Christmas Around the World

by Jean Henry Mead

While researching Christmas customs around the world, I discovered that the first Christmas tree was decorated in 1510 in Germany and Livonia (now Estonia and Latvia). And in many countries Santa Claus is known as Father Christmas. In Latvia he places gifts under the tree and a special dinner is prepared of brown peas with bacon sauce, small pies, sausages and cabbage.

In Finland, where children believe that Father Christmas lives above the Arctic Circle, they call him Korvatunturi. Their three holy days include Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day (a public holiday in many countries known as the second day of Christmas). Finnish people eat rice porridge and a sweet soup of dried fruits on Christmas Eve, then decorate a spruce tree in their homes. A "Christmas declaration" is broadcast throughout the country at mid-day via radio and television. And that evening a traditional Christmas dinner is served consisting of casseroles containing liver, rutabaga, potatoes and carrots with ham or turkey as well as various salads, sweet and spiced breads and cheeses. They also attend church and decorate the graves of their departed relatives. Children receive their presents on Christmas Eve from someone in the family dressed as Father Christmas.

In Hungary the Winter Grandfather (Santa Claus) arrives on the sixth of December when children place their carefully cleaned shoes outside the door or window before retiring for the night. The following morning they find candy and small toys in red bags placed inside their shoes. Youngsters who don't behave find a golden birch branch next to their shoes, which is meant for spanking, although it's rarely used. On Christmas Eve, children visit relatives or attend movies while baby Jesus delivers Christmas trees and presents to their homes. Candy and other edibles are hung on the tree as well as glass balls, candles and sparklers. Fresh fish with rice or potatoes and pastries are usually served that evening for dinner, after which the children are allowed to see their decorated tree for the first time. Christmas songs are then sung and gifts opened. Older children usually attend Christmas mass with their parents later that night and on Christmas Day the kids are allowed to eat the sweets hanging from their tree.

In Belgium Sinterklays (St. Nicholas) is also celebrated on December 6, and is observed separately from the Christmas holiday. Santa Claus is known as Kerstman or le Pere Noel because there are three languages spoken within the country—Dutch, French and German. Santa Claus brings gifts to the children on Christmas day and small presents for family members are placed beneath the tree or in stockings hung near the fireplace. Sweet breads called cougnour or cougnoleand and shaped like the baby Jesus are eaten at breakfast.

Romanian children receive small gifts on December 6 from St. Nicholas in their freshly-polished shoes. Rural families "sacrifice”a pig on December 20, and each part of the pig is cooked in a different way, such as sausage or mince meat cooked with rice, onions and spices. They also dress up as bears and goats to sing traditional songs at each house in the village. Children visit other homes, not unlike our Halloween, to sing carols and receive sweets, fruit or money. Transylvanians serve stuffed cabbage on Christmas Eve and eat the leftovers for lunch the following day when they return from church services.

Brazilians call Father Christmas Papai Noel and the date of celebration differs in various regions of the country. Christmas trees are decorated by even the poor who have plastic trees or simple branches decorated with cotton to represent snow. Christmas dinners for the affluent usually consist of chicken, turkey, pork or ham served with rice, beans and fruit, often served with beer. The poor usually have chicken, rice and beans with  beer or colas. For desert they enjoy brigadeiro made of chocolate and condensed milk.

Christmas is called Noel in France and Father Christmas is known as Pere Noel. Christmas dinner is an important family gathering with the best of meats and finest wines. Christmas trees are often decorated with red ribbons and white candles, and electric lights adorn fir trees in the yard. Most people send New Year’s cards instead of at Christmas to wish friends luck, and Christmas lunch is celebrated with fois gras, a strong pate made of goose liver followed by a meal of seafood.

House windows are decorated in Germany with electric candles and color photographs as well as wreathes of leaves with candles called adventskrant, which signal the arrival of the four-weeks before Christmas. Additional candles are added as the holiday grows nearer. Father Christmas, called Der Wihnactsmann, delivers presents to the children during the late afternoon of Christmas Eve after celebrants return from church. A member of the family rings a bell to announce that presents are under the tree. Christmas Day is celebrated with a meal of carp or goose.

Father Christmas delivers gifts to Portuguese children on Christmas Eve. Gifts are left under the tree or in their shoes near the fireplace. Christmas dinner usually consists of dry cod fish and boiled potatoes at midnight.

During the reign of the Soviet Union, Christmas celebrations were prohibited. The New Year was celebrated instead when Father Frost brought gifts to the children. Now in Russia, Christmas is celebrated on December 25, or more often on January 7, the date the Russian Orthodox church reserves for religious observances. Christmas dinner consists of cakes, pies and meat dumplings.

New Zealanders celebrate by opening presents under the tree on Christmas morning. They then have Christmas lunch at home or a family member's house. A dinner of chicken or turkey is eaten, followed by tea time and dinner cooked on the barbie, served with beer or wine. And in Sweden, a special dinner is served on Christmas Eve of ham, herring and brown beans. Many attend church early on Christmas Day before gathering to exchange gifts with family members.

Christmas customs in this country are too numerous to list, and I'd like to wish all our blog visitors a very Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year, no matter where you happen to live, or how you plan to celebrate the holiday.

Remembering John Mantley, Part II

John Mantley played the lead on “Buckingham Theatre,” which was the most prestigious program on Canadian radio’s coast-to-coast network. “It was necessary to do half a dozen shows a week to earn a halfway decent living,” he said. “Therefore, we learned to do old voices and young voices and all kinds of accents that would come in handy later on.” Mantley won several provincial and national awards for acting and directing with the New Play Society, Canada’s equivalent of the American ANTA.

Returning to California, he performed as an actor at the LaJolla Playhouse.  “After that I went to New York City, where I starved.  But eventually, I got to play three leads in several shows that were produced by Harvey Marlow, and I got to be friends with him.” Manley assumed Marlow’s job as producer of the television station WOR, when his friend was named general manager. Among three half-hour shows, he produced “Mr. & Mrs. Mystery,” written by John Gay, who later won an Oscar for “Separate Tables.”  Mantley then wrote the half-hour series scripts and played Mr. Mystery, while his wife played Mrs. Mystery. For the original script and their combined performances, they received a grand total of fifty dollars in cash so they could collect unemployment insurance "in order to stay alive.”

The Canadian actor also produced the first foreign language television show in this country, starring an all-Italian cast, and had to change his name for the show to Giovanni Mantelli. It was during his years at WOR that he began to write for television, “because we didn’t have a budget, and I was doing all the things I had to do for a weekly salary of $103, barely enough to live in New York. We had no professional writers. We got our scripts from university students, and anybody who had an idea, and I had to fix them to make them work.”

Mantley spent four years in Rome, where he produced and directed a series of thirty-nine, half-hour  dramatic anthologies for American television, a pioneering effort which played in some two hundred markets and earned investors a good return on their money. “I learned a tremendous amount in shooting the shows in Italy because when we got there, the Italians had never shot live sound. They had no way to do special effects, or even fades and dissolves. All they could do was print film. So it was a great learning experience.”

The Mantley’s first child was born in Italy, “and we survived there because part of the time my wife did the voices—post synchronization of the voices of Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren and many others.” Mantley said he translated Italian films into English by the lip syncing process because American audiences would not accept subtitles.  “And because at that time the American motion picture industry would not sell their films to television because they were trying to destroy the media.”

Mantley borrowed the fare from his cousin Mary Pickford to return to this country, where he found that the entertainment industry had a short memory; no one remembered him or his work. It was then he began to write full time, turning out a number of short stories and articles. His first novel, The 27^th Day, became a Book of the Month Club selection here and in England, as well as adapted to film for Columbia Pictures. “The book was somewhat of a minor classic in the science fiction field, I have to believe, because I just bought a first edition which cost me fifty-five dollars.” He subsequently wrote The Snow Birch, at the urging of his cousin, which was produced as the motion picture, “Woman Obsessed” by Twentieth Century Fox, starring Susan Hayward. Mantley recalls that “those books kept my nose above water financially until I began to write for television.”

His first freelance television script was for Desilu Westinghouse Theatre, for which he wrote five. He also wrote for “Harrigan and Sons,” “The Untouchables,” “Outer Limits,” “Kraft Theatre,” “Rawhide,” and nearly a hundred other shows. He freelanced scripts for “Gunsmoke” before he became executive story consultant, and held the same position with “Great Adventure.”

He produced “Gunsmoke,” the longest running dramatic show in television history, for the next ten years. The series had previously been produced on radio before it made the transition to television, and ran five more years.

(The conclusion of this interview will appear next weekend. John Mantley talks about what it was like to work with James Arness and much more.)

Are Audio Books Taking Over the Market?

Are audio books taking over the market, crowding out ebooks and print editions? If my latest royalty statements are any indication, my assumption is correct. A writer friend mentioned that his ebook sales had been cut in half during the past few months, as have mine, but that his audio books are selling well. 

I had submitted some of my own novels to an audio company, with negative results, so I  decided to follow my friend's lead by applying to Amazon.To my surprise, my first novel, Escape, was not only accepted but featured in the company's newsletter, and I received quite a few requests to record it from freelance narrators. Written after ten years of research about Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, it's been my best selling book since 1999, with three publishers. Award-winning Kevin Foley narrated the book. And his singing adds to the novel's humor.

I followed Escape with my second Wyoming historical novel, this time a mystery.  No Escape, the Sweetwater Tragedy, was written after more than 20 years of sporadic research. It's the true story of an innocent young woman and her husband hanged by greedy cattlemen. I included a  fictional young Missouri woman determined to homestead on her own, a composite of some 200,000 actual single women homesteaders. Dennis Redfield, a southern California actor, did a terrific job of narrating the book, which is now available at Amazon, Audible.com and iTunes with three of my other books.

Westerners: Candid and Historic Interviews contains some of the fascinating people I've had the pleasure of interviewing over the years. Among them Louis L'Amour, country singer Chris LeDoux, attorney Gerry Spence, Lucile Wright, early aviatrix and friend of Amelia Earhart; infamous grandsons of Buffalo Bill Cody and Presidents Benjamin and William Henry Harrison. They left their own imprints on society, among many others interviewed during my years as a news reporter and freelance photojournalist in California and Wyoming,  Narrator Paul McSorly deftly brings the interviews to life.

Mystery of Spider Mountain was written for middle grade readers and features the adventures of the Hamilton Kids. It's a semi-autobiographical story of my childhood in the Hollywood hills. Chelsea Ward does a great job narrating the novel for 9-12 year-olds and will also narrate the following book in the series, Ghost of Crimson Dawn. 

More of my books are currently in the process of narration and it's been fun listening to them as they're recorded as well as working with the narrators. From now on I'll keep my sentences shorter and narrations in mind as I write future books. All the books are currently on sale at: Audible.com where you can listen to them by clicking on the small green circles under each one.