A 1920s Christmas in Rome
Present-day students at the Venerable English College typically spend Christmas at home with family and friends. Before leaving Rome there is a range of celebrations, including an Annual Advent Entertainment and the conferral of ministries and candidacy, important moments on the journey towards priestly ordination. In the past, however, the College community stayed in Rome for the festive season. What was a seminary Christmas like nearly a century ago, during the 1920s?
The Christmas Season was normally inaugurated by the Quarant’ Ore, forty hours of continuous adoration of the Blessed Sacrament exposed, held in the days leading up to Christmas Eve. For this, the church was ‘thrown open to the public’. Meanwhile, the College crib was constructed and the Common Room hung with evergreens. In 1922 the College diarist noted that ‘ingenuity was taxed to the utmost to try to discover new and recherché ways of decorating the walls and ceilings’ and ‘the piano stood on the edge of a perfect jungle of tropical undergrowth’ (The Venerabile, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 174).
At dinner on Christmas Eve, the Senior Student-elect chanted the traditional reading from the Martyrology, proclaiming the birth of Christ. Matins was recited at 11.15pm, followed by Midnight Mass and Lauds. The community then retired to the Common Room to continue the celebrations and devour the pages of the Christmas edition of Chi Lo Sa?, a home-produced ‘rag’ satirising College life.
Cover page of Chi Lo Sa, Christmas 1924
There was another tradition on Christmas night which may seem strange to modern readers: ‘a fire was lighted…for the convenience of those cheerful spirits who find its glow necessary to add a little colour to their anaemic ghost stories’ (The Venerabile, vol. 2, no. 2, p. 185)
Christmas Day itself was a quiet, intimate affair. There is no mention of turkey being eaten in the 1920s and the highlight of Christmas lunch seems to have been the ‘plum pudding’, set alight by the addition of various flammable fluids. As Roman Christmases were often characterised by wet, cloudy weather, the festivities continued indoors. There would be a concert in the afternoon, the first of a series over the festive season, with a variety of musical numbers and sketches. After supper there was much excitement with the arrival of ‘Snapdragon’. This was a popular parlour game in which raisins were soaked in rum or brandy and set afire; the challenge was to pick the raisins out from amidst the flames. Then Santa Claus would arrive – or occasionally an alternative character, such as a foreign missionary (1925) or the ‘Apostolic Visitor to Africa’ (1927) – and presents distributed.
If Christmas Day was a largely family affair nella casa, the most splendid celebrations were reserved for the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury, patron of the College, on 29 December. There was a High Mass in the morning and a banquet, attended by prelates and dignitaries. In 1929 Cardinal Francis Bourne (1861–1935), Archbishop of Westminster, and Cardinal Rafael Merry Del Val (1865–1930), formerly Secretary of State, were present. When Cardinal Aidan Gasquet (1846–1929), Protector of the College, had attended the previous year, he had allowed himself to be carried by the students up the stairs to the Common Room for recreation!
That was not all. Concerts were organised for St John, St Thomas, the New Year and Twelfth Night. Films were viewed, such as Il Sacco di Roma sotta Clemente VII (‘The Sack of Rome under Clement VII’), enjoyed by students on 28 December 1923. There was an annual sporting fixture: a football match against the Scots College, and on Boxing Day an excursion was made by some to Santo Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian Hill, not only to mark the feast of the first martyr but to view the vivid frescoes of martyrdoms down the ages by Niccolò Circignani (c.1517–1596). This artist had, of course, produced the original frescoes in the College tribune.
Whist Drives were organised, sometimes in fancy dress, to raise money for the Little Sisters of the Poor and, from 1925, a ‘Country Fair’ or ‘Bazaar’ held in the Common Room, also for charity. This provided a wide range of amusements – Hoop La, Roulette, a Rifle Range and even ‘a tremendous typewriting competition in which the ring of backers did their level best with yells, jeers and catcalls to distract the unfortunate competition’ (The Venerabile, vol. 3, no. 4, p. 389).
Students' common room, Christmas 1923 (AVCAU photographic collection)
Occasionally, this annual round of festivities was interrupted by extraordinary events. In 1925 students assisted pilgrims to Rome for the Holy Year, which ended only on 24 December. In 1929 a group of English Martyrs were beatified just before Christmas, including twenty-two of the College’s ‘Forty-Four’, which kept the students and staff fully occupied. On Boxing Day 1927, there was an earthquake in the afternoon centred around Nemi (just outside Rome), strong enough to ring the College bell. Tragically, a Jesuit student at the Gregorian University, the classmate of some of the students, was killed by falling masonry at San Carlino al Quirinale.
On New Year’s Eve Auld Lang Syne was sung after supper and some observed the Italian custom of throwing things out of the window. In 1924 the College diarist noted that the passing of the old year provided inhabitants of the Monserrà corridor with ‘a splendid opportunity of disposing of last year’s broken crockery and exhausted electric bulbs’, which resulted in quite a crash (The Venerabile, vol. 2, no. 2, p. 187).
Such glimpses afforded by The Venerabile magazine and other archive sources give a warmly human aspect of seminary life nearly a hundred years ago. These celebrations undoubtedly helped bind the community together, bringing a little taste of home to the Eternal City, whether it be in the form of food, song or parlour games. Then, after Epiphany, ‘the gay lights die out and the holly comes down and the workaday world awakes once more’ (The Venerabile, vol. 4, no. 2, p. 199).