Asby History Group

“Standing Pies and Possets –
An Old-Fashioned Cumbrian Christmas”

(… which may include some performance!)

Presenter: Dr. Sue Allan

Christmas has always been celebrated in style in Cumbria, it being one of the few times in the year workers got any sort of holiday.  And they made the most of it.  The season then, as now, was characterised by eating, drinking and making merry.  John Housman wrote in 1800 that Christmas continued with feasting and dancing until ‘after the Twelfth Day’, and no work was done at all.

The festive season was ushered in by the Waits, who ‘played their Christmas tune’ beneath the eaves of Dove Cottage, as Wordsworth relates. This seasonal offering from the Lake District and wider Cumbria tells of other Christmas waits, of ‘hunsupping’, Men of Misrule, feasting, carols, merry neets and more from the Early Modern period to the end of the nineteenth century.

(A new speaker for AHG events, Cumbrian writer and academic Dr Sue Allan wrote her PhD thesis on folk songs in the county, and she has also researched Cumbrian folk music, folklore and calendar customs for some decades.  She has also written about these traditions in academic publications as well as popular magazines, including Cumbria Life, for which she is a regular contributor.).

AHG members free; non-members £5