Xmas Scenes: Choosing Christmas cards

Every December, Clothes in Books likes to feature Christmas in Books – seasonal scenes from random books, for no better reason than I like looking for the pictures, and I and some readers find them cheery and Xmas-y (particularly, of course, those featuring murders and other miseries)

Many of the entries  - this year and in the past – were suggested by clever readers: so if you have a favourite please do let me know and I will try to use it

Mapp and Lucia by EF Benson

published 1931

 

 

[excerpt] The pleasant custom of sending Christmas cards prevailed in Tilling, and most of the world met in the stationer's shop on Christmas Eve, selecting suitable salutations from the threepenny, the sixpenny and the shilling trays. Elizabeth came in rather early and had almost completed her purchases when some of her friends arrived, and she hung about looking at the backs of volumes in the lending-library, but keeping an eye on what they purchased. Diva, she observed, selected nothing from the shilling tray any more than she had herself; in fact, she thought that Diva's purchases this year were made entirely from the threepenny tray. Susan, on the other hand, ignored the threepenny tray and hovered between the sixpennies and the shillings and expressed an odiously opulent regret that there were not some 'choicer' cards to be obtained. The Padre and Mrs Bartlett were certainly exclusively threepenny, but that was always the case. However they, like everybody else, studied the other trays, so that when, next morning, they all received seasonable coloured greetings from their friends, a person must have a shocking memory if he did not know what had been the precise cost of all that were sent him. But Georgie and Lucia as was universally noticed, though without comment, had not been in at all, in spite of the fact that they had been seen about in the High Street together and going into other shops. Elizabeth therefore decided that they did not intend to send any Christmas cards and before paying for what she had chosen, she replaced in the threepenny tray a pretty picture of a robin sitting on a sprig of mistletoe which she had meant to send Georgie. There was no need to put back what she had chosen for Lucia, since the case did not arise.

Christmas Day dawned, a stormy morning with a strong gale from the south-west, and on Elizabeth's breakfast-table was a pile of letters, which she tore open. Most of them were threepenny Christmas cards, a sixpenny from Susan, smelling of musk, and none from Lucia or Georgie. She had anticipated that, and it was pleasant to think that she had put back into the threepenny tray the one she had selected for him, before purchasing it.

 

comments: Oh this joyous book, always a pleasure to read.

It featured earlier this year in a context you might not have been expecting: mourning. Mapp and Lucia shows Lucia moving on from the death of her husband and goes into some detail of her clothes, so ideal for that (extensive) set of posts on the blog.

Christmas here is at the end of the book. Lucia and Miss Mapp have been feuding (of course) but a post-Christmas visit by Mapp to Lucia’s house, in pursuit of lobster a la Riseholme, is going to end very unexpectedly.

The main thing to say about the books is that for entertainment and detail they cannot be faulted.

Collection of Christmas cards from first half of 20^th century, Library of Congress.

Santa and the birds from the NYPL.