I'm a Stranger Here Myself (19 page)

One of the many small mysteries I hoped to resolve when I first moved to England was this: When British people sang “A-Wassailing We’ll Go,” where was it they went and what exactly did they do when they got there?

Throughout an American upbringing I heard this song every Christmas without ever finding anyone who had the faintest idea of how to go about the obscure and enigmatic business of wassailing. Given the perky lilt of the carol and the party spirit in which it was always sung, it suggested to my youthful imagination rosy-cheeked wenches bearing flagons of ale in a scene of general merriment and abandon before a blazing yule log in a hall decked with holly, and with this in mind I looked forward to my first English Christmas with a certain frank anticipation. In my house, the most exciting thing you could hope for in the way of seasonal recklessness was being offered a cookie shaped like a Christmas tree.

So you may conceive of my disappointment when my first Christmas in England came and went and not only was there no wassailing to be seen but no one I quizzed was any the wiser as to its arcane and venerable secrets. In fact, in twenty years in England I never did find anyone who had ever gone a-wassailing, at least not knowingly. Nor, while we are at it, did I encounter any mumming, still less any hodening (a kind of organized group begging for coins with a view to buying drinks at the nearest pub, which I think is an outstanding idea), or many of the other traditions of an English Christmas that were expressly promised in the lyrics of carols and the novels of authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

It wasn’t until I happened on a copy of T. G. Crippen’s scholarly and ageless
Christmas and Christmas Lore,
published in London in 1923, that I finally found that
wassail
was originally a salutation. From the Old Norse
ves heil,
it means “in good health.” In Anglo-Saxon times, according to Crippen, it was customary for someone offering a drink to say, “Wassail!” and for the recipient to respond “Drinkhail!” and for the participants to repeat the exercise until comfortably horizontal.

It is clear from Crippen’s tome that in 1923 this and many other ancient and agreeable Christmas customs were still commonly encountered in Britain. Now, alas, they appear to be gone for good.

Even so, Christmas is something that the British still do exceptionally well, and for all kinds of reasons. To begin with, the British still pack all their festive excesses (eating, drinking, gift-giving, more eating, more drinking) into this one single occasion, whereas we in America spread ours out over three separate holidays.

In America, the big eating holiday is, of course, Thanks-giving. Thanksgiving is a great holiday—probably the very best holiday in America, if you ask me. (For the benefit of those unacquainted with its provenance, Thanksgiving commemorates the first harvest feast at which the pilgrims sat down with the Indians to thank them for all their help and to tell them, “Oh, and by the way, we’ve decided we want the
whole
country.”) It is a great holiday because you don’t have to give gifts or send cards or do anything but eat until you begin to look like a balloon that has been left on a helium machine too long.

The trouble is that it comes less than a month before Christmas. So when on December 25 Mom brings out another turkey, you don’t go, “Turkey! YIPPEEE!” but rather, “Ah, turkey again is it, Mother?” Under such an arrangement Christmas dinner is bound to come as an anticlimax.

Also, Americans don’t drink much at Christmas, as a rule. Indeed, I suspect most people in America would think it faintly unseemly to imbibe anything more than, say, a small sherry before lunch on Christmas Day. We save our large-scale drinking for New Year’s Eve, whereas the British think they are doing exceptionally well if they save it till, say, lunchtime of Christmas eve.

But the big difference—the thing that makes a British Christmas incomparable—is Boxing Day, as December 26 is known.

Curiously, for all its venerated glory, no one knows quite how Boxing Day came to be or why it is so called. It appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon—the great and majestic
Oxford English Dictionary
can trace the term back no further than 1849—though, like so many Christmas traditions, its roots lie much deeper. Its origins may have something to do with church alms boxes, which were opened at Christmas and their contents distributed to the poor. What is certain is that at least as far back as the 1500s, and possibly earlier, it was customary for servants, apprentices, shopkeepers, and others in a subservient position to receive year-end gifts of money from those they had served all year. These small gratuities were put in an earthenware container, called a “box,” which was broken open at Christmastime and the proceeds used to fund a bit of high living.

Since most servants had to wait upon their masters on Christmas Day, their own Christmas celebrations were deferred to the day after. Hence December 26 became the day on which their boxes were opened, and hence Boxing Day.

Whatever the origins, Boxing Day is very nearly as dear to British hearts as the day that precedes it. Indeed, there are those of us who think it is altogether superior since it doesn’t involve long, perplexed hours spent on the floor trying to assemble dollhouses and tricycles from instructions written in Taiwan, or the uttering of false professions of gratitude and delight to Auntie Joan for the gift of a hand-knitted sweater bearing the sort of patterns you get when you rub your eyes too hard. It is a day, in short, that has most of the advantages of Christmas (lots of good food, general goodwill toward all, a chance to doze in an armchair during daylight hours) without any of the attendant drawbacks.

We as a family still preserve an English Christmas even though we are no longer in England. We have crackers and plum pudding with brandy butter and mince pies and a yule log and we drink to excess and, above all, we observe Boxing Day.

It’s quite wonderful really. But I do still wish I could find someone to wassail with.

Something rather daring that I like to do at this time of year is to go out without putting on my coat or gloves or any other protection against the elements and walk the thirty or so yards to the bottom of our driveway to bring in the morning paper from a little box on a post.

Now you might say that that doesn’t sound very daring at all, and in a sense you would be right because it only takes about twenty seconds there and back, but here is the thing that makes it special: Sometimes I hang around out there just to see how long I can stand the cold.

I don’t wish to sound smug or boastful, but I have devoted much of my life to testing the tolerance to extremes of the human body, often with very little regard to the potential peril to myself—for instance, allowing a leg to go fast asleep in a movie theater and then seeing what happens if I try suddenly to rise and go for popcorn, or wrapping a rubber band around my index finger to see if I can make it explode. It is through this work that I have made some important breakthroughs, notably the discovery that very hot surfaces don’t necessarily look hot, and that temporary amnesia can be reliably induced by placing the head immediately beneath an open drawer or cupboard door.

I expect your instinct is to regard such behavior as foolhardy, but let me remind you of all those occasions when you yourself have stuck a finger into a small flame just to see what would happen (and what exactly
did
happen, eh?), or stood first on one leg and then on the other in a scalding bath waiting for an inflow of cold water to moderate the temperature, or sat at a kitchen table quietly absorbed with letting melted candle wax drip onto your fingers, or a great deal else I could mention.

At least when I engage in these matters, it is in a spirit of serious scientific inquiry. Which is why, as I say, I like to go for the morning paper in the least encumbering apparel that decency and Mrs. Bryson will allow.

This morning when I set off it was –19°F out there—cold enough to reconfigure the anatomy of a brass monkey, as I believe the saying has it. Unless you come from a really cold place yourself, or are reading this in a chest freezer, you may find such extreme chilliness difficult to conceive of. So let me tell you just how cold it is:
very.

When you step outside in such weather, for the first instant it is startlingly invigorating—not unlike the experience of diving into cold water, a sort of wake-up call to every corpuscle. But that phase passes quickly. Before you have trudged a few yards, your face feels as it would after a sharp slap, your extremities are aching, and every breath you take hurts. By the time you return to the house your fingers and toes are throbbing with a gentle but insistent pain and you notice with interest that your cheeks yield no sensation at all. The little residual heat you brought from the house is long gone, and your clothes have ceased to have any insulating value. It is decidedly uncomfortable.

Nineteen degrees below zero is unusually cold even for northern New England, so I was interested to see how long I could bear such an exposure, and the answer was thirty-nine seconds. I don’t mean that that’s how long it took for me to get bored with the idea, or to think, “Gracious, it
is
rather chilly; I guess I’ll go in now.” I mean that’s how long it took me to be so cold that I would have climbed over my mother to get inside first.

New Hampshire is famous for its harsh winters, but in fact there are plenty of places much worse. The coldest temperature ever recorded here was –46°F, back in 1925, but twenty other states have had lower lows than that. The bleakest thermometer reading yet seen in the United States was at Prospect Creek, Alaska, in 1971 when the temperature fell to –79.8°F.

Of course, almost any place can have a cold snap. The real test of a winter is in its duration. In International Falls, Minnesota, the winters are so long and ferocious that the mean annual temperature is just 36.5°F, which is very mean indeed. Nearby there is a town called (honestly) Frigid, where I suspect the situation is even worse but they are just too depressed to report.

However, the record for most wretched inhabited place ever must surely go to Langdon, North Dakota, which in the winter of 1935–1936 recorded 176 consecutive days of below freezing temperatures, including 67 consecutive days in which the temperature fell below 0°F (i.e., into the shrieking brass monkey zone) for at least part of the day and 41 consecutive days when the temperature did not rise above 0°F.

Just to put that in perspective, 176 days is the span of time that lies between Christmas and midsummer. Personally, I would find it very hard to spend 176 consecutive days in North Dakota at any time, but I guess that is another matter.

In any case, I have all I can handle right here in New Hampshire. I was dreading the long, cruel winters in New England, but to my surprise they delight me. Partly it is because they are so shocking. There really is something exhilarating about the sharpness of the cold, the cleanness of the air. And winters here are stunningly pretty. Every rooftop and mailbox wears a jaunty cap of snow for months on end. Nearly every day the sun shines, so there is none of the oppressive gray gloom that characterizes winter in so many other places. And when the snow begins to get trampled or dirty, there is generally a big new fall that fluffs it up again.

People here actually get excited about winter. There is skiing and ice skating and sledding on the local golf course. One of our neighbors floods his backyard and turns it into a skating pond for the kids on our street. Dartmouth has a winter carnival, with ice sculptures on the college green. It is all very cheery.

Best of all, you know that winter is just one in an endless cycle of reliable, well-defined seasons. When the cold starts to get to you, there is the reassurance of knowing that a good, hot summer is just around the corner. Apart from anything else, it means a whole new set of interesting experimental challenges involving sunburn, poison ivy, infectious deer ticks, electric hedge clippers, and—this goes without saying—barbecue lighter fluid. I can’t wait.