Of round robins and Redbreasts…

If there’s something in the air this Christmas – along with, I hope, plenty of peace and goodwill – it may be a robin. True, many seasonal robins will be on Christmas cards, but some will be on the wing. When they alight, and especially if it’s cold, some of these may be round robins, red-breasted, fluffy and puffed up. They should not be confused with other round robins, often typewritten, boastful and also puffed up.

At Christmas, the robins share their roundness with other singers, ‘carollers’, who probably get their name from the Greek word choros, a circling dance in Attic plays. The flute-players in those plays were known as choraules, a word the Romans put into their own language unchanged except for the lettering. From it, the people of northern France coined the word carol, which meant ‘to dance in a ring’. We use it to describe songs that The Oxford Book of Carols says are simple, hilarious, popular and modern, with a religious impulse.

Though carols are most often associated with Christmas, they may be sung at any time of year. And being essentially folk songs, they celebrate all manner of creatures. Birds are much mentioned: cuckoos, pigeons, geese, swans, French hens, turtle doves, partridges and colly birds. Not many robins, though.

Even the Victorians, inventors of the Christmas card and all that came with it, notably the Yuletide robin, failed to produce many carols old or new that mention robins. The only one I can find is ‘Patapan’, a Provençal or Burgundian carol from the 17th or 18th century that was resurrected and translated in the early 1800s. It features a whistling robin: ‘Willie, take your little drum, / With your whistle, Robin, come! / When we hear the fife and drum, / Ture-lure-lu, pata-pata-pan, / When we hear the fife and drum, / Christmas should be frolicsome.’

It’s tempting to look for a link between ‘Patapan’ and The Pie and the Patty-pan by Beatrix Potter, but probably futile. Duchess, the dog, you may remember, inserts a patty-pan in a pie to hold up the crust, a task that now often falls to a small pottery blackbird. If only it were a robin, but it isn’t.

So back to round robins. They too have come to be associated with Christmas, because of those annual epistles bringing us up to date with other people’s family news. But round robins were once very different. Each was a petition or letter of protest, below which the signatories’ names were arranged in a circle so that no name headed the list. The term comes from France – a corruption of rond meaning ‘round’ and ruban meaning ‘ribbon’ – where some say it was first used by beribboned sailors and others by grumpy government workers.

In 19th-century Britain, some government workers were known as ‘Redbreasts’. Although Robert Peel’s ‘Bobbies’ were the ‘men in blue’, their predecessors, the Bow Street Runners, took their name from the bright red waistcoat they wore under their blue dress coat. That, at least, is what Dickens wrote, though some say the term ‘Redbreasts’ applied only to members of the Bow Street Horse Patrol.

Victorian postmen also wore red – rather more of it, in fact, than the ‘Redbreasts’ – and they became known as ‘Robins’. At Christmas, they no doubt delivered countless cards adorned with robins, many on red pillar boxes.

But the times they are a-changing. Some people in the north of Scotland thought Christmas 2017 had started with the sighting of a robin never before seen in Britain. It was an adult male Siberian robin, and it was quite round.

But it was blue.