Eating Peacock for Christmas and other odd southern Yuletide customs
Christmastide was considered a season of deep mystery. The foods served to mark the Savior’s nativity possessed symbolic potency. The South never had much to do the with Puritanic indifference to the old Christian rites and ceremonies that made Christmas in New England an austere holiday during the colonial era. White southerners kept the old European table rituals and dishes. Up until the 20th century there were odd pockets of old believers who built the Christmas feast around the Peacock rather than the Turkey, keeping alive the old English association of the incorruptibility of the peacock’s flesh with the immortality of Christ. The Old English feast had certain immutable features: the Boar’s Head first, Peacock, frumenty (a wheat porridge with fruits), plum pudding, and mince pie. In the ancient preparation the peacock was skinned so that its feathers remained intact; after the bird was roasted the plumage would be reattached to make a spectacle on the serving platter.
Captain E. Benton of Kershaw, South Carolina, was one of the last to serve peacock for Christmas, doing so in 1900. [“A Peacock Dinner,” The State (Columbia, SC: December 30, 1900), 3.] The surviving records indicated that southerners opted for roast peacock and did not indulge in the peacock pies that were a favorite of English country gentlefolk.
The antiquity of this dish was not enough to keep it part of the Christmas feast. Already in the 19th century, the Christmas feast had altered into the spread recalled in multitudes of memoirs. Actually there were several sorts of feasts—institutional banquets served to prisoners, mental patients, and soldiers—town dinners featuring grocery goods and canned green vegetables—there were church banquets—and there were the “old plantation feasts,” the most elaborate of all.
“The Christmas dinner! All home-made, all home-raised. The turkeys, the chickens, the hams, the pressed eat—souse meat. I mean—the back bon the light bread, every kind of preserves, brandy peaches, any kind of cake and pies, sillibub, tender beef, barbecued ‘shoat’ and mutton—and I have forgotten the other half.” W. W. Lumpkin, “Old Time Georgia Christmas,” The State (March 4, 1910), 8.
Because duck hunting was one of the invariable past-times of the Christmas season, surely ducks were part of “the other half” that Lumpkin forgot, as were the vegetables. Other writers fill in the gaps.
After the soup there came a great turkey at one end of the table, a pair of ducks at the other, a chicken pie on one side, ham on the other, flanked by a variety of vegetables. But the dessert was the portion that interested me most deeply. Plum pudding and mince pie were the substantials. [“Christmas before the war,” The State (December 24, 2026.]
Oyster soup was the usual Lowcountry first course. The vegetables included, “sweet potatoes, and Irish same; beets, rice, fried parsnips, black-eyed peas; cole slaw,” not to mention a battery of pickles [Marion Harland, “Christmas on the old Plantation,” Christian Union (December 17, 1896), 1173.]
Black rural families kept their own rites: watch night, the firing of guns on Christmas eve, and the contest of shouting “Christmas Gift” at someone before he or she shouted it at you, giving the right of commanding a present from someone. In the Lowcountry, in the middle decades of the 19th century African Americans on the day after Christmas put on tatterdemalion and processed as John Coonahs, demanding refreshment and dancing at every house in a region. How this West Indian carnival tradition transferred to Christmas is not exactly clear, but it was recorded in some detail by Rebecca Cameron in the Ladies Home Journal at the end of the 19th century (Dec. 1891), p5.
Christmas hunts were standard well into the twentieth century. There were two targets pursued in the fields and forests: deer and turkeys. In the week before the holiday a company would scour the woods, using hunt dogs. If the hunt was a success venison would appear on the table; if not, one would have to content oneself with pork. A yard turkey would stand in for the wild rice field.
In Virginia and Kentucky corn shuckings would be one of the preparatory rites. A mound of corn would be amassed, a fiddler secured, and the husks stripped off in a sociable bout of working and singing. Whether performed by black laborers in tidewater, or white neighbors in the hill country, the shucking would provide the matter that would eventually be ground to meal and backed as corn bread.
By the 1840s a kind of literary sub-genre developed around plantation Christmas—magazines would print nostalgic or picturesque accounts of the holiday, so many indeed that it became apparent that these were not too transparent exercises in romanticizing the slave regime in the South by focusing on the one week when labor was suspended. In the 1890s an anthropological dimension crept into the accounts, inquiring how many of the rites were survivals of old English or old French customs. It was then that writers began to notice the last of Christmas peacocks.