Jane Austen’s Regency Christmas
As our fabulous Festive Jane Austen & Bath experiences begin, our expert guest blogger Dr Moira Rudolf takes a look at the Christmas traditions Jane Austen would have enjoyed.
In Jane Austen’s time, the Christmas Season was very different from the one that we recognise today. Many of our familiar customs – including Father Christmas and the exchange of presents on Christmas morning did not exist – and the Georgian festivities ran for much longer than ours; from 6th December – in the midst of Bath’s fashionable Winter Season – until 6th January.
It was, overwhelmingly, a time for family and friends to celebrate with much eating and drinking; either assembling at home for private parties, or else gathering at balls, dances, large feasts and suppers.
All of the Austens, especially when together at Steventon, were inveterate performers, revelling in Charades and Riddles; amateur theatricals; comic verse, literary readings, and parlour games such as Spillikins (Pickup Sticks) or Bilbocatch (Cup & Ball), at which Jane excelled, to the delight of her young nephews and nieces. She was not averse to a little light gambling, either….
Jane also enjoyed music, although many of today’s carols – excepting While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night (composed c1700) and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen (published 1760; seventeenth-century in origin) – were not written until much later.
She loved the dangerous-sounding, fun entertainments, such as Snap-Dragon and Bullet Pudding. Snap-Dragon (Flap Dragon) first became popular in the sixteenth-century. Francis Grose in Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) described it as: ‘A Christmas gambol: raisins and almonds being put in a bowl of brandy, and the candles extinguished, the spirit is set on fire, and the company scramble for the raisins.’
The aim of the game was to snatch the raisins out of the burning brandy without getting burnt or singeing the hair and eyebrows. It was played during the winter, especially on Christmas Eve or Twelfth Night, when the extinguished candles accentuated the blue flames playing around the alcohol, rather like the flaming Plum Pudding – the forerunner of our Christmas Pudding – arriving in a dimmed dining room….‘
In an eighteenth-century edition of The Tatler, contributor Richard Steele noted: ‘The wantonness of the thing was to see each other look like a demon, as we burnt ourselves, & snatched out the fruit.’
Bullet Pudding is one of the most memorable Georgian parlour games and certainly the silliest. On 17th January 1804, Fanny Austen Knight, one of Jane’s favourite nieces and daughter of her wealthy brother Edward wrote to her friend, Dorothy Chapman: ‘I was surprised that you did not know what Bullet Pudding is but as you don’t I will endeavour to describe it as follows: You must have a large pewter dish filled with flour which you must pile up into a sort of pudding with a peak at the top, you must then lay a Bullet at the top and everybody cuts a slice of it and the person that is cutting it when the Bullet falls must poke about with their noses and chins till they find it and then take it out with their mouths which makes them strange figures covered with flour, but the worst of it is that you must not laugh for fear of the flour getting up your nose & choking you. You must not use your hands in taking the bullet out.’
Fanny enjoyed various entertainments with Jane during Christmas 1806. She exclaimed in a letter: ‘Different amusements every evening! We had Bullet Pudding, then Snap-Dragon, & we danced or played at cards.’
Christmas visiting began on St Nicholas’ Day, 6th December, with the exchange of small gifts. St Thomas’s Day, 21st December in honour of St Thomas the Apostle, was when food and alms were distributed to the poor; widows of soldiers killed in the Napoleonic wars, for whom there was scant support, would go ‘Thomasing’ by knocking on kitchen doors.
On Christmas Eve everyone – both gentry and poor – gathered holly and evergreens such as bay, hawthorn, laurel and rosemary which they brought indoors to weave into long drops, garlands or wreaths and decorated with oranges, red berries or ribbons. These were then draped over mantels and door cases or hung on the walls. This ancient tradition was thought to engender warmth and light and heralded the end of the cold, dark winter days. Mistletoe was also popular, but as a bough, rather than a ‘kissing ball’.
Jane, appreciated this, but almost certainly did not have a Christmas Tree. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, is often credited with introducing this German custom to England in 1840, but it was Queen Charlotte, Hanoverian consort of George III, who set up the first in December 1800 at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor. Prince Albert popularised it in 1848 when he released a photograph showing the family gathered below a huge decorated fir.
Jane Austen would have loved to send Christmas cards, had they then been invented. The first was commissioned in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole (instrumental in introducing the Penny Black stamp in1840 and facilitating The Great Exhibition of 1851). His designer, John Calcott Horsley, focussed on the arrival of spring rather than religious or snowy scenes. Images of happy families making merry around a laden table were a later innovation, inspired by Charles Dickens.
On Christmas Eve a celebratory candle was lit and the Yule Log, wrapped in hazel twigs, dragged home from the woods, and set ablaze with a fragment of the previous year’s log. The blazing fire was kept going as long as possible.
Christmas Day, a national holiday, began with church, followed by a splendid feast at home. This opened with a toast, while the Wassail Bowl with its lightly-spiced honey-flavoured ale was circulated, as the guests enjoyed roast goose, boar’s head, assorted other meats and vegetables as well as soups, cheeses and savoury minced-meat pies. It ended with the presentation of the blazing brandy-doused holly-decorated Plum Pudding….
Jane Austen painted a vivid image of a lively Christmas in Persuasion:
‘Immediately surrounding Mrs Musgrove were the little Harvilles, whom she was sedulously guarding from the tyranny of the two children from the Cottage, expressly arrived to amuse them. On one side was a table, occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper; and on the other were tressels and trays, bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies, where riotous boys were holding high revel; the whole completed by a roaring Christmas fire, which seemed determined to be heard, in spite of all the noise of the others. Charles and Mary also came in, of course, during their visit, and Mr Musgrove made a point of paying his respects to Lady Russell, and sat down close to her for ten minutes, talking with a very raised voice, but, from the clamour of the children on his knees, generally in vain. It was a fine family-piece.’
St Stephen’s Day on 26th December, was another charitable occasion and a holiday for servants, when the wealthy gave them – and their tenants and tradesmen – Christmas Boxes of money, gifts, clothing; a tradition which gave rise to the term ‘Boxing Day’.
6th January, or Twelfth Night, marked the end of Christmas with costumed or masked balls and revels. The evergreen decorations were taken down and burned as it was considered unlucky to keep them after that date.
After Jane Austen’s guests departed, on 7th January 1807, she wrote to her sister Cassandra:
‘When you receive this, our guests will be all gone or going, and I shall be left to the comfortable disposal of my time, to ease of mind from the torments of rice puddings and apple dumplings, and probably to regret that I did not take more pains to please them all.’
It is a sentiment many of us share today!
Dr Moira Rudolf, a Walking Tour Guide, first trained as an Art Historian (University of Manchester, Department of History of Art), with an especial interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before she returned to her first love, Architectural History, in which she gained her doctorate (University of London, Courtauld Institute). She has a lifelong enthusiasm for the architectural/social history of Bath, having fallen in love with the city at the age of five, and – somewhat later – with the life, works and wit of Jane Austen. After all, who could resist Mr Tilney, or even Mr Darcy? Moira will leading a guided countryside walk of the sort Jane Austen enjoyed and giving a fascinating talk as part of our special programmes celebrating Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary in April and October 2025.
