Q&A Your history questions answered

Festive traditions have always been changing. Even within living memory, we’ve seen some begin to disappear: carol singers no longer come to most people’s doors, and telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve is no longer a big deal. Meanwhile, festive jumpers, which never used to be ‘a thing’, are now de rigueur.

But go a little further back in time and you find a vast number of practices, beliefs and games that are now extinct. Here are just a few…

Many Christmas celebrations involved upending the social hierarchy. Medieval churches and cathedrals elected ‘boy bishops’ and celebrated a Feast of Fools, in which a ‘Lord of Misrule’ or ‘Abbot of Unreason’ was appointed to supervise the revelry. This mischievous form of merry-making was banned in England and Scotland after the Reformation.

Another archaic belief was that burning the biggest log the hearth could accommodate would turn the dark night of winter as bright as day. In the north of England, people would put a fragment of this ‘yule log’ under their beds to protect the house from fire and lightning for the rest of the year, and it might be used to light the following year’s log. You could also throw a piece of it into the fire to quell a storm outside. This was a favoured practice in some Yorkshire coastal towns – perhaps to help fishermen out at sea.

Some of these lost traditions now seem bizarre to say the least. In the 1600s, young men and women would throw food at the wall during Christmas dinner to see if the grub that stuck spelled the name of their future spouse. In Wales, the tradition of holly-beating, or ‘holming’, saw young men and boys hitting the bare arms of young women with holly branches until they drew blood. In some parts of the country, it was similarly the custom to beat the last person to get out of bed on Boxing Day.

In fact, even the name of Boxing Day comes from a tradition that is no longer practised. Traditionally, 26 December was the day on which delivery boys, tradesmen, tenants and servants collected their ‘Christmas boxes’ of money, food or other goodies.