Making Merry

An English Christmas in the Middle Ages would begin before dawn with a mass that marked the end of Advent and the start of the holiday.

The Christmas feast was an EOE affair.

Commoners made sure at least to serve ham and bacon. 

One memoirist of the period described his family's Christmas feast also to include sausages, pasties, black pudding, roast beef, fish, fowl, custards, tarts, nuts, and sweetmeats.

Royalty took things up a notch. In addition to the above goodies, King Henry III added salmon, eel, venison, and boar to his table; King Henry V, crayfish and porpoise.

Royalty also drank heartedly on Christmas. 

Wine was served, not by the bottle, but—literally—by the ton (a ton equaling 1,272 bottles). 

Henry III served 60 tons of wine on Christmas. That's more than 76,000 bottles! 

What will appear on your table?

Above. The Only by Ans Debije. Oil on panel. 6 x 6 inches.

Now on Vitalcy

I'm pleased to announce that Goodly posts will now appear each week on Vitalcy, an online magazine that targets "peak stage" adults.

A gutsy new alternative to AARP, Vitalcy is "your hub to discover what’s next and navigate through and expand the potential of this stage of life," the publisher says.

Goodly posts will also be syndicated beginning 2022.

You can become a member of Vitalcy at no cost here.

HAT TIP: My thanks go to Dan Cole for introducing me to the publisher. Thanks, Dan!

Bitched

We are all bitched.

— Ernest Hemingway

It's 1934 and F. Scott Fitzgerald has just published Tender is the Night, his first novel in a decade.

Fitzgerald is out of favor with readers, who are impatient with stories about rich people (it's the height of the Depression, after all).

He's anxious to learn whether Tender is the Night is any good and writes to Ernest Hemingway to ask his opinion.

Hemingway responds by saying the characters in the novel seem like little other than "marvelously faked case histories." He scolds Fitzgerald for "cheating" readers by inventing characters who merely give voice to his own self-pity.

"Forget your personal tragedy," Hemingway says. 

"We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you."

We could use a little of Hemingway's stoicism right now. We're awash in self-pitying writers. 

And why not? 

Self-pity is, as James Fallows says, The American Way.

A current example appears in writer Beth Gilstrap's article "A Monstrous Silence," in the new issue of Poets & Writers.

Gilstrap describes her agonizing efforts to write while attending to her cancer-patient mother-in-law. Needless to say, the writer's art suffers. And oh how it suffers!

The struggle to chauffeur her mother-in-law to the cancer center twice a week overwhelms the dolorous Gilstrap, and she finds writing eludes her. "When you spend so many hours in hopeless environments," she confesses, "it becomes difficult to see the point of continuing to make art."

And art is her raison d'etre, her "identity," her "sense of self." 

Never mind that Mom wears an unreliable IV drip, endure bouts of nausea, keeps getting blood infections, and has to undergo repeat intubations—Gilstrap's art is suffering! 

"I people-please myself damn near out of existence," she writes.

Golly.

To a writer like Gilstrap, I just want to say, "Honey, hate to break the news, but we're all bitched. If you don't believe me, ask Mom."

Forget your personal tragedy. Don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you.

But Hemingway is out of favor, alas; and self-pity, The American Way.

I'm wasting my breath.

Biologism

We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.

— Heinrich Himmler

The belief that links all white supremacists worldwide and throughout time is the belief in biologism.

Biologism insists that genes determine destiny; that nurture holds no sway; and that race, gender, sexuality, and ability are all natural endowments.

The Nazis gave biologism a bad name. But it's still with us, like a bad pfennig.

Biologism rears its ugly head at rallies like the one in Charlottesville in 2017 and the one on Capitol Hill in January, where members of the master race gathered to wreak havoc and reinstate their churlish champion of biologism, Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the rest of us—normal people who know nurture trumps nature every time—shake our heads and wonder: what's wrong with these loons? Didn't they get the memo?

Biologism's roots are old: Aristotle believed in it in the 4th century BCE; so did Linneaus in the 18th century and, to a degree, Darwin in the 19th.

But as a result of its "practical application" in the 20th century by the likes of Madison Grant and Adolph Hitler, biologism crescendoed. Its decline after 1945 was a rapid and irreversible.

Only misfits believe in it today.

The Man Who Would Be Scrooge

I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off until the master passion, gain, engrosses you.

— Charles Dickens

Just as real people inspired the creators of Sherlock Holmes, Jean Valjean, Dean Moriarity and Norman Bates, an actual man inspired Dickens' Scrooge.

John Elwes was a notorious Parliamentarian whose miserly antics entertained Londoners seven decades before Dickens lampooned him in A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843.

Elwes learned skinflintery from his mother, who died of starvation despite having inherited £12 million, and a maternal uncle whose fortune exceeded twice that amount.

Elwes inherited both his mother's and uncle's money upon their deaths and, to Londoners' delight, set about hoarding it.

Elwes' stinginess was the stuff of legends. 

Too cheap to pay for a coach, he walked everywhere, even in the rain and snow. When he traveled to London from his country estate, he always took the long way, to avoid turnpike tolls. He routinely ate moldy bread, rancid meat, and rotted gleanings from the harvest; refused to see doctors when he was ill; and, despite being a Member of Parliament, wore a single, ragged suit and a ratty wig he'd found in a gutter. (His fellow Members of Parliament observed that, since Elwes only had one suit, they could never accuse him of being a turncoat.)

Elwes would spend his evenings sitting beside a woodfire in his kitchen, to save on candles and coal; and would find his way to bed in the dark. He let his several townhomes fall into ruin, rather than pay for their upkeep, and relocated each time one became uninhabitable, which they all did. He quit Parliament after only 12 years, because he thought it too costly to remain a Member.

When he died in 1789, Elwes' net worth exceeded £38 million. His obit said his name would become "proverbial in the annals of avarice." But it didn't. 

Instead, the name Scrooge did.

Dickens took that name from a grave in Scotland.

During a visit to Edinburgh in 1841, the novelist spotted a headstone with "Ebenezer Scroggie" carved on it, and took mental note of the odd-sounding name.

Although the real Ebenezer Scroggie wasn't a miser—quite the opposite—Dickens made him one.