As in America, the Christmas Season on this side of the pond is pretty much wrapped up: the decorations are down, trash bins everywhere are buried under piles of pine-tree skeletons, and in all the stores, Christmas displays have been replaced with Easter merchandise. 

The season itself is similar in many ways as well.  The British Santa Claus (aka Father Christmas) looks just like the illustrations in the Coca Cola ads and, although on a whole they tend to be less flamboyant with their decorations than we Americans, you can generally count on every village to have at least one homeowner who, with reckless disregard of the electricity bill (not to mention good taste), gleefully festoons his house in a collection of blinding, blinking lights garish enough to give the neighborhood a collective headache, send his children into therapy and warm the heart of any homesick Yank who happens to wander by. 

So, really, Christmas in the UK wouldn't be so different from Christmas in the US if it weren't for crackers and Panto. 

I must warn you about these British Christmas cracker: you can't eat them. I expect this is a common misconception; I can't have been the only one.

From the end of November right through to the beginning of January, crackers appear on dinner tables at all festive occasions.  The 'cracker' looks like a gift-wrapped toilet paper tube and the idea is for you and your dinner partner to play tug-o-war with it until it busts open with a tiny explosion.  Inside the cracker is a small toy (I got a water pistol), a card with a few painfully awful jokes and a colorful paper crown.  Everyone at the table then puts on their crowns and takes turns reading the jokes (and, incredibly, laughing at them). 

I have to believe that some sort of legislation or ancient Royal edict is involved here because that's the only way I can make sense of a table full of normally stolid Brits in party hats laughing over unfunny jokes.  It's as if they suddenly forget they're English. 

And Panto is even harder to explain. Simply put, Panto (short for Pantomime) is a play; but there's so much more to it than that. 

In an attempt to come to a better understanding of Panto, I convinced my wife--who then convinced two other couples--to come see one with me.  The end result was six adults sitting in a crowded theatre packed with about 6,000 screaming children.  (Did I mention Panto is for children?)  Actually, there is a fair amount of adult material woven into the dialogue, but it's still generally good form to have at least one child in tow. 

And when I say 'screaming kids' I don't mean to imply they were ill behaved; on the contrary, they were obediently performing their parts of the dialogue.  Think of it as a Rocky Horror stage show, but for a younger audience. 

The play itself is always one of a handful of stories handed down from who knows when.  The main character is always a boy (Aladdin, Dick Whittington, Peter Pan, among others) and is traditionally played by a girl.  There is also a major woman's role--called The Dame--played to great comic effect by a man.  Everyone in the audience (bar me, of course) knows their lines and shouts them out at the appropriate moments.  "He's behind you!" seemed very popular. 

The plays are audience-driven--without a loud and rowdy audience, there can be no Panto--and are filled with slapstick, bad jokes, double-entendre and cross-dressing.  But the oddest thing about them is, they contain no mention of Christmas, even though they are an integral part of the British Yule-Tide experience. 

If you were suddenly set down in a theatre in the middle of a pantomime play, you might think . . . well, I can't imagine what you'd think, but I can be fairly certain you wouldn't think of Christmas pudding, mince pies, crackers (the exploding kind), twinkling lights and piles of presents under the Christmas tree.  Yet these are the images Panto brings to the mind of almost everyone who grew up on this island.

As a mere interloper, I may someday come to appreciate the fact that the Christmas season brings with it the Pantomime plays, but these two entities will never become linked in my deepest psyche; you really need to be British for that.

<=Prev     Home     Next=>