Happy New Year.

I’m a bit of a New Years Grinch. The idea that at the start of the year that we must nurture artistic skills within ourselves, or start jogging, or learn to speak French just well enough to ask a Parisian if they, too, enjoy playing football at the weekend with their brother just seems like too much effort and pressure too soon after the effort and pressure of Christmas. I just want to relax and I don’t see the point in forcing myself to do something I have minimal interest in when I know I will give it up before midnight on 2nd January. I did once set myself the goal of being the type of woman who can do her bra up behind her back rather than employing what I like to call the ‘coward’s method’ (or frontus swivellus, to give it its Latin name.) It was a silly but achievable goal which I nevertheless failed to achieve because my elbows don’t work that way.

If, however, you find the fresh slate of a new year the boost you need to nurture your inner Caravaggio or if you can only dust off those running shoes by the wan light of a new year sun, crack on. And if you do hope to one day play football at the weekend with your brother in France before having a ham and cheese sandwich and asking a stranger where the toilets are despite the fact that the ‘WC’ symbol for public toilets is the same as it is in Britain as it is in France, then you go ahead and download that Duolingo, girl.

Merry Christmas?

There is one New Years tradition I could possibly embrace, however: gift giving. “But Ellie you greedy cow”, I hear you cry in frankly an overly hostile way, “you’ve just had your annual visit from Father Christmas!”

Hear me out, though. Traditionally within Christian culture the new year was a bigger deal than Christmas, and was therefore when all the biggest feasts and merriment happened. Christmas was just the day when some guy* was born; 1st January was the day when that guy was given the holy name of Jesus (and was also circumcised as per Jewish tradition.) This was obviously a Very Big Deal and became known as the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.

*I mean, he was still the son of God.

Jesus’ circumcision was so important that it affected dating methods throughout Christian Europe. New Year in England was actually celebrated on March 25th until 1087 when the Normans began to use the not at all creepily entitled circumcision dating which placed New Year on 1st January. In 1155 the people of England, presumably concerned by the gross breech of GDPR associated with organising an international calendar around one individual’s intimate surgical procedures, went back to celebrating New Year on 25th March. This was known as annunciation dating, when the Archangel revealed Mary’s pregnancy to her, and it stayed that way until 1752 when we forgot our shame and went back to circumcision dating. Not that people took much notice between 1155 and 1752; although the change of date affected certain legal aspects of society, it appears most people still thought of the new year as beginning on 1st January.

And just to cement January’s status over Christmas – it was actually 6th January, which was when the magi arrived to meet Jesus, which was the big celebration. In the Tudor era, for example, Christmas was a time for feasting after four weeks of fasting, but it came with a sense of restrained awareness of the significance of the holy birth. By the 6th January however, any semblance of restraint had been carelessly tossed aside as if it were a Messiah’s foreskin, and decadence reigned. In 1532, Henry VIII hosted a Twelfth Night banquet which contained over 200 dishes and had to be housed in a temporary banqueting hall which was erected in the grounds of Greenwich palace specially for the occasion. I’ve written more about Twelfth Night here.

Get to the gifts

Okay, so: gift giving was front and centre of all these New Year’s revelries. People would exchange gifts small and large with loved ones to celebrate the day. During the Christmas of 1616, the playwright Ben Jonson wrote a masque for King James I to celebrate the festivities (and take the piss out of Puritans who would have had such entertainment banned if they had their way…)

In this play one of the characters is called New Years Gift and is presented thusly:

NEW-YEAR’S-GIFT, in a blue coat, serving-man like, with an orange, and a sprig of rosemary gilt on his head, his hat full of brooches, with a collar of ginger-bread, his torch-bearer carrying a march-pane with a bottle of wine on either arm.

Masque of Christmas, Ben Jonson

Later on in the masque another character makes reference once again to New Year carrying gingerbread gifts. So what better inspiration for this year’s first experiment?

Sugar Gingerbread

Because I am not completely immune to the New Year’s nonsense of achieving unreasonable goals, I decided to try and find a gingerbread recipe written in a year ending with 24, in honour of 2024.

I could find only one. Well, three, technically, although they all came from the same source: The Virginia Housewife, by Mary Randolph published in 1824. The first one, Ginger Bread, seemed a little too austere given the celebratory occasion. Ms Randolph’s second recipe seemed even more frugal judging by the title Plebeian Ginger Bread. But, like Goldilocks, the third option was perfect: Sugar Ginger Bread.

Take two pounds of the nicest brown sugar, dry and pound it, put it into three quarts of flour, add a large cup full of powdered ginger, and sift the mixture; wash the salt out of a pound of butter, and cream it; have twelve eggs well beaten; work into the butter first, the mixture, then the froth from the eggs, until all are in, and it is quite light; add a glass of brandy butter shallow moulds, pour it in, and bake in a quick oven.

The Virginia Housewife, Mary Randolph

The instructions and measurements were a mess. Pounds thrown in with cups? Quarts of non liquid products? Twelve eggs?! Flicking through the rest of the book I was inclined to think Ms Randolph perhaps didn’t try all of her recipes herself, as the recipe ‘To Make The Stuffing for Forty Melons’ proves, being a rather long recipe which finally concludes with a mango getting stuffed (?!) rather than even just one of the forty (?!?!) nominated melons:

Wash a pound of white race ginger very clean; pour boiling water on it, and let it stand twenty-four hours; slice it thin, and dry it; one pound of horse-radish scraped and dried, one pound of mustard seed washed and dried, one pound of chopped onion, one ounce of mace, one of nutmeg pounded fine, two ounces of turmeric, and a handful of whole black pepper; make these ingredients into a paste, with a quarter of a pound of mustard, and a large cup full of sweet oil; put a clove of garlic into each mango.

To Make the Stuffing for Forty Melons, Mary Randolph

The verdict

I muddled along as best I could with this hodgepodge of a recipe (the gingerbread one, not the fever dream melon one), and noticed that even though the recipe was called sugar gingerbread, the sugar was vastly outweighed by the ginger. In fact, dry ingredients in general outweighed wet ones so that the mixture was exceptionally thick and claggy, leading me to think I’d converted something incorrectly given that I was supposed to “pour” the mix into the baking tin at the end. Nevertheless, I persisted.

They baked for approximately 25 minutes or so, filling the room with a very festive scent indeed. Once cut open and tried the verdict was that they 1) were not overly sweet, 2) would go well with a sharp cheddar, and 3) packed so much of a spicy gingery punch that they could scare away a threatening New Years cold.

I made enough for a batch of six and honestly, I could have done with more – particularly to adequately fulfil point 2 with the amount of Christmas cheese we had left over.

Whatever your feelings about New Year traditions, I hope this year brings you happiness and health and plenty of New Year gifts this coming week.

E x