A Bit of Old English Christmas: Allen’s Christmas Parades
Before 1882, the village of Allen in Wicomico County was called Upper Trappe, and its long history dates to 1702, when William Brereton established a grist mill that operated until 1919.
In the 1800s, an interesting — and from today’s perspective unusual — tradition was associated with Allen’s Christmas Day celebration, a masquerade parade through the village with the men dressed as women!
The Allen News column in the Salisbury Advertiser on Jan. 10, 1885, mentions this Christmas masquerade parade, reporting that 50 or 60 residents “passed along the principal roads of our village. The masqueraders were mounted on horses and mules as well as in carts and wagons.” The parade was led by the village cornet band, with a “basket auction” afterward to benefit the Methodist church.
The Christmas parade is also mentioned in a letter from Frederick Messick in 1951 to Ruth Jones Wilkins. Messick describes what happened during one Christmas Day parade that involved his older brother, Harry (1872-1931).
Had Frederick been a teenager at the time of the parade, it could have been the same event described by the Allen News reporter in January 1885, but it may have been a bit later. Harry was dressed as a young woman, of course, but Frederick was too young to have participated in the parade. The tradition eventually came to an end, and I would add that the end may have come as a result of the story he related. Here is his story from his letter.
“The one I remember particularly was when Harry — dressed in one of mother’s dresses — rode our old crumpled-horn cow that we boys used as a saddle horse. On this particular morning, Mr. Christopher Ball, who lived down on the other side of the creek, came out to join in the parade. He had had a little Christmas cheer before he left home and was feeling pretty jolly. He decided to make love to the ‘young lady’ on the cow and rode his horse up beside to give her an embrace. Mother was looking on from the front yard, and I can hear her scream now when she thought he was going to pull Harry off his bovine mount. No casualty occurred, however.”
This cross-dressing custom in Allen is a remnant of an ancient English Christmas tradition going back to Roman times.
Christmas occurs after six months of diminishing daylight relentlessly darkens the world until the solstice, when the sun appears to sit still for a bit and then change course, returning to bring light, each day a little longer. This is the time of reversal, when dark becomes light, and it’s common to mark this liminal time at the threshold when life turns upside down.
Allen’s Christmas parades turned the genders topsy-turvy with the help of some jolly drunkenness. Men became women by wearing women’s clothing and briefly loosened the normal restrictions that governed relations between men and women.
This is very different from today’s Christmas in the United States; our customs have changed over centuries. The Christmas tree is a German tradition introduced in the Victorian era by the queen of England and German immigrants. Christmas has evolved into a family celebration that culminates a month of frenzied shopping for presents. Consumerism has surpassed religion as well as astronomical events. Our major Christmas parade (which occurs a month before Christmas) is sponsored by a department store in New York City.
Pantos
In England and beloved by children and adults, Christmas pantomimes (or pantos) are popular slapstick skits with music and jokes. Often a bit scary, kid hide under their seats, but can’t wait for more. Almost always appearing is the Dame, a man dressed as a careworn mother. Buffoonery, cross-dressing, in-jokes, audience participation, and sexual innuendoes are all part of these pantos.
Pantos have their origin in old Christmas mummer plays, performed by male actors in the great halls of manor houses. These plays always had a moral of extreme Good defeating extreme Evil. Many were based on the legend of St. George and the Dragon. In the Middle Ages, these performances always had elements of pantomime, such as stage fights, coarse humor, fantastic creatures, gender reversals, and Good over Evil. In the 15th through the 17th centuries, pantomimes included a form of courtly entertainment called the masque.
Medieval Christmas
Some of these elements came from medieval mummers and pagan rituals around the winter solstice. Consuming alcohol was at the core and was the most popular feature of these entertainments that included songs and carols to music provided by pipes, flutes, lutes, and drums. Acrobats and minstrels did tricks. Folk tales, puppet shows, and parlor games such as blind-man’s buff were annual events. There were also archery, wrestling, bowling, hockey, and medieval football. The end of the Twelve Days of Christmas was marked by a plough race at sunrise on the Monday after Epiphany, known as Plough Monday or Saint Distaff’s Day. It was “a day of carnival, an occasion for ‘misrule,’ for ‘comic battles between the sexes’ in which men set fire to women's flax and women made sure men got soaked.” This ritual marked the end of the carousing and feasting and was the signal to get back to working in the fields for men and weaving for women.
Saturnalia
It is not surprising that the Puritans banned Christmas in England and Massachusetts, but the origin of a time of drunkenness and debauchery was far older than medieval customs and pagan rituals. The Romans celebrated the sun god on December 25. Originally a thanksgiving and harvest feast during December known as Saturnalia, the festival ended on the winter solstice.
The Christian church in the 4th Century co-opted the Roman festival by imposing the celebration of the birth of Christ and letting the older traditions become incorporated as the celebration of Christ. Saturnalia involved gift-giving, feasting, candles, gambling, promiscuity, and misrule. The local English pagans added their sacred items: holly, mistletoe, and in the Victorian period, the German Christmas tree.
A bawdy Christmas was too deeply embedded in English traditions to allow the Puritans to ban it. In the 17th Century, December was called the “voluptuous month” because young men and women often took advantage of the moral laxity of the Christmas season to engage in late-night drinking and sex.
Much of the old remains. Christmas has become more consumer oriented, but the “sordid underbelly of Christmas remains. That family member who always has a bit too much to drink, the overeating, the regretful rendezvous with a colleague at the office party — all telltale signs our oldest Christmas traditions are alive and well.”
The descendants of English settlers in non-Puritan Maryland were still practicing the cross-dressing and bawdy behavior of old English Christmas in the village of Allen in the 1800s.
A native of Wicomico County, George Shivers holds a doctorate from the University of Maryland and taught in the Foreign Language Dept. of Washington College for 38 years before retiring in 2007. He is also very interested in the history and culture of the Eastern Shore, African American history in particular.
Jeanette E. Sherbondy is a retired anthropology professor from Washington College and has lived here since 1986. In retirement she has been active with the Kent County Historical Society and Sumner Hall, one of the organizers of Legacy Day, and helped get highway /historical markers recognizing Henry Highland Garnet. She published an article on her ethnohistorical research of the free Black village, Morgnec.
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