A Very Marxist Christmas

As Christmas 2021 is here, many are wondering how we can create a better world in the future, where gross inequality, oppression and climate catastrophe no longer blight our lives.

In the spirit of hope for that better world, we thought it would be nice to publish some excerpts on how the anti-capitalist revolutionaries Karl and Jenny Marx, and Friedrich Engels, celebrated Christmas.

Edited by Adam Johannes

On Christmas 1836, a fiery young radical Jewish intellectual sent his childhood sweetheart, from an aristocratic family, three books of romantic poetry he had written and dedicated to her. “Love is Jenny,” ended one poem, “Jenny is love’s name.”. Karl Marx later described Baroness Jenny Von Westphalen who was to become his wife as “the most beautiful girl in Trier’.

Jenny Marx was to sacrifice her family privilege to become a revolutionary socialist, organising left wing meetings, joining Karl in exile as a political refugee, helping other refugees to get housed and fed, transcribing Karl’s work so others could read his indecipherable handwriting and raising a family, tragically four of the Marx’s seven children died of poverty and illness. Here are some extracts from books about how Karl and Jenny Marx (pictured) and their dear comrade, Friedrich Engels, marked Christmas.

[Jenny Marx to Friedrich Engels, London, 23 or 24 December 1859]

My dear Mr Engels,

My most heartfelt thanks for the Christmas hamper. The champagne will be a tremendous help in tiding us over the otherwise gloomy holiday, and will ensure a merry Christmas Eve. The sparkling bubbles of the champagne will make the dear children forget the lack of a little Christmas tree this year, and be happy and jolly for all that.

[Jenny Marx to Friedrich Engels, London, Monday 1 o’clock 24 December 1866]

My dear Mr Engels,

The hamper has just arrived, and the bottles have been put on parade, with the Rhenish to the fore! How can we thank you for all your friendship! The 10 which arrived on Saturday will avert the harshest storms of Christmastide and enable us to celebrate a Merry Christmas. The wine was particularly welcome this year, as with the young Frenchman [Paul Lafargue] in the house we like to keep up appearances.

If the publisher in Hamburg’ really can print the book [Capital] as fast as he says, it is certain to come out by Easter in any case. It is a pleasure to see the manuscript lying there copied out and stacked up so high. It is an enormous weight off my mind; we have enough troubles and worries left without that, especially when the girls fall in love and become engaged, and to Frenchmen and medical students to boot! I wish I could see everything couleur de rose as much as the others do, but the long years with their many anxieties have made me nervous, and the future often looks black to me when it all looks rosy to a more cheerful spirit. Cela entre nous.

Once more, a thousand thanks for the hock and all its train!

Yours
Jenny Marx

[Eduard Bernstein, My Years of Exile, 1915]

‘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.

In this connection I cannot help thinking of an evening at Engels’ which preceded the Christmas celebrations. It was on the day when the dough, or rather paste, for the Christmas puddings was prepared. An enormous quantity was made, for there was not a single friend of the house who did not receive a Christmas pudding from 122 Regent’s Park Road. Professor Karl Schorlemmer, Engels’ medical adviser, Dr. Gumpert of Manchester, friend Sam Moore in Yorkshire, the old Chartist, Julian Harney in Jersey, Peter Layoff, the honoured leader of the Russian Socialists, as well as Marx’s sons-in-law, Paul Lafargue and Charles Longuet in Paris, various intimate friends in London, and, if I am not mistaken, some friends in Germany as well, were always remembered.

Hence, on a given day, about a fortnight before Christmas, the lady friends of the house turned up early in the morning, and worked on until the evening, chopping great heaps of apples, nuts, almonds, candied peel, etc., into little bits, and stoning and chopping pounds upon pounds of raisins; and as may be supposed it was a thoroughly cheerful party: As the ingredients were prepared they were put into a huge tub. Later in the evening the male friends of the house arrived, and each of them was required to lay hold of a ladle that stood upright in the tub, and stir the paste three times round; a by no means easy task, which needed a good deal of muscular strength. But it had rather a symbolical meaning, and those whose strength was inadequate were mercifully exempted.

The concluding touch was given by Engels himself, who descended into the wine-cellar and brought up champagne, in which we drank to a merry Christmas and many other things as well. All this, of course, took place downstairs in the great kitchen, which enhanced the charm of the whole proceeding, for to linger in a spacious kitchen always puts one somehow in mind of one’s home. At one time even well-to-do people used to eat in the kitchen: and this would have answered capitally in Engels’ house, for the kitchen was a roomy one, with the range built into the fireplace after the English fashion, so that it did not take up any room to speak of. Like so many things in England, it combined the old with the new. The construction of the range was at that time regarded as modern, but the old-fashioned turn-spit or meat-jack was not lacking, on which a hanging joint of beef could be roasted, while underneath was a dish to catch the dripping fat. In Germany, in a small house or tenement, the kitchen has often enough to serve as a sitting-room; but hardly so often as in England, where in the advertisements of dwelling-houses the kitchen, in the smaller houses, is briefly described as a “living-room,” to distinguish it from the best room, or sitting-room, as it is called. Of course, in such houses the scullery is always shut off from the kitchen.

But whereas Engels’ kitchen was never used for meals, there were occasions on which it seems to have served for drinking, owing to its nearness to the cellar. Engels himself told me of at least one such occasion. With a certain good friend of his he once sat the livelong night in the kitchen, arguing and drinking wine, until his wife came down early in the morning and made coffee for them.’

[Friedrich Engels, Eulogy to Jenny Marx at her funeral after her death from liver cancer, 1881]

‘The contribution made by this woman, with such a sharp critical intelligence, with such political tact, a character of such energy and passion, with such dedication to her comrades in the struggle — her contribution to the movement over almost forty years has not become public knowledge; it is not inscribed in the annals of the contemporary press. It is something one must have experienced at first hand.

But of one thing I am sure: just as the wives of the Commune refugees will often remember her — so to, with the rest of us have occasion enough to miss her bold and wise advice, bold without ostentation, wise without ever compromising her honor to even the smallest degree. I need not speak of her personal qualities, her friends know them and will not forget them. If there ever was a woman whose greatest happiness was to make others happy it was this woman.’

[Letter to Jenny Marx from Karl Marx, 1865]

‘There are many women in the world, and some among them are beautiful. But where could I find again a face, whose every feature, even every wrinkle, is a reminder of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life? Even my endless pains, my irreplaceable losses I read in your sweet countenance, and I kiss away the pain when I kiss your sweet face…

Good-bye, my sweet heart. I kiss you and the children many thousand times.’

Yours, Karl’