adminslaughter. Luckily for the geese, but peculiarly for the English language, everything was about to change.
There’s a funny Madagascan bird called the helmeted guinea fowl. It’s a very ugly creature with a big knob of bone on the top of its head. However, it does, apparently, taste absolutely delicious. In the 16th century, these birds were imported to Europe by merchants and traders from — you guessed it — Turkey.
They were known as ‘Turkey merchants’ and soon the tasty bird they were importing came to be known as a turkey. It was a hit in European kitchens all year round.
But it is not the bird you probably enjoyed for your Christmas lunch — and will be eating in sandwiches for days to come.
The helmeted guinea fowl came from Madagascar via Turkey, but the turkey as we know it and love today came via Spain from the Americas.
There’s an amazing account of early explorers in the New World finding whole flocks of these giant birds nesting in forests of rhododendrons.
The Aztecs had already domesticated the fowl and were happily cooking them for high days and holidays when the Spanish conquistadors arrived searching for cities of gold and a good slap-up meal.
They loved the succulent white meat and took the birds back to Spain with them. From there, the new delicacy rapidly became popular around Europe, and by Shakespeare’s time it had already become the standard Christmas meal.
So what’s all this got to do with the helmeted guinea fowl?
Well, the American bird (known to the Aztecs as the huexolotlin) tasted very, very similar and as they were both exotic new dishes from faraway places, people called the American bird turkey as well. (Who can blame them? Huexolotlin is such a mouthful).
And thus an indigenous American bird was named after a Madagascan bird that was named after the country via which it had once been imported to Europe.
The 12 days of Christmas
The 12 days of Christmas, celebrated in the much-loved song, are actually the 12 days after Christmas. And some of the gifts sent by ‘my true love’ may not be quite what you think they are.
I assume that if you love someone truly, you, too, have been off spending your savings on partridges, turtle doves, French hens and the like. This is all right and proper.
But don’t, whatever you do, send your true love four calling birds, five gold rings or, indeed, a pear tree — for these are all linguistic illusions.
The Old French for partridge, for example, was pertis, and the pear tree of the song is almost certainly a confused anglicisation of pertis to pear tree. So what was just a partridge became, rather neatly, a partridge in a pear tree. Similarly, there is no such thing as a calling bird; but a colly bird is a blackbird because colly (from coal) means black.
Finally, the gold rings are almost certainly ring-necked pheasants, or ring pheasants as they used to be called. In the Christmas season, the females have a beautiful ring of golden feathers around their necks.
As an oven-ready pheasant costs about a fiver, you could have saved yourself a lot of money by consulting me before the jeweller.
Rocking Robin
Another bird associated with Christmas is the red-breasted robin.
There’s a very old English folk tale that says when Jesus was nailed to the cross, a robin sang into his ear to comfort him. Until then, robins had been plain brown all over, but having been stained with blood, the robin ever afterwards had a red breast.
This story is biologically unlikely, but it is one of the explanations for the constant association of robins with the festive season.
The other explanation is to do with the clothes that Victorian postmen wore. Their uniforms were once bright red, like the pillar boxes and the post office vans. They were, therefore, known colloquially as robin redbreasts. As Christmas is the time when postmen bring you presents and postcards instead of the usual bills, it became traditional to put a picture of a robin redbreast on a Christmas card as a little joke.
Hairy Christmas
Christmas is also the season when strange men in red hats and white beards lurk and loiter in every shopping arcade. It’s therefore the time when the word misopogonistically comes into its own.
Misopogonistically is an adverb that means ‘with a hatred of beards’. Sample sentence: ‘No, I don’t want to see what’s in your grotto,’ she said and scowled misopogonistically.
Got the grumps?
Those readers who feel that Christmas is the season to be anything other than merry, may resort to having the mulligrubs. It’s such a charming way of saying that you’re in a bad mood, that your malevolence will be instantly forgotten.
The crimbo conundrum
Crimbo! That word, which must have seemed cheerful, irreverent and rather modern at one point, today feels rather dated — to me, it is somehow redolent of the Eighties, although the Oxford English Dictionary has a citation for ‘Dick Crimbo’ (meaning St Nicholas) as early as the Sixties.
An OED citation for a closely-related word, ‘crimble’, perfectly captures the period flavour: ‘Stevie’s determined to have a well-wacky Crimble do’ (Just 17 magazine, 1987).
At any rate, both ‘crimbo’ and ‘crimble’ seem to be fading from popular use.
The OED is slightly vague on etymology. It describes both words as ‘humorous alteration[s] of Christmas, perhaps reflecting childish speech’.
The earliest citation for ‘crimble’ is in a Beatles Christmas message, cited in the New Musical Express in December 1963: ‘Garry Crimble to you, Garry Crimble to you, Garry Bable, Dear Christmas, Happy Birthday, me too!’
The earliest recorded reference to ‘crimbo’ is from The Strand Magazine in 1928: ‘You’ve saved your man, by crimbo.’
But it’s not clear that this is actually a reference to Christmas — to me, it sounds more like an exclamation along the lines of ‘by Jingo!’.
That said, ‘Christmas’ (in phrases such as ‘Oh, Christmas’ or ‘Jiminy Christmas’) was also used as an interjection in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — perhaps, like ‘cripes’ or ‘crikey’, a euphemism for ‘Christ’ — so ‘crimbo’ could be a variation on that.
X marks the spot
It’s a funny thing, but Xmas is older than Christmas (or, originally, Christ’s Mass). You’d imagine that Xmas was thought up by some advertising executive in the Eighties.
But, in fact, you’ll find it in the Anglo Saxon chronicle in 1100 (about 25 years before the first recorded use of the newfangled Christmas spelling). And it’s even older than that. In the Ancient Greek alphabet, the word Christ was spelled with an X at the beginning: XPISTOS. And as Jesus was killed on a cross, it seemed rather appropriate. The OED insists there is a word ‘christmasly’, meaning ‘proper to the season of Christmas’. So whatever you do with your stockings, your turkeys and your tangerines, make sure you do it christmasly! — Daily Mail.
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