Watching the English

The Hidden Rules of

English Behaviour

Kate Fox

CALENDRICAL RITES AND OTHER TRANSITIONS

Calendrical rites include big celebrations such as Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and others that occur at the same time every year, such as Easter, May Day, Harvest Festivals, Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes’ Night, as well as Mothers’ Day, Valentine’s Day and Bank Holidays. I’m including our annual summer holidays in this category, as they are seasonal and therefore essentially calendrical, even though they do not occur on fixed dates. (Some nit-pickers might argue that the summer holiday is not, strictly speaking, a ‘rite’, or at least not in the same sense as Christmas or Harvest Festivals, but I think it qualifies, and will explain why later.) Also in this category

would be the daily/weekly work-to-play transitional ritual of after-work drinks in the pub, but I’ve already covered this one in detail in the chapter on work.

Under ‘other transitions’ I’m including life-cycle rites of passage other than the major ones covered above – such as retirement celebrations, ‘significant’ birthdays (decade marks) and wedding anniversaries (silver, golden) – and rituals marking other social/place/status/lifestyle transitions, such as housewarmings and ‘leaving dos’. This all adds up to an awful lot of rites, many of which, like the major life-cycle transitions, are in most respects largely similar to their equivalents in other modern Western industrialized cultures. Gifts, parties, special meals, songs and decorations at Christmas; chocolate eggs at Easter; cards and flowers on Valentine’s Day; alcohol at almost all festive occasions; food at most; etc. Rather than attempt to describe each rite in exhaustive detail, I will focus mainly on the broader unwritten social rules governing peculiarly English patterns of behaviour associated with these rites.

All human cultures have seasonal and transitional celebratory rites of some sort. Other animals just automatically register things such as the passing of the seasons, and adjust their behaviour accordingly: humans have to make a huge song-and-dance about every little calendrical punctuation mark. Fortunately for anthropologists, humans are also quite predictable, and tend to make pretty much the same kind of song-anddance about such things – or at least the festivities of different cultures tend to have a lot of features in common. Singing and dancing, for example. Most also involve eating, and virtually all involve alcohol.

Christmas and New Year’s Eve Rules

The English year is punctuated by national calendrical holidays: some are mere commas, others are more important semi-colons; the Christmas holiday and New Year’s Eve are the final full stop. Most calendrical rites were originally religious events, often ancient pagan festivals appropriated by Christianity, but the Christian significance of many of these rites is largely ignored. Ironically, they might be said to have reverted to something more like their original pagan roots, which serves the Christians right for hi-jacking them in the first place, I suppose.

Christmas and New Year’s Eve are by far the most important. Christmas Day (25th of December) is firmly established as a ‘family’ ritual, while New Year’s Eve is a much more raucous celebration with friends. But when English people talk about ‘Christmas’ (as in ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ or ‘I hate Christmas!’), they often mean the entire holiday period, from the 23rd/24th of December right through to New Year’s Day, including, typically and traditionally, at least some of the following: Christmas Eve (family; last minute shopping; panics and squabbles; tree lights; drinking; too many nuts and chocolates; possibly church – early evening carols or midnight service); Christmas Day (family; tree; present-giving rituals; marathon cooking and eating of huge Christmas lunch; the Queen’s broadcast on television/radio – or pointedly not watching/listening to the Queen; fall asleep – perhaps while watching The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz or similar; more food and drink; uncomfortable night); Boxing Day (hangover; family ‘outing’ of some sort, if only to local park; long country walk; visiting the other set of relatives; escape from family to pub); 27th–30th December (slightly strange ‘limbo’ period; some back at work, but often achieving very little; others shopping, going for walks, trying to keep children amused; more overeating and drinking; visiting friends/relatives; television; videos; pub); New Year’s Eve (friends; big boozy parties or pub-crawls; dressing up/fancy-dress; loud music; dancing; champagne, banging pans etc. at midnight; fireworks; ‘Auld Lang Syne’; New Year’s resolutions; taxihunt/ long cold walk home) New Year’s Day (sleep late; hangover)

Many people’s Christmases may not follow this pattern, but most will include a few of these ritual elements, and most English people will at least recognise this rough outline of an average, bog-standard Christmas. Often, the term ‘Christmas’ comprises much more than this. When people say ‘I hate Christmas’ or moan about how ‘Christmas’ is becoming more and more of a nightmare or an ordeal, they are generally including all the ‘preparations’ for and ‘run-up’ to Christmas, which may start at least a month ahead, and which involve office/workplace Christmas parties, ‘Christmas shopping’, a ‘Christmas Panto’ and quite possibly, for those with school-age children, a school ‘Nativity Play’ or Christmas concert – not to mention the annual ritual of writing and dispatching large quantities of Christmas cards. English people understand ‘Christmas’ to include any or all of these customs and activities, as well as the Christmas-week celebrations.

The school Nativity Play is, for many, the only event of any religious content that they will encounter during the Christmas period, although its religious significance tends to get lost in the social drama and ritual of the occasion – particularly the issue of whose children have been fortunate enough to secure the leading roles (Mary, Joseph) and the principal supporting ones (Three Kings, Innkeeper, Head Shepherd, Angel-of-the-Lord), and whose must suffer the indignity of playing mere background shepherds, angels, sheep, cows, donkeys and so on. Or the school may have been gripped by a sudden fit of political correctness and attempted to replace the traditional Nativity with something more ‘multicultural’ (‘we’re all very multiculti round here’ an Asian youth-worker from Yorkshire told me). This being England, the squabbles and skirmishes over casting and other issues are rarely conducted openly but are more a matter of indirect scheming, Machiavellian manipulation and indignant muttering. On the night, Fathers tend to show up late and record the second half of the Nativity on shaky, cinéma-vérité video, unfortunately focusing throughout on the wrong sheep. The Christmas Panto is a bizarre, quintessentially English custom. Almost every local theatre in the country puts on a pantomime at Christmas, in which a children’s fairy-tale or folk tale – such as Aladdin, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Dick Whittington, Mother Goose, etc. – is performed, always with men in drag (known as Pantomime Dames) playing the main female parts and a woman in men’s clothes as Principal Boy. Tradition requires much noisy audience-participation for the children, with cries of ‘HE’S BEHIND YOU!’ ‘OH NO HE ISN’T!’ ‘OH YES HE IS!’

(a ritual into which adult members of the audience often throw themselves with considerable gusto), and a script full of salacious double-entendres for the grown-ups (at which the children laugh heartily, before patiently explaining them to their parents).

gift, as any first-year anthropology student can tell you, is never free. In all cultures, gifts tend to come with some expectation of a return – this is not a bad thing: reciprocal exchanges of gifts are an important form of social bonding. Even gifts to small children, who cannot be expected to reciprocate in kind, are no exception to this universal rule: children receiving Christmas presents are supposed to reciprocate with gratitude and good behaviour. The fact that they often do no such thing is beside the point – a rule is not invalidated just because people break it. It is interesting to note that in the case of very young children, who cannot be expected to understand this rule, we do not give Christmas presents ‘directly’, but invent a magical being, Father Christmas, from whom the gifts are said to come. The traumatic discovery that Father Christmas does not exist is really the discovery of the laws of reciprocity, the fact that Christmas presents come with strings attached.

English squeamishness about money can be a problem in this context, particularly for the upper-middle and upper classes, who are especially sensitive about it. Talking about how much a Christmas present cost is regarded as terribly vulgar; actually telling someone the price of their present, or even that it was ‘expensive’, would be crass beyond belief. Although general, non-specific complaints about the cost of Christmas presents are allowed, harping on and on about the financial aspects of gift-exchange is uncouth and inconsiderate, as it makes recipients of gifts feel awkward.

Actual expenditure on Christmas presents seems to be inversely related to income, with poor, working-class families tending to give more lavish gifts, especially to children, often going heavily into debt in the process. The middle classes (particularly the ‘interfering classes’) tut-tut sanctimoniously over this, and congratulate themselves on their superior prudence, while tucking in to their overpriced organic vegetables and admiring the tasteful Victorian ornaments on their tree.

New Year’s Eve and the Orderly-disorder Rule

New Year’s Eve, which more of us will admit to enjoying (although some of the bah-humbug brigade make the more straightforward carnival – with all the usual, standard liminal stuff: cultural remission, legitimized deviance, festive inversions, altered states of consciousness, communitas and so on – and it is more obviously a direct descendant of pagan mid-winter festivals, uncluttered by Christian meddling with the imagery or sanitization of the rituals.

As with Freshers’ Week, office Christmas parties and most other English carnival rites, the extent of actual debauchery and anarchy tends to be greatly overestimated, both by the puritanical killjoys who disapprove of such festivities and by those participants who like to see themselves as wild, fun-loving rebels. In reality, our New-Year’s-Eve drunken debauchery is a fairly orderly sort of disorder, in which only certain specified taboos may be broken, only the usual designated inhibitions may be shed, and the standard rules of English drunken etiquette apply: mooning but not flashing; fighting but not queue-jumping; bawdy jokes but not racist ones; ‘illicit’ flirting and, in some circles, snogging, but not adulterous sex; promiscuity but not, if you are straight, homosexuality, nor heterosexual lapses if you are gay; vomiting and (if male) urinating in the street, but never defecating; and so on.

Minor Calendricals – Commas and Semi-colons

And as New Year’s Eve is understood to be the most debauched and disinhibited of our calendrical rites, the rest (Hallowe’en, Guy Fawkes’ Night, Easter, May Day, Valentine’s, etc.) tend to be pretty tame – although they all have their origins in much more boisterous pagan festivals.

Our May Day, with staid, respectable, usually middle-aged Morris Dancers and the occasional innocent children’s maypole, is a revival of the ancient pagan rites of Beltane. In some parts of the country, counterculture/ New Age revellers with dreadlocks, beads and multiple body-piercings celebrate May Day alongside the Morris Dancers and the Neighbourhood-Watch/Parish-Council types – an odd-looking juxtaposition, but generally amicable. Hallowe’en – fancy-dress and sweets – is a descendant of All Souls’ Eve, a festival of communion with the dead, also of pagan origin and celebrated in various forms in many cultures around the world.

The practice of lighting bonfires and burning effigies in early November is another pagan one – common at ‘fire festivals’ welcoming the winter (the effigies represented the old year) – adapted in the seventeenth century to commemorate the defeat of Guy Fawkes’s plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. It is still also known as Bonfire Night and Fireworks Night66, and is now celebrated with firework-parties over a period of at least a fortnight, rather than just on the night of the 5th of November. Valentine’s Day – cards, flowers, chocolate – is a sanitized Christian version of the Ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, originally held on the 15th February, which as a much more raunchy celebration of the ‘coming of spring’ (in other words, the start of the mating season) esigned to ensure the fertility of fields, flocks and people. Many people think of Easter as one of the few genuinely Christian calendricals, but even its name is not Christian, being a variant of Eostre, the Saxon goddess of spring, and many of our Easter customs – eggs and so on – are based on pagan fertility rites. Some otherwise non-practising Christians may go to a church service on Easter Sunday, and even some totally non-religious people ‘give something up’ for the traditional fasting period of Lent (it’s a popular time to restart one’s New-Year’s-Resolution diet, which somehow lost its momentum by the third week in January).

As calendrical punctuation marks go, these are mostly just commas. Easter qualifies as a semi-colon, as it involves a day’s holiday from work, and is used as a reference point – people talk about doing things ‘by Easter’ or ‘after Easter’, or something happening ‘around Easter’. Valentine’s Day also just about counts as a semi-colon, although we don’t get a day off work, as it plays a significant part in our courtship and mating practices (significant enough to cause a big peak in the suicide rates, anyway).

In addition to these ‘mainstream’ national calendricals, every English ethnic and religious minority has its own annual punctuation marks: the Hindu Divali and Janamashtami; the Sikh Divali and Vaisakhi; Muslim Ramadan, Eid-Ul-Fitr and Al-Hijra; Jewish Chanukkah, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana, to name just the first few that immediately spring to mind. And every English sub-culture has its own calendricals – its own annual tribal gatherings and festivals. These include the upper-class ‘Season’, of which the Royal Ascot race-meeting, the Henley Regatta and Wimbledon tennis championships (always abbreviated to just ‘Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon’) are the principal events. The racing fraternity have the Grand National, the Cheltenham Festival and the Derby in addition to Ascot; Goths have their annual Convention at Whitby in Yorkshire; New Agers, other counter-culture groups and young music-lovers have their Festival at Glastonbury; Modern Druids have the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge; the literati have Hay-on-Wye; opera-lovers have Glyndebourne and Garsington; dog-lovers have Crufts; bikers have the BMF Show at Peterborough; horsey folk have Badminton, Hickstead and the Horse of the Year Show; and so on. There are thousands of these sub-cultural calendricals, far too many to list, but each one, to its adherents, may be much more important than Christmas. And I have only mentioned the ‘Christmases’ – every sub-culture has its own minor calendricals as well, its own semi-colons and commas.

But even the minor punctuation marks are necessary: we need these special days, these little mini-festivals, to provide breaks from our routine and give structure to our year – just as regular mealtimes structure our days.

That’s ‘we humans’, of course, not just ‘we English’, but we English do seem to have a particular need for regular ‘time out’ from our rigid social controls.

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