“What is a sugar plum?” I ask myself this question practically every year, as we slide into autumn and then into the general holiday season, which begins, at least in America, in October and concludes with Valentine’s Day. Usually it comes after hearing a bit of The Nutcracker; this year, it was inspired by the name of a perfume. My mind conjures up a candied plum—which is only reasonable—but in fact sugar plums are hard sugar candies that usually surround a nut of some kind. They have nothing to do with plums.
If somebody had actually ever given me a sugar plum as a child, I would have regarded it with disappointment. Every day a child somewhere probably discovers that “Turkish Delight” is not whatever delightful treat she privately imagined but a sticky, powdery goo. If you’d sell your soul to the devil for this, you must have been about halfway there already. (Though, in my experience, once you’re older it turns out you like Turkish Delight after all—perhaps Edmund was precocious.)
“Sugar plums” are one of those things that survive in language because of their presence in a handful of Christmas texts: The Nutcracker, say, or “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” The latter’s narrator sleeps in a “cap” and throws up a “sash,” both of which are likely to inspire some very odd images in the minds of literal-minded children. We’re so used to the poem that we only stop to ask ourselves what it means if prompted by something else. The words are so familiar as to be meaningless. Except for those moments when we’re required to read older novels and poems in grade school, Christmas is probably the time of year that most of us are exposed to non-contemporary English vocabulary, syntax, and diction.
The language of Christmas is a fossil record. Once something has been accepted as a piece of Christmas, it is likely to stay there forever, no matter how little sense it makes as the years go by. The result is that we go around parroting things that sound familiar, even cozy, even though they are either functionally meaningless or simply incorrect. I haven’t got a clue what the reference in “The Holly and the Ivy” to “the running of the deer” is supposed to mean, but my guess—that it refers to seeing deer run—could easily be wrong. Nevertheless, I sing the hymn with gusto every year.
The language of Christmas is the delight of fussy pedants like me, whose greatest joy in life is to remind people that we are resting gentlemen merry, not resting merry gentlemen. The “twelve days” of Christmas really mean the days between Christmas and Epiphany, but now they have also come to mean the twelve days before. Presented with pieces of language that have floated wide of their original context and meaning, we have come up with new ones; now they are all real meanings, even if only one was intended.
Christmas language is part of what makes Christmas itself such a wonderful holiday. Beneath every worn phrase lies a history that co-exists with its present in ways we simply don’t encounter in everyday language, which we basically understand and which acquires and discards its nuances over time. Usually when a word acquires a new meaning, the old one is simply superseded; in Christmas language we can enjoy new and old equally, just as we can enjoy listening to a crooner or Wham! singing “Last Christmas” on the same playlist.
In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington stumbles upon Christmas by accident. “Roasting chestnuts on a fire!” he exclaims. “What’s this?” It is a charming movie with the ability to render the familiar strange as we watch the denizens of Halloweentown attempt to make an ersatz Christmas out of bits of decor and practices they do not understand. Yet I too sing about roasting chestnuts on an open fire every year without ever having done it myself or even having seen it done.
Perhaps in some far-off future, children will be singing about chestnuts on the newly habitable moon without having ever seen a chestnut, or a fire. Did you know a chestnut grows on a tree? one will say. That’s so cool, the other one will respond. But what’s a tree? Some kind of crater moss?
