My recent Guardian Fletter on Engels Christmas festivities may have given the impression that he was somewhat of a Bah Humbug type. Far from it. His issue was not under indulgence but over indulgence…
With the festive season now fully upon us, the view of Friedrich Engels in a letter he wrote to Jenny Marx on 3 January 1868 seems relevant: “a lot of eating and drinking and upset stomach, and the obligatory ill humour and waste of time”.
Keith Flett
Tottenham, London
Published 26th December 2025
Christmas was kept by Engels after the English fashion as Charles Dickens has so delightfully described it in The Pickwick Papers. The room is decorated with green boughs of every kind, between which, in suitable places, the perfidious mistletoe peeps forth, which gives every man the right to kiss any person of the opposite sex who is standing beneath it or whom he can catch in passing. At table the principal dish is a mighty turkey, and if the exchequer will run to it this is supplemented by a great cooked ham. A few additional attractions – one of which, a sweet known as tipsy-cake, is, as the name denotes, prepared with brandy or sherry – make way for the dish of honour, the plum-pudding, which is served up, the room having been darkened, with burning rum. Each guest must receive his helping of pudding, liberally christened with good spirits, before the flame dies out. This lays a foundation which may well prove hazardous to those who do not measure their consumption of the accompanying wines.
The above is an extract from Eduard Bernstein’s My Years of Exile (1915). Bernstein was a co-thinker of Marx and Engels who went on to be a revisionist leader of the German SPD.
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