The first, the liveliest, the most enduring Christmas card of all comes via that unique bookseller G. Heywood Hill of Curzon Street, London. It is the slim booklet A Christmas Cracker, being a commonplace selection by John Julius Norwich, 1997. A wonderful diversity of oddities and wisdom. Page one gives lines from the Notebooks of Samuel Butler: "The little Strangs say the `good words', as they call them, before going to bed, aloud and at their father's knee, or rather in the pit of his stomach. One of them was lately heard to say, `Forgive us our Christmases, as we forgive them that Christmas against us.' " Norwich puts in a quatrain he picked up somewhere: "Noel!" the festive robin cried,/When he the heavinly babe espied,/But Santa said "Enough of that"/And with a yule log squashed him flat.
Not all the themes are about Christmas, however. Memorable opening sentences of books are led, surely by Rose Macaulay's first words in The Towers of Trebizond: " `Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from the animal on her return from High Mass." There's a certain amount of French in this issue, and he gives us a bit of a translation into French of It's a long way to Tipperary:
C'est a Tip, Tip, a Tipperary/Ou nous allons, mes amis,/Et c'est chic, chic, a Tipperary,/Mais mon dieu, c'est loin d'ici.
There's more, and he adds a Hindustani version given him by Paddy Leigh Fermor. And, while on the theme of place names, he quotes the "inspired verse" from The Night I appeared as Macbeth an old music hall song by W. F. Hargreaves: "I acted so tragic, the house rose like magic,/The audience yelled "You're sublime" /They made me a present of Mornington Crescent/They threw it a brick at a time."
Prayers before battle begin with Sir Jacob Astley's before the battle of Edgehill: "O Lord thou knowest how busy I must be this day: if I forget thee, do not thou forget me." Also given are Drake's prayer before Cadiz and Wingate's, but Falstaff's before the battle of Shrewsbury is the simplest of all: "I would 'twere bed time, Hal, and all well."
There are some mildly naughty limericks, one begins: A Magdalen don of divinity/Had a daughter who kept her virginity,/The Fellows at Magdalen/Were obviously dagdalen/It could never have happened at Trinity. Two lovely pieces about sighting dolphins by the same Leigh Fermor. Not a lot to do with Christmas, but the Cracker is an institution. Y