Last weekend, I took my third-grade children to Ohio Village’s Dickens Christmas, a small replica village illustrating daily life in the 1800s, nestled among the Ohio Historical Center, the Historic Crew Stadium, and the state fairgrounds. My kids had been there for a school field trip and had seen Dickens’ A Christmas Carol performed, so I thought the event might provide an interesting segway into the holiday season.
It was interesting, to say the least.
We did have fun, stringing popcorn and cranberries for tree garlands, dancing popular line numbers in the town hall, testing our agility on wooden stilts, speaking German with an ancient Father Christmas, old enough he might have grown up in German Village when it was actually a German-speaking village, until…
…we happened upon the stack of Victorian Christmas cards.
I should say that only I was interested in those. My kids, not so much. They wanted to go home.
The Victorians were an odd bunch. Likely because it was a bleak time, full of disease, poverty, and industrial waste. But these Christmas cards, bedecked with uplifting written messages against ultra-bizzaro backdrops, were stranger than strange. One showed crustaceans eating Christmas dinner, ostensibly comprised of other kinds of seafood; others featured anthropomorphized pigs dressed in their Sunday best, maybe preparing for slaughter or to eat the (pork?) feast themselves.
The creepiest of the cards (because of their lack of satire, maybe?) showed a pair of dead birds, lying on their backs, claws up, eyes open.
Yes, that’s right, dead birds, either robins or wrens, paired with any one of the standard Christmas messages, such as, “Wishing you a joyful Yuletide” or “Wishing you all the pleasures of the season.”
Still thinking about those birds when I got home, I dug into the meaning behind them, anticipating another Victorian obsession with death. I wasn’t disappointed.
According to John Grossman’s Christmas Curiosities: Odd, Dark, and Forgotten Christmas, “A dead European robin frozen from the cold was bound to elicit Victorian sympathy and pity and may reference common stories of poor children freezing to death at Christmas. The 1880s card may have invoked one’s own good fortune and that of the card’s recipient during the holidays.”
Grossman’s sentiment reminded me of the child characters in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (a novela I taught for a decade, the imagery of which inspired this blog post a few years ago), after which the Ohio Village event was themed. Featuring destitute children Ignorance and Want, who cling to the Ghost of Christmas Present’s legs, and the disabled child Tiny Tim, who would die if Scrooge didn’t pay his father better wages, Dickens’ story seems to utilize the same heart-wrenching imagery as the dead-bird card. Both the story and the card, Grossman might suggest, were meant to remind Victorians that winter can be cruel to the most vulnerable among us. We should consider the poor and frail in our prayers and with our generous hearts.
But something about that comparison—and Grossman’s analysis—doesn’t sit right with me.
While the children in A Christmas Carol urged Scrooge and selfish others to care for poor children, I’m fairly certain the cards did not inspire Victorians to put out birdseed for freezing birds. According to one of the docents at Ohio Village, the birds portrayed on cards were dead only because (Irish) Victorian boys participating in a holiday ritual associated with St. Stephen’s Day and Chistmas had killed them. The cards were sent in the spirit of that tradition.
Dark. Interesting and very dark.
According to Celtic lore, a wren’s song once either betrayed the hiding place of the Irish Saint Stephen, who was then martyred, or Celtic soldiers hiding from Viking invaders, who were then slaughtered. To avenge either St. Stephen or their Celtic relatives, Celic boys, referred to as “Wren Boys,” then spent the day after Christmas, St. Stephen’s Day, hunting wrens, tying their corpses to poles, and parading them around town while drinking, singing, and carrying on. The Celts claimed that the wrens represented their cruel pasts while robins (associated with Christmas) represented their better futures. They believed that parading the dead wren around town brought them luck.
What were the Victorians thinking? Probably not the exact same thing their long-past Celtic relatives had—that the birds were evil-incarnate tattlers and killing them would bring luck. Likely, if they were also portraying dead robins, they had forgotten the tradition’s original meaning, much like we forget our traditions’ original meanings, latching on only to the visceral feelings the holiday evoked. In this case, rage and release.
I think the cards justified growing Victorian resentment around their classes, which were only then becoming more mobile. The birds represented the uncontrollable elements working against them, and seeing those birds dead gave them a sense of control. In the worst months of bitter, dark suffering, Victorians recieved this reminder, along with the sender’s well wishes, that someone else (or some bird) was to blame for their stations, and that if they rid of that element, they might climb higher.
Even originally, there was nothing generous or sentimental about the practice of wren hunting, which was more about vengeance and carousing than pity. Wren hunting was then—and became even moreso—a ‘boys will be boys’ practice for pent-up young men who needed a violent outlet. It was a cathartic ritual, allowing them to act against an outside force, to feel like they were still alive, even if the poor birds were not, so they would not grow violent among themselves, fighting over resources and love interests or out of sheer boredom.
Which is probably why, out of all the bizarro cards on display that night, the dead-bird ones bothered me the most. Somehow, I sensed the selfishness behind them.
Peace and joy, not so much. Death and fear, the more the merrier.
Some Irish still celebrate St. Stephen’s/ Wren Day on the Isle of Man, but now without the bird hunting. It has become mostly commercialized, about men partying—knocking on doors early in the morning and begging for cake and coins and drink.
Thank goodness we have evolved from days of yore, amirite??
Whether you need stories, prayer, extra time in the bathtub, some sugary snacks, evergreens, or even macabre imagery to help get you through the holiday season, please be kind to others, especially the birds and babies. We are all struggling.
And may you find joy and health during this Yuletide season!