DOWN MEMORY LANE: Christmas traditions that change over time - including having whale on the Highland menu for Christmas
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This year is the 180th anniversary of whale meat being on the Christmas Day menu in Inverness – while the period saw some local families celebrate the day, though the Presbyterian-minded chose to ignore it, writes Bill McAllister.
Four years earlier decision makers in Ardersier decided they preferred Christmas to be on December 25 rather than January 6.
The Courier of December 1855 reported how “Justices of the Peace, ministers, farmers and leading tradesmen agreed to keep December 25 and January 1 as holidays instead of the old style”.
The same month a public meeting in Tain agreed to celebrate New Year on January 1 instead of the 12th – and to inform Easter Ross ministers of their decision.
The Celts celebrated the winter solstice on the shortest day – usually December 21 – while the Vikings who settled in Scotland referred to their solstice festivities as “Jol”, which became Yule.
It was a Catholic feasting day hereabouts until the Reformation in 1560 and in 1640 the Scottish Parliament made “Yule vacations” illegal.
On December 18, 1851 there was great local excitement when a whale, as the Courier put it, “made itself at home for a week in the narrows of the Kessock Ferry without being captured.”
The paper added: “Boats did not venture to approach it close enough to drive it ashore.”
Then, on Christmas Day, the creature became stranded on a sandbank between Redcastle and North Kessock. A crew from Clachnaharry was first to swoop and kill it, taking plenty of meat and blubber.
It was Queen Victoria who popularised Christmas as we know it, with Prince Albert’s German background being responsible for a decorated tree with gifts, drawings of which triggered similar scenes in many households.
In Victorian Inverness, however, there was a major festive divide. The presbyterian working people regarded Christmas as an alien tradition while the burgh’s better-off families, many Episcopalians, were happy to celebrate it.
Inverness author Isabel Harriet Anderson reported 120 years ago that Christmas was, in effect, becoming commercialised compared to in her youth.
She wrote that Christmas in the earlier 19th century had been “a day of more satisfying happiness for the children than it is at present, when they are surfeited with Christmas cards and costly gifts”.
She recalled “it was the custom to make little gifts for all friends, relations and servants which cost little money, but a great deal of labour, and were on the latter account highly valued.”
Each night in the run-up to Christmas, she added, groups of boys would come round, “singing loudly at the street doors, and of course, expecting pennies”. These youngsters were, she related, called ‘Bulliegeizers’ – which has an echo of Hallowe’en “guisers”.
On Christmas Eve, tea, sugar, meats and currant loaves would be crammed into baskets as gifts for “favourite retainers, and pensioners”.
On Christmas morning, servants were summoned to the dining room for a drink, where they toasted the family’s health, before being given some shortbread and little gifts created by the children.
Later, the local beggars most favoured by the family – such as “Water Lexy” – would “call to wish everyone a Merry Christmas”. In turn, a child would be sent to the back door with a shilling for the visitor.
Christmas Day didn’t become a public holiday again in Scotland until 1958.
