Xmas Activities. And Mumming.

The special CiB meme ‘Xmas scenes from books, accompanied by carefully chosen pictures’ is back!

Every year I do a series of Xmas entries on the blog, helped and encouraged by suggestions and recommendations from my lovely readers. If you use Pinterest you can see some of the beautiful seasonal pictures on this page, and you can find (endless!) more Xmas books via the labels at the bottom of the page. You’d think I’d be running out of Xmas books and scenes by now, but far from it – I have to begin this feature earlier in December each year. More ideas still welcome in the comments. (If it’s a particularly good choice I will ditch one of the ones I have ready and give you credit…)


Murder Goes Mumming by Charlotte MacLeod or Alisa Craig



published 1981




Murder Goes Mumming 1



The men on the rope were pulling a great log across the floor. It lay on a well-waxed skid and must not be all that difficult to move, though everybody except Madoc was putting on a great show of slaving at the task. Rhys was only looking gently amused and quite remarkably handsome, Janet thought, among this lot of blond beeves. Suddenly Janet wasn’t tired any more. She was laughing and clapping while Squire and his crew with great fanfare rolled the Yule log into the fireplace and set it alight.



Murder Goes Mumming 4


The oil lamps that Graylings depended on mostly for light didn’t make much impression on these vast rooms. They were the perfect illumination for a masquerade, though. Costumes that might have looked tacky in daylight now took on an air of glamor and fantasy. Val in her pink brocade and Roy in a white satin coat and knee breeches he’d no doubt rented from some theatrical costumer did make a striking couple. Donald was wearing knee breeches and cutaway coat like Roy’s, though in a deep green well suited to his years and dignity. Babs had on a dress cut much like her daughter’s, in emerald green with rose-colored ribbons. They made a most effective tableau grouped with their daughter and her escort.


Murder Goes Mumming 3


Clara was a flapper, complete with cloche hat and rolled stockings with Christmas seals stuck on her knees. Lawrence had blossomed forth in a raccoon coat, a porkpie hat, and a fake red poinsettia as a boutonnière. Aunt Addie looked vaguely Elizabethan in a black velvet gown with so much fullness in the skirt it must date from the age of hoops and petticoats.

commentary: This book – which I came across as one of Tracy K’s seasonal efforts at Bitter Tea and Mystery last year – certainly is stuffed full of Christmas events and customs. It is one of a series of Madoc and Janet Rhys mysteries set in Canada: here the couple has just got engaged, and for not-very-convincing reasons they are spending the Christmas season with a family they scarcely know, in a big country house in the middle of nowhere. Their hosts are a strange family of hard-drinking, over-excitable, physical oafs. The guests are prissy and prim – a Mountie, and a farmer’s daughter who can’t wait to give up work and become a housewife (I had to check the date at this point: yes, 1981). The family has various tensions and someone ends up dead. Madoc now has to reveal that he is a Mountie, and investigate.

In one respect (and, believe me, in one respect only) the book reminded me of, of all things, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. In that book, Fanny and Edmund are dreary high-minded dullards, quietly bitching about everyone else as a way of virtue-signalling: but in order to tilt the scales, Austen makes the rest of the family coarse and vulgar, so it is hard to choose between two equally unattractive teams. This book is the same.

And the crime – well it would be just about impossible to solve, as great swathes of info and clues are withheld from the reader till the finale, and it is in any case hard to distinguish among all the various members of the family, or to care.

All that said, the book is still an excellent Christmas read. I don’t know when I’ve ever read a book that had Yule Logs, AND Christmas tree decoration, AND wassailing, AND mumming, AND mistletoe AND a kissing ball. You name it, it’s there. In addition, MacLeod describes everyone’s clothes: the sweater-and-long-skirt look for cold evening dinner parties, the thermal underwear, the beaver cape and muff, the orange stretchknit trousers.

Mumming, by the way, is a folk activity which came to Canada from the UK with emigrants – dressing up, making a nuisance of yourself, you know the kind of thing. It means slightly different things in different locations: sometimes they travel round from house to house, but in this case it is just the residents dressing up for each other (before killing each other).

So I’m not really recommending the book (certainly not as a crime story) but it might put you in a seasonal mood, and would certainly make you glad you were not spending Christmas with any of the awful people within.

The Yule Log picture, from Flickr, surprisingly linked in with my preoccupations at the beginning of the year, TB and sanatoria – see a sample post, and a French TB stamp here, and many others all over. As a result of that fevered excitement (accompanied by a hectic flush) there will be  several sanatorium posts describing Xmas in hospital.


Murder Goes Mumming 2


The picture of a fancy-dress ball is from Sam Hood’s collection at the State Library of New South Wales. The second one is of a fancy dress party, and comes from the State Library of Queensland. I love all  pictures of fancy dress parties: if you share my partiality, click on the 'fancy dress' label to be directed to thumbnails of the many fine pictures I have found in the past. 



















Comments

  1. I'm glad you mention the mumming, Moira. In Philadelphia, mumming has developed into the annual Mummers Parade, which involves the fancy dress, marching to a particular sort of step, music, and so on. It's a very big New Year deal in Philadelphia, and is always one of the top news stories of the day on local news outlets. The story itself sounds like a solid, classic-style read, too, even if it doesn't exactly sweep one away.

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    1. I was sure I remembered your mentioning Mumming, Margot, so am glad to be proved right. Now, doesn't it arise in connection with the musical The Music Man? I feel I remember your mentioning that too. And thank you for the very interesting extra information about the tradition.

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    2. Good memory, Moira! Yes, in The Music Fan film, Robert Preston does a Mummer strut as he leads the band. I confess I don't know if that's choreographed into the original musical or other productions.

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    3. It is a lovely scene, exactly what a musical should be...

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  2. Mansfield Park was the last Austen I read, and after the joys of Elizabeth Bennett, Emma Woodhouse and the Dashwood sisters, Fanny Price was such a dreary lot that I almost couldn't help rooting for that ghastly family. But Fanny has grown on me with time, and it is fascinating to see Austen approaching the concept of romance from a different moral ground. I have to say also that my favorite Austen heroine has always been Anne Elliot - the most complex one of the bunch, right? - and this might have added to my sympathies for Fanny, who never got a break in terms of being raised right!

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    1. I must say I am a bit more sympathetic to Fanny now I'm a bit older, but I always remember Kingsley Amis saying words to the effect of: 'It would be a brave soul who invited Fanny and Edmund round for dinner hoping for an evening's entertainment'. Mansfield Park is always an intriguing book BECAUSE it is not straightforward. And yes, Anne Elliot is great. Do like Emma a lot though... hard to choose between them.

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    2. I think Jane Austen felt quite protective towards poor little Fanny, who never got the chance to be an Emma Woodhouse or an Elizabeth Bennet, at the same time as she was able to mock her a little - but just a little. It's far too easy for those of us who are reasonably self-confident and outspoken and have been told by our doting parents how great we are (yes, that's me) to be impatient with the Fannys of this world. One of the many (very many!) things which Austen does brilliantly, I think, is to show how our personalities are shaped equally by genes and by circumstances. Fanny's mother, for instance, is obviously very similar in personality type (basically: idle and shiftless) to her older sister Lady Bertram, and Austen comments on the fact that she would have made a perfectly decent job of being a fine lady, whereas she is a catastrophe as the wife of a poor man and the mother of too many children - a job that the middle sister, Mrs Norris, horrible as she is, would have managed much better.

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    3. It IS endlessly interesting isn't it? Because Jane Austen herself, from her letters, was nothing like Fanny: she was not retiring or easily shocked, she was quite bitchy and gossipy. And it must be a very hard thing to write a heroine who is so different from herself. And they are such real characters - it is perfectly reasonable to speculate about other lives for even minor characters.

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  3. You can perhaps imagine what it was like being a Canadian mystery fan back in 1981 when this came out. P.D. James had just published her very challenging "Innocent Blood", that was taking the mystery world by storm ... Marcia Muller had published "Edwin of the Iron Shoes" and started the ball rolling towards the woman PI novel taking over the genre. There was a sense that the "old-fashioned mystery" was about to give way to something more exciting ... and starting in 1979-ish there was actually a mystery bookstore in Canada. (I worked there for a while in its first year.) Canada was trembling on the verge of actually being part of the wider global sweep of how mysteries were changing to meet a new age. And then this hymn to rusticity, where the good guys were "dreary, high-minded dullards," came out and was heralded as the Canadian mystery of the year by all the papers, if I remember correctly. It was depressing. ;-)
    Mumming, or mummering, AFAIK is generally associated only with the Canadian Maritime provinces and particularly Newfoundland ... don't expect to find this in Calgary or Vancouver.

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    1. Oh that's so funny Noah, thanks for giving us that light on the situation, I can see exactly how it must have been. This book must have been even more bizarre in that context.
      And mumming - what a weird thing it is, strange traditions. I did follow it up a bit via Wikipedia, and it is odd the way it pops up in different places. I don't think it exists at all in the UK now.

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  4. I am glad you read this book. All the wonderful Christmas elements and the costumes. If the characters had not been so irritating it could be perfect.

    I like Fanny in Mansfield Park; Edmund is a little wishy-washy and not too bright. And they are way better than the rest of the family.

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    1. Thanks for the tipoff Tracy, it really was a great festive read, despite imperfections! I think Fanny wins over most readers by the end, at least to a degree...

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  5. I haven't read this Macleod, although I did enjoy REST YOU MERRY, which was the first of her Professor Peter Shandy novels. The grumpy academic has been part of the campus in a Canadian agricultural college for many years, but has always defied the local tradition of decorating the outside of his house for Xmas. In exasperation he finally gives in, and places every tacky piece of Xmas merchandising that he can find on his house, along with machines that play songs like 'Get off my roof, fatty!' at full blast. Returning from an ocean cruise he discovers that there is a dead body in his house...

    It's quite a fun book, which manages to mix Christmas, murder, comedy and romance for the tinsel hating hero. It's one of those crime books where a few days later you can't remember who was murdered or why or how, but it's enjoyable anyway.

    The only place that I've ever seen people actually wassailing and mumming is Cambridge, where some of the collegiate types throw themselves into stuff like this full-heartedly (and elderly dons even indulge in sword play using their walking sticks-it's that kind of place). I love Cambridge, even the tramps are polite. I still recall many Xmas ago when a couple of tramps in old army great-coats who appeared to have walked out of some Ealing Comedy, stopped me one evening. "Aaaah, Sir, you're obviously a gentleman. A gentleman and a scholar. You wouldn't begrudge a couple of old seafaring men who have fallen on hard times the price of a warm cup of tea on this cold, cold night, now would you? You're obviously the kind of man who appreciates how we fought to keep this country safe in years gone by, but now must fight the elements to keep body and soul together. Whatever you can afford,sir"

    I told him "Most people just ask if I've got any spare change, but you've really put some effort into this" and gave them both some money. How can you resist spiel like that?

    I'm trying to instigate a new Xmas tradition of watching a version of the Sherlock Holmes story THE BLUE CARBUNCLE. Haven't yet decided on the Jeremy Brett or Peter Cushing adaptions. I may even go for a radio version. I have tons of old radio shows, and most of them have Xmas editions. There's even a seasonal edition of THE SAINT,with Vincent Price as Simon Templar. Choice, choices and the great day is hurtling ever closer...

    ggaru

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    1. Do you know, someone else mentioned that book, and it didn't ring any (Xmas) bells, but now that you have described the plot I definitely HAVE read it, I remember that setup perfectly well. And as you say, can't remember who murdered whom... perhaps I will read it again for next year...
      What a lovely story about the Cambridge tramps. We lived there for a while, years ago, and loved it, it is one of my favourite places.
      One of my favourite memories of a v quiet Christmas is listening to a radio version of The Nine Tailors (which is NY Eve rather than Xmas, but not fussed) and feeling this was the perfect thing to do.

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  6. (I had to check the date at this point: yes, 1981).

    I can remember job hunting as a recent graduate in 1976. If you were a young woman, they bunged you straight into a clerical position (college degree or no) and you were expected to be grateful. After all, you were only working until you got married.

    How things have changed.

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    1. Yes you are right - a friend training to be a solicitor back then was asked if she was 'just doing this for pin money before having babies': the trainees were very badly-paid then (it was assumed you had a well-off family) and she said 'I felt like saying if I wanted pinmoney I'd go and sell makeup at Woolworths, because it would be better paid.' But in general then it was the male bosses discounting the women, not the women themselves!

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    2. you probably know, but for anyone in doubt - solicitor is a lawyer...

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    3. Plus ça change...

      https://notalwaysright.com/examination-standards-fifty-years-date/102240/

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  7. Posting this comment for Sam Karnick:

    This is a very good review, Moira. I started to read this book a couple of weeks ago, and I quit at about the 2/5 mark because the mystery was taking so long to get going and I did not care for the two lead characters. I may give this another try next week, as lower expectations regarding the mystery element may allow me to sit back and enjoy the Christmas atmosphere. I did read Rest You Merry this Advent season and enjoyed it greatly.

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    1. Thanks Sam, I know exactly what you mean. See another comment about about Rest You Merry! I think I will read that one again.
      So sorry you had such trouble posting this, I don't know why. But I signed out to post as anon on your behalf, and it was an absolute pain!

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    1. Yes, I can't see you getting on with this one.

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