Season’s Beatings

Dec 3

There’s a Newfoundland Christmas tradition of yesteryear you won’t find on any holiday postcard — it was the annual business of deciding the strongman of the community.

2 men fight infant of a red clapboard building

Long before I came along, in the part of Bonavista Bay where I grew up, young men celebrated the holiday season by doing what young men have too often done when left unsupervised: they fought each other.

  
    A good dust-up in the snow might be the most faithful Newfoundland Christmas tradition of all
  

In this particular case, they were not fighting out of anger. They were fighting to earn the title of the community strongman.

It worked like this:

Sometime during the Christmas season, someone would drag a coat behind him along the road. That was the invitation. If another fellow felt like testing his strength—or maybe just had something to prove—he’d step on the coat, and the challenge was on.

The rules were straightforward: bare knuckles, and three knockdowns earned a win.

Most of the fights were more friendly than fierce, and many ended after the first clean hit. Among buddies, one good shot was enough to settle the question of who’d earned bragging rights for the year.

And that’s probably just as well. These young men must have been capable of packing quite a punch — they spent their days rowing boats, hauling fish, and cutting firewood by hand. One good punch was likely plenty.

One of my favourite stories of the old custom comes from Harold Squires’ A Newfoundland Outport in the Making. He recalls a man named Rogers, who earned the title “Champion of Salvage.”

The Champion of Salvage

Snow-covered church in Savage, Newfoundland and Labrador — Salvage, Newfoundland and Labrador

Titles like that seemed to matter because when word hit town that some young fellow across the bay in King’s Cove was calling himself the “Champion of Bonavista Bay,” Rogers — and the whole of Salvage — felt slighted.

How could this man decide he was the champion of the bay when he hadn’t faced down the best Salvage had to offer?

The situation called for action.

So, Rogers gathered a few friends and set off for King’s Cove — rowing across Bonavista Bay in the dead of winter.

When they reached King’s Cove, they found the self-proclaimed champion, and Rogers did as the game required: he dropped his coat on the ground and began to drag it.

The challenger came forth and, according to the account, Rogers “left ’im straightened out on the road. All six feet of ’im.”

And that was that. The title was corrected and Salvage earned itself the bragging rights.

I’m sure it’s the kind of story that grows a little with each retelling, especially when told over a glass of Christmas rum.

And while I wouldn’t suggest we resurrect the tradition, it does stand as a fun slice of old Newfoundland holiday culture with equal parts toughness, pride, and good humour.

Church and houses along the coast in King's Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador — King’s Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador

The Mummer’s Swab

Truthfully, it’s not so different from some aspects of mummering. Mummers sometimes carried a swab — a sort of stick— with which they’d ‘playfully’ hit people. Sometimes play turned into a brawl.

The following is an excerpt from a piece Calle Rambling Thoughts About Christmas in Newfoundland Years Ago written by William Whittle and published in the Evening Telegram in 1885:

“The reign of the Mummers, like that of the ‘ fools ‘ was put an end to, owing to a street row between them and the spectators, in which the latter received the worst of it. ‘ For, as I have said, both the ‘ fools ‘ and mummers were composed of the ‘bone and sinew ‘ of the town. Many a time I have seen a ‘ fool ‘ whom the mob tried to ‘ run,’ pull off his cap, take the handle of his ‘ swab ‘ and clean out some two or three hundred persons.”

— William Whittle, 1885

And, as I’ve written elsewhere, the anonymity of mummer’s disguises sometimes offered an opportunity to settle scores with a diminished threat of retribution. In one unfortunate incident, it even ended in murder.