We continue our celebration of the festive season by counting down the Sundays until Christmas Eve

 We continue our celebration of the festive season by counting down the Sundays until Christmas Eve, highlighting different holdings, with connections to Christmas and the festive period, in our library's collection. Today we have an insight into the preparations for the Twelve Days of Christmas by an eighteenth-century housewife.

In Elizabeth Moody’s mock-heroic, a strain that pervades Moody's works, poem ‘The Housewife, or The Muse Learning to Ride the Great Horse Heroic’ (1...798), the narrator asks her muse to aid her in her domestic chores and the preparation for Christmas, who in turn summons Greek heroes to help the narrator in her works. The poem’s final stanza describes the narrator preparing a Twelfth Night cake, a treat which can be enjoyed at our Georgian Christmas on 13 December, amongst other delicious Georgian Christmas treats taken from the Knight Family’s Cookbook. For more information on the Georgian Christmas or the recipe of Georgian Ginger Cake see Dr. Annie Gray’s blog on our website: www.chawtonhouse.org