Christmas is actually fairly weird, when you think about it.
You spend all year waiting to welcome a gigantic red intruder into your house with pastries, put a tree in the corner of your living room and cover it in glitter, and spend the other fifty-one weeks of the year measuring your time by how close you are to the event.
It makes sense when you know the backdrop, but at face value, it’s kind of a strange one. But the same can be said for a lot of the words we use to describe and characterise the festive season.
For eleven and a half months of the year, a cracker is a plan, hard bread-like biscuit that’s often found in close proximity to Wensleydale cheese, but in December, it’s a brightly-coloured party favour with a joke nobody laughs at. Words are strange like that: they often have double meanings, or migrate away from their meanings over time, or sometimes never really have made sense in the first place.
And that’s actually pretty fun to look at. So here are a couple of other obscure Christmassy words that verge on the weird and on the wonderful, to break out over a second helping of Christmas pudding.
Crumping
The sound you make when walking over semi-frozen snow; ‘crumping over the hills’ or ‘he crumped sadly down the garden’.
Hogmadog
A large ball of snow made by rolling a smaller ball of snow around a field until it grows in size. Often used as the body of a snowman, or a lethally large snowball for folks you don’t like.
Doniferous
Carrying a present in your arms.
Yule
'Yule' derives from an Old Norse word 'jol', which was one of the names given to a twelve-day festival celebrated by the Scandinavian and Teutonic peoples of Northern Europe. It's believed to have its etymology in the word 'Jolnir'; one of the names and epithets of the Norse god Odin.
Yule-Hole
The extra hole you have to make on your belt after indulging at Christmas dinner, or over the festive period in general.
Yuleshard, Yule-Jade
Somebody who leaves a lot of work to do until the last thing before Christmas. See also: your dad getting everybody presents from the local gas station because he didn’t leave the house to start Christmas shopping until 5.35pm on the 24th of December.
Eggnog
This one's an adventure. The 'nog' part of Eggnog comes from a seventeenth-century word for a strong beer or ale, once brewed in the East of England- but that 'nog' actually comes from an even older Scots word 'nugg' or 'nugh', a term for beer warmed by putting a red-hot poker into it. And 'nugg' comes from an even, even older Old Norse word, 'knagg', for a metal peg or spur, kind of like a fire poker.
(The 'egg' part comes from the fact it has egg in it).
Peck-of-Apples
A heavy fall on icy ground, literally to ‘drop your apples’, from a nineteenth-century Lincolnshire dialect. A peck is an archaic unit of measurement used to weigh out large quantities of produce equal to around two gallons.
Toe-Cover
1940s slang for a cheap or useless present; a reference to the habit of gifting socks.
Scurryfunge
We’ve all been guilty of a festive scurryfunge - it means to hastily and sloppily tidy up when about to receive unexpected company, to preserve the illusion that you inhabit a tidy home.
Quaaltagh
A word borrowed from the Manx dialect from the Isle of Man, a Quaaltagh is the first person to enter your house on Christmas Day or New Year’s Day morning. They were believed to have a bearing on the luck that the household would see for the coming year, and often if somebody suspected that they’d be the Quaaltagh wherever they were visiting, would take a gift of whiskey or coal with them to bring goodwill to the house for the next season.
Fyole
A light covering of snow, a smattering.
Kedge-Gutted
Made to feel sick through over-indulgence in food; for example: ‘that last helping of turkey curry has me absolutely kedge-gutted’.
Belly-Cheer
A word from the 1500s and often the preclude to feeling a bit kedge-gutted; a meal that’s guaranteed to raise a smile, full of rich and unhealthy foods.
Whullup
To whullup somebody is, according to the Old English language, to bestow gifts upon them in an attempt to curry favour with them, or receive goods in kind that might benefit you or your station. Similar to the English phrase ‘buttering them up’, but in a very specifically gift-giving sense.
Emacity
A fondness for buying things, especially things that aren’t vital or you don’t really need.
Charette, or Nuit de Charette
Literally ‘Chariot’ or ‘Night of the Chariot’ in French, it’s used to describe any last-minute push towards a work goal, particularly at festive season. It comes from an old practice in Parisian art schools in December the nineteenth century, where a wheeled chariot would be trundled between desks for students to submit their work into as they worked all night towards their deadlines. Anything not on the chariot by the end of the night wouldn’t be marked towards their final grade; hence ‘night of the chariot’.
Bull Week
Similar to Nuit de Charette, Bull Week or ‘To Get the Bull Down’ means to complete extra work the week before Christmas.
It comes from a practice seen in nineteenth-century cutlery factories in Sheffield, UK, where workers were rewarded for completing extra work in the run-up towards Christmas with the promise of a whole roast bull delivered to their family home.
Sugarplum
It’s not actually a plum... in fact, it’s not a fruit of any kind. It’s actually a layered hard candy ball sometimes embellished with nuts or spices, more akin to a gobstopper than the sugared fruit we’d expect it to be. The name comes from the fact that they were often the size of a plum, and other names include ‘sugar ball’ and ‘plum lozenge’.
Fog-Dram
A drink to clear your head; a shot of whiskey or grain spirit thought to wake you up and add a little pep to your step when the weather is chilly or if you’re recovering from an illness.