celebrated? Or is both? And are presents opened on Christmas Day or Eve? In the states there are lots of variations, may reflecting ethnically where the family came from -- families of Italian origin have fish feasts on Christmas Eve; families from German traditions have their events on Christmas Eve. Now, most churches have a children's service in the last afternoon on Christmas Eve and many have sung services much later, between 10 and 12.

Any information you would be willing to share about your holiday traditions and/or sources to extrapolate to to the 1940s would be lovely!

Oh and that very foreign thing to American tastes known as the pudding... is that something people would have tried to make? Or would they try to buy it and not be able to get it -- I saw cites that they simply were not available -- hundreds signed up and the store only had 2? This is one where I understand that families with ties to American families did get things -- chocolate, soap, liquor, cigarettes, toilet paper, and other things. There's a real Scrooge arriving to save the family with a Christmas goose feel to it all, but I was going to run with it -- for just that reason -- that all life's problems can't be solved with a goose, and the sense of humility/shame and deep gratitude. I assume however, that a proper English pudding would not have been available from the American PX. Any insight you have into the pudding, including whether I'm being too over the top to even think on it would be much appreciated!

Not sure about dancing and midnight mass. The main family celebration is nearly always Christmas day, and since it was in Dickens' time as well, I think it's reasonable to assume the same for centuries in between. Community events are more likely to happen a bit earlier. With children around this will involve silly games such as musical chairs or pass-the-parcel.

Food I can help on - I just happen to have, on my cookery book shelves, two books on WWII & rationing. The Ministry of Food realised how important keeping a more-or-less traditional Christmas was to morale, and issued fact sheets with advice on how to manage on tight rations. They even issued extra sweet rations some years (not sure if this includes 1942 or not

The pudding was relatively easy, as it can be made with lots of grated carrot & breadcrumbs (the recipe I use does this - makes it rather less heavy, as the really traditional recipes can be a bit much after turkey). The book which talks most about Christmas adds that raisins were hard to get, and that the Ministry suggested using prunes instead. Another recipe doesn't use breadcrumbs or brandy, does use grated raw potato, and adds that it can only be made a couple of days in advance as it doesn't keep.

Christmas cake was much harder to manage. They encouraged the pooling of resources - the same book gives an example of a teacher who got every child in her class to contribute something (an egg, a little sugar) and managed a cake for an end-of-term party that way. Frosting was extremely difficult, as there was no icing sugar, but could be made with boiled sugar and egg white or powdered milk. "Almond" paste was made out of plain cake crumbs, margerine and almond extract.

The MoF were very keen on making party food that looked good, and other suggestions include open sandwiches topped with colourful raw vegetables & a little sardine, and "gingerbread men" made out of pastry.

Decorations and party hats could made out of odd scraps such as off-cuts of wallpaper.

Once the Americans were over (thank you!) they were frequently invited round to join local families, particularly for important occasions such as Christmas. Much culture clash ensued, and American servicemen were subsequently issued with a leaflet of instructions, including orders to refuse second helpings (apparently some GIs were eating a family's entire week's meat ration at one go, and not realising), and not to criticise the coffee ("okay, so the British can't make coffee. You can't make tea").

If you're able to find a copy of "Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, 1942" I think you'll find it very helpful. It's certainly been published over here.

Okay, I'm now raiding Wellinghall's military histories. Apparently the US army decided the best solution to the "eating too much of the rations" problem was to give the host families at Christmas a package containing "fruit or tomato juice, evaporated milk, peas, bacon, sugar, coffee, lard or shortening, butter, rice or available substitutes". When word got out, the number of invitations shot up - 50 invitations for every GI available at Christmas 1942.

Music - yes. All of the above, radio, gramophones, pianos in many homes and pubs.

Thank you both so very, very much.

There's a Neville Shute novel where an American officer (sergeant?) goes into a shop and sees the assistant measuring out food. "Do you have to do that evey day?" "Day? This is for a week!"

Thanks so much to both you and

wellinghall for reviewing the bookshelves and cookbooks and such and for generously sharing your knowledge. It cracks me up to think of the two of you saying, oh look, an imaginary American person is writing fanfiction about things she knows nothing about has questions about Christmas in 1942.

In contrast, while, on the one hand, I did have a detailed and lovely conversation last night over Thanksgiving with a woman who works in bird conversation and energy policy about Laysan albatrosses (while everyone else was laughing at me about the same sex bonding in giraffes), no one in RL knows about the fanfic. I've hidden it behind psudos and such for nearly 20 years.

I've been lobbying for a family trip to the UK in the Spring rather than Rome -- "I want to go to Oxford." "Why?" "Errrr.... dinosaurs?"

Thank you again ever so much.

You are most welcome! :-)

Well, Rome has its fine points as well, I suppose.

Depends when you want to go - early spring Rome probably has the more pleasant climate, late spring Oxford is at its best. You don't want it too hot and sticky for serious sight-seeing, after all, do you?

Ooh, remind me and I will pull down my MO diaries books for you - there were x-mas entries!

If You are looking for information about British life and language (vs. America), this blog is a great resource:
http://hp-britglish.livejournal.com/

Thanks so much! I've got a number of sites I go to for some of this, but I also know I'm never going to capture the feel of proper English. There's a passage in Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy involving a description of the school that Jim Prideaux is teaching at and I know the book by heart and the paragraph or two is nearly unintelligible. Or it tosses around words like "red brick" and an American has to go and look it up. Pathetic, I know.

I believe Evensong was often held in the afternoon, before dark. I will ask my grandmother for more info whe I speak to her (she is 93).

Almost every home would have had a radio - they were probably enarly as common then as TVs are now. Record players less common, but still a good 50% of homes would have had them. Pianos less common still - in a minority, I think - but there would have been occasional other instruments as well.

In the interests of education (mine anyway), I'm intrigued that a pudding isn't part of your Christams staple fare. If pudding isn't traditional on an American table, what is your traditional Christmas dessert of choice (allowing for mtuli-cultural variation, of course).

Min, I just posted a new entry because we had a long talk about regional variations of holiday food in the U.S. and it is a really fun topic. (at least for me. I'm fascinated by the regional US variations in things like gravy, stuffing, desserts, and such). Oh, I hope someone explains the red velvet cake or chess pie. As I say over in that entry, I've had everything from Christmas cookies to fondue, to trifle, to Buche de Noel at Christmas. It's all over the place and I've never seen a pudding ever.

This imaginary friend is thankful for you, too.

And to you! It sounds as if you have a lovely day!

Oh, I am so grateful for some of this information. I have a feeling that some of it will be extraordinarily handy in the future. And to answer min023, there is a LOT of variation for Christmas dessert. There is usually some kind of pie - apple, pecan, and pumpkin being the big ones - and in my grandmother's house it was coookies, cookies, cookies, at least six or seven kinds. She would make up platters of them, add some chocolates, and we would just demolish them during the three or four days around Christmas. She just turned 85, and I still crave her pecan pie.

Because this is such a WONDERFUL topic, I ended up just starting a post on it. But first, I may go have some apple butter pumpkin pie.

I checked with my Dad, who would have been 10 in 1942. He said, if you were lucky, your family might have a chicken. Probably served with roast potates and some other vegetables, bread sauce and gravy.(No cranberry sauce, this was unkown in England at the time.) He said his grandmother saved up sugar ration all year, managed to get hold of some currants or sultanas and made a Christmas cake. He doesn`t remember having Christmas pudding during the war. No candy of course. ( My Mum remembers getting chocolate from American soldiers who were camped on their front lawn the days before D-Day, but they lived in south England, whereas Dad was in the Midlands and so missed out.)
Dad also commented that if you knew a farmer who made his own butter or cheese, you might be lucky and get a bit extra from him. He said they ate a lot of rabbit. Apparently most people in the country or in villages kept rabbits. This might not be impossible even in suburban areas like Finchley or Cambridge. There might very well be a rabbit hutch at the bottom of the garden.
He mentioned that there was no beer in bottles. If you wanted to drink beer at home, you went to the pub with a jug, where they filled it up. And women, if they went to the pub, would sit in the snug.
Also, I don`t know how extensive the Russell grounds are, but some more aristocratic types might have herds of deer on their estates. I`m sure all four Pevensies could stalk and shoot deer with a bow. I bet Peter, Edmund and Eustace could snare rabbits and grouse and tickle trout too. Ironically what little I know about grouse shooting and poaching comes from ``Danny, Champion of the World`` by Roald Dahl!

Re coffe vs. tea. I think a lot of this is a class thing. The Pevensies seem to be upper middle-class or even gentry. They would be used to drinking coffee. But it would be unheard of for the lower classes to have coffee. Certainly my parents` families didn`t at this time. It was always tea. There`s also the issue of what time you ate meals. Lower classes probably ate their main meal of the day, around 1:00 p.m. then had a tea round 5-6. Upper classes ate the main meal later in the evening.

This sort of social history is fascinating, especially when you think it wasn`t all that long ago.

Can`t help on the church question--my parents` families seem to be non-church goers. Oh except not everybody would have been C of E or Catholic. There would have been Methodists or chapel folk too. Again possibly a class thing.

Hope this helps a bit.

ClaireI

Thank you so much, Clairel! And you checked with your Dad, which was so nice! I've found a lot of information, and I'm overthinking as I do have an easy deux ex leo in the form of the Pevensies now having access to an American family with access to the PX/Commissary. There's a sort of Christmas Carol thing forming in my head where all problems are solved with the arrival of the Christmas goose or turkey with the Americans, but the American food traditions, as the next entry shows, do not have this tradition of dried fruits soaked in spirits and set aflame. The closest is that thing known as the Fruit Cake which nowadays at least is the subject of scorn. Dried fruit and nuts barely held together with a batter and soaked in rum or brandy and packed in a tin. It was popular at one time but I can't imagine a fruit cake taking the role of the Christmas dessert -- though.... I should check the Joy of Cooking, the classic American cookbook that has been in print since the War. (I referenced it in the Tools of the Trade chapter in TQSiT). The classic Joy gives instructions on how to skin squirrels.

In my head, btw, I'm assuming they are COE. Though I admit that English class dynamics are not something Americans understand well at all. Thanks so much!

Yeah, I find the nuances fascinating and confusing as well, even when it extends to things like sports. According to my father, if you were upper class, you played rugby and lower class you played football/soccer. So at their boarding school Peter and Edmund would play rugby, tennis and row. Although as far as I can tell everyone played cricket!
ClaireI

This is one I'm never going to nail exactly. My British readers have been incredibly generous both in not criticizing my errors and in gently helping when they could. Though I seem to have lost theoretica, who was very helpful with the military side of things. And the hummingbirds.

A useful link might be to the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwtwo/christmas_underfire_01.shtml

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In which Ruth almost but not quite outs herself

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Christams food during the war

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