What about a Dickens Xmas

Tags

Christmas, class, Dickens, life, Royals, society, tradition, Victoria

At this time of the year there will be a lot of events mimicking what people imagine a Victorian Christmas was like and will base their view of it on Charles Dickens (1812-1870) books of life in England in the period. His life was in a period of great change in Britain, born in the Napoleonic period, grew up during the Regency under the Reign of George IV and then William IV. For the last 30 years of his life he lived in the period of Victoria and Albert from 1837 to 1870. In his lifetime the industrial revolution took old with all the horrors that entails in a age with no social policies and a society based on class in a pyramid structure.

His books are a moral tale of sorts and a critique of society where the new emerging middle-class is aping the Aristocracy and the gentry and imagining what the Royals are like in a day when the Royal Family was out of bounds for most of the population, a very remote idealized family, no Netflix back then and no social media. In fact until 1960’s one could not speculate in the media on the Royal Family, you would have been ostracized and the media were more respectful.

But to come back to the idealized view of Victorian society and Christmas, it is romanticized and made to amuse but is very far from daily reality. Mary Poppins on steroids so to speak. In Victorian times people like Ebenezer Scrooge were legion and they did not have a conversion moment like St-Paul in which they came to help the poor and provide them with the fatten goose, gifts and money. It would have been unheard of to lower oneself socially to the level of Bob Cratchit and his family. Social status and rank was everything. Dickens wrote that story in 1843 a bleak time in Britain and in other European countries for the working poor in cities, sub-standard tenement housing, debtors prison, workhouses, child labour, 18 hour days and no weekend or holidays, no rights, no unions and no voting in elections, something reserved for the powerful landowners. In fact the large proportion of people who today love this story would have found themselves in impoverished conditions on the wrong side of the tracks. Only the wealthy merchant class, the gentry, the aristocracy would have had a jolly good Christmas in their great homes while the servants toiled.

This is why I do not understand that attachment to a Dickensian/Victorian Xmas. It was only a good time for a precious few. As for our modern traditions born from commercialism and crass consumerism it’s phony as baloney. I much prefer traditions that come from either your family or traditions you developed and fashioned in your life and share with those who matter to you.

This year a more personal Christmas will probably be the rule, quiet at home. It will seem strange, yes, but maybe this is what Christmas is suppose to be and not what it has become in the age of Climate change and pandemics. Listening to Christmas music this year, I am not really in the mood. It all sounds like music of another era, a time long ago, somewhat like big band music of the 1940’s. I am so looking forward to 2021.

French Canada at Christmas

Tags

Canada, Christmas, culture, Fir tree, French, French Canada, Latin, Music, Noel, tradition

A few days ago, a dear friend and blogger asked me to send him example of Christmas music from French Canada. The roots of French Canada goes back to 1534 and 1608 with the founding of Quebec City and then Montreal in 1642. There are also at this time the French settlements in the Maritime then known as Acadia from 1600 who have very similar tradition, in food, feasting, music and celebration.

As a child and growing up in Montreal and Quebec City and having uncles and aunts, cousins etc all close relatives numbering about 300, Christmas celebration were steeped in tradition from Old France and New France. Winter of course with lots of snow and cold weather, strong drink, lots of rich food and music surround the Christmas time. Our mother, aunts and grand parents made sure we knew well those traditions. Our schools also reinforced the cultural bond not to mention the Roman Catholic Church who saw itself in French Canada as the protector of French culture and heritage.

The Christmas tree was one tradition and when it would appear in the house. Usually in those days it was in the week after 15 December and would stay up until at least 7 January. There was always lots of stories around selecting a tree and putting it up and then the only acceptable tree was a traditional sapin (evergreen fir tree) symbol of immortality.

The food also was specific to the Holiday. There was never enough dishes it seems, and many came to celebrate en famille. There would be Ragout beef meat balls with pigs feet, a turkey with all the trimmings, tourtières (meat pies) everyone has a recipe on this pie, it was important to compliment the Chef on her tourtière and the crust. Mash potatoes and lots of gravy, peas and carrots. Then came the desserts, an incredible array, from the Bûche de Noël, to fruit cake, pastries stuffed with whipped cream, cookies, and of course chocolates. Everything was made from scratch, these were the days before supermarkets and processed foods. An enormous amount of work for the 25 December. The Eve was spent mostly at home and by 10:30pm it would be time to go to Church for the triple Xmas Mass and you got out around 1am. Usually followed by a Réveillon of rich foods and drink. When we were very young we did not go to Christmas Eve mass, but went to bed early because le Père Noël would be coming and we could not be awake. However when my mother was a child in the 1930’s, in those days the tradition was to give gifts around Epiphany 6 January and not on Christmas morning. A gift in her childhood was a book and an orange which was exotic and expensive and some clothing. How things have changed.

So when it comes to music, none of what you hear today in shopping malls or stores was known or played. Christmas music was at Church, in school concerts or at home in family dinners and gatherings. It was all traditional and we, as kids learned it by heart, you had to be able to sing with everyone else.

All this French Christmas music or most of it was composed based on text from the New Testament, Luke, 2, The birth of Jesus. The music was compose in the 17 and 18th Century to accompany the Roman Catholic Mass. It remains a staple today in a more secular world. It is part of the fundamental culture of French Canada.

You Tube has them all. Marc Hervieux, Tenor from Montreal who also has a music radio show on weekend on Radio-Canada devoted to opera and classical music is probably today one of the best singer in this category.

Here are some titles of the classics: Venez Divin Messie, Il est né le Divin Enfant, Minuit Chrétien, Ca berger assemblons-nous which was originally written in old French but modernized after 1789 with modern French and pronunciation and Les Anges dans nos campagnes which is in Latin and French since Mass was in Latin until 1964. All classics!

Fruit Cake, a tradition

Tags

Canada, Covid 19, Friendship, fruit cake, tradition, Vaccine

For the last 40 years our friend John H. sends us one of his famous home made fruit cake. He makes usually a dark and a light version in both cases they are soaking in Brandy keeping the cakes very moist. It is by far the best fruit cake I have ever had. No one else I know makes such a delicious cake. He does make quite a few because he gives them as gifts. We always had a fruit cake at home from John even in my far away postings.

Tonight for dessert I opened the cake he gave me, I believe it was made about 18 months ago. The cake as aged and it is the richer tasting fot it. It had a heavy smell of Brandy and all the fruits in it where sweet and juicy.

Absolutely delicious fruit cake, it won’t last long.

I mentioned previously that in years past we sent electronic Xmas cards but this year we decided to send paper ones. Now the work is to get all the addresses, I may have to go get more cards. Trying to complete the job in the next few days only 23 days before Christmas now.

The big news today in Canada from the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health is that the Government has bought about 9 doses of the anti-Covid19 vaccine from 4 companies for each Canadian. There are 38 million Canadians this means we have 342 million doses total. The problem in Canada is logistics given are huge geographic area and 6 time zones, a lot of logistics will be required. But it looks like we are in the home stretch now.

Navy Gin

Tags

alcool, Canada., drinks, Gin, tradition

Here on PEI Gin tonic is a very popular drink and for good reason. The usual London Dry Gin is 40% but has the label of Strait Gin 51 indicates on PEI this local brand is 11% above the usual volume.  I thought at first that PEI Strait Gin was Navy Gin or Sailor Gin but no, that has a volume of 58% and I know that it use to be available in Montreal, known as big gin or Gros Gin in French. I know that my mother thought this was the sort of gin men drank but not ladies.

On the Island when you have friends at the house do serve Island Gin and not that imported stuff, people ask for it and expect it to be on hand. Othewise they are likely to think you are trying to cheat them.

Strait also produces Vodka and Moonshine. Support Local as they say in PEI.

 

Lunedi Lunacy

Tags

Cossaque, Holiday, London, tradition, Xmas Crackers

From Will’s Blog on our tradition of Xmas Crackers at the table.

via Lunedi Lunacy

As the year ends

Tags

2020, age, levee, New Year, PEI, seniors, tradition, Travel

Well now we look at the New Year 2020, what will it bring, who knows.  My only wish is really for good health, because if you are in good health then you can do pretty much anything. For me this new decade means I will truly be in my so called golden years.

I still do want to travel to cities like Berlin in 2021 and maybe to other European countries, but has one ages the window of opportunity for travel closes and it becomes more difficult to travel given the stresses involved nowadays. I also have to look at priorities, living on this small island, spend more time going to the beach, visiting the Maritimes, going to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton all of which is very close to us. As for my volunteer activities, I may become more picky about it, I really don’t want to spend an entire Summer doing guided tours at the Art Gallery, there are other things to do.

This week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day is always a bit of a loss, people are away on vacation or visiting family. Then the question is what to do with New Year’s Eve, well frankly speaking we do not have any plans and not sure we want any. We are in no mood to go to a pub to listen to some music with a rowdy crowd. Maybe these parties are for the under 40 crowd or go to a restaurant for more rich food, we have a fridge full of food. The big day is Wednesday 1 January for the Levée activities, this is a very big thing in PEI and everyone participates, it is rare to find someone who does not partake in visiting all the different Levée held not only around Charlottetown but in other towns and communities on the Island.  The tradition of the Levée, a French word meaning to rise, dates back to Louis XIV, the Sun King, who made his courtiers attend his rising every morning, if you missed that event you were banished. With time the tradition transformed itself into this event on New Year’s Day where the population comes to pay their respect to the personal representative of the Sovereign in PEI, the Lieutenant Governor and to other elected Officials Civic and Military.  Anyone can hold a Levée, if you are willing to put up with the crowds. Government House will see about 700 people, our Club will have about 500 people show up.

This 1 January I will be at the Haviland Club in the greeting party to welcome all the visitors to our Club. Our time slot is 11am to 1pm. Many will go to pay their respect to the Lieutenant Governor at Government House at Fanningbank first and then wander down to the other venues like the PEI Regiment barracks to see the Military Commander, to City Hall to see the Mayor, to the Fire Hall, to the Premier’s Office, etc… Everyone offers a drink, a piece of cake and coffee.

Government House, Charlottetown, PEI.

The Haviland Club, Charlottetown, PEI.

WISHING EVERYONE A HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR 2020. BONNE ANNÉE!

Festive dinner ware

Tags

dinnerware, Family, Food, Holidays, home, memories, plates, tradition

Many decades ago I inherited a set of dishes which have been in my family (maternal side) for 80 years. This dinner ware was always used for family occasions like Christmas, Easter, special dinners etc. It belonged to the second wife of my maternal grandfather. My grandfather became a widower in the late 1930’s and had one son and five daughters. They all lived in a grand house on rue Filiatrault in Ville Saint-Laurent, all that remained of a fortune which disappeared in the 1930’s through mismanagement and the crash of 1929.

The story about this dinnerware and its provenance is interesting. My grandfather born in 1904 whose family had been considered very wealthy and he had attended private schools including the college Notre Dame on Queen Mary Road and had his own car in 1920 which was a luxury, in the imagination of the neighbours the family could not be considered less despite a reverse of fortune. His second wife also came from a former prominent family the LeCavalier who were social rivals in this small town, now a neighbourhood of Montreal.

When my grandfather remarried he was now working as a fireman and police officer he would become later head of the police for Ville Saint-Laurent. Having little money and for social reasons could not use what had belonged to his first wife, he had to make a show of what his new second wife brought with her, dowry and wedding gifts etc.

I remember many childhood Christmases in that house on rue Filiatrault and the trophy Moose head on the left side of the front door. It was a very nice place with formal rooms with columns and beautiful wood floors and a small study at the front were my grandfather read and met with his visitors, in later years it would become the TV room but he watched very few programs, there only was 2 French language channels then in black and white. He did watch the weekly television serials produced by Radio-Canada which are today classics of early television. But he listened to a lot of radio, news and other programming including everyday the agricultural news, though he was not living on a farm, many other relatives had farms including his own father who had a big tobacco farm just North of Montreal. Agriculture and land ownership in French Canada was a big status symbol.

So this dinner ware was cobbled together one piece at a time from powdered clothes detergent, I forget which brand but it seems it was Tide. The marketing ploy was to get women who had families and lots of clothes to wash to buy the big boxes of detergent and inside was a piece of dinner ware, you just collected them. This way his second wife, whom we always called Aunt and never grandmother because that would have been inappropriate to the memory of my maternal grandmother who had died in her early thirties of heart failure due to bearing far too many children.

The dishes were made in England by a Company called Empire, later bought by Staffordshire, the pattern is called York Maroon, not hand painted, it was mass produced. Of the original set of 12 dinner place settings only 8 survive to this day. Through the years many pieces were broken or chipped but considering its age it is amazing it survived at all. The pattern is discontinued but what is still available is worth about $15 for a dinner plate or luncheon plate as it is called, or $9. for a small bowl or $35 dollars for a sugar bowl or serving dish.

When my mother told me that she had this dinner service for me, initially I did not want it, I could not really remember it and wondered what would I do with it. We did have at the time 8 other dinner service. I am glad I have it now and it is a good souvenir of all those Christmas turkey luncheons with peas and mash potatoes, the turkey was always very good, the desserts and the Hershey Kiss chocolates a treat once a year, not allowed the rest of the year, Tante Fernande was the cook. Memories of my childhood and all my aunts and cousins on those times together and all the little traditions we had to observed, the singing of traditional Christmas songs and the Christmas Family benediction by my grandfather as the patriarch.

The last Christmas was 1968, my grandfather died in 1969 and after that the tradition simply fell apart. We still went to my father’s side of the Family for New Year’s but it was a different affair with none of the homey touches. In the 1970’s my family moved a lot and our Christmases tended to be in hotels with trees prepared by the hotel engineer and food from the hotel kitchen.

This year we will probably use Tante Fernande’s dinner service. We are having Bisque de Homard to start made from scratch, Tourtière which is a  combination of veal, beef and pork and turkey with vegetables and of course Will’s Plum Pudding, the recipe by Nigel Slater flamed in Brandy. We had a taste test the other night with a small pudding he made, OMG is it ever good.

I hope you all enjoy your Holiday Season!

 

 

 

 

Official Portrait

Tags

Anniversary, Austria, Canada., Family, Laurent, life, Salzburg, tradition, Trudeau, vacation, Will

Many years ago my parents were friends with Armenian born Yousuf Karsh, the World famous Canadian photographer who lived for many years in a suite at the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, he offered to my parents on their Wedding Anniversary to do a series of portraits of them. We kept those wonderful portraits and I use to kid my Mother that she had now something in common with Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill, that of having her portrait taken by Karsh. Those portraits are family heirlooms now.

Ottawa being the Capital many Politicians have their picture taken by photographers but some shine above the rest and one is Jean-Marc Carisse who came to prominence in the late 1960’s with his portraits and action shots of our then Prime Minister Pierre E. Trudeau, the father of Justin. Carisse then took pictures of all manner of famous people and his work was in great demand. He became identified with the Liberal Party of Canada, the natural governing party of Canada. His skill was to take perfectly natural photos of his subjects and their humanity just shine through. Jean-Marc Carisse is an award winning Canadian photojournalist. He has photographed the political, cultural and social scenes in Ottawa and around the world for over 40 years, including stints as official photographer serving the Prime Minister’s Office (Pierre E. Trudeau, John Turner and Jean Chrétien) and as a freelancer. His photographs have appeared on many covers of magazines including Time, Paris Match and Maclean’s.

One of the more famous portrait of Prime Minister Pierre E. Trudeau with a dedication by Trudeau to Carisse. A Prime Minister in 1969 as a young Caesar. One of our truly great Prime Minister’s

I always wanted to have a picture of us taken by him and we went to see him at Studio Café Carisse on Elgin Street in Ottawa just a few steps away from our house. At Christmas time our puppies Nicky and Nora arranged a gift certificate, they are such clever Dachshunds.

Here is the result of Carisse’s work. This portrait is to mark my 60th and Will’s 70th Birthday.

Wearing our Traditional Austrian Trachten jackets a souvenir of the many vacations spent in Innsbruck, Salzburg and Vienna and of many happy memories of our long life together. This year, 2016 is an anniversary year for us and the beginning of a new adventure.

 

 

 

Lunch and Dinner

Tags

BBC, cooks, food cuisine, history, lunch, tradition, UK dinner

It use to be for centuries that we only ate two meals a day not three like today. Dinner at 10am after several hours of work, people got up at dawn and went to work. The second meal of the day was a light meal in the afternoon around 4pm. With time Dinner will slip to 2pm and finally to the time we now have it today in North America. In Europe breakfast is often a coffee and a pastry, where lunch is a substantive affair around 1:30pm and dinner is late and light after 8:30pm, think Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece or France. Germany, Britain, and other Northern countries have adopted a meal time we know.

Interesting to see in this video with Clarissa Dickson-Wright how our relationship to food, its preparation and our meal time changed completely with the Industrial Revolution around 1800 and beyond. What also changed was eating to nourish body humours to eating dishes that where fashionable and elegant.

Fast food or street food comes in with the Victorian age around 1837 to satisfy city workers and the teeming masses who left the countryside farms for the industrial cities, the mines and the industrial workshops who have no time to sit down for a proper meal. In other words people took the time to eat a meal in the past whereas today we have no time to eat or do anything.

I find this video so instructive on human habits and the societal influences on our daily lives. Imagine before 1800 people took on average a full hour for their 10am dinner, sat down and consumed large amounts of meats and a variety of dishes. How our work day has completely changed the way we live today. It also seems healthier to me to have a large meal early in the day when you continue to be active and can digest properly and not late in the day when you are less active and go to bed to sleep.