What is a Cameronian Christmas?

“Kirsmas—I think I hae heard tell o’ that afore—what is’t?”

The question comes from twelve-year-old Robin Stiel, standing at the gates of a Galloway hill farm on a December evening in the mid 19^th century. His uncle Gray has just mentioned that Christmas is three days away, and the boy is genuinely puzzled. Christmas? What manner of thing might that be?

Gray’s answer is matter-of-fact: “it’s a time when folk hae mair to eat than they ken what to do wi’, and mair to drink than is guid for them.”

Robin’s response is immediate and heartfelt: “O Lord, I wuss Kirsmas wad come to the Nethertoun.”

This exchange, from S.R. Crockett’s story “The Packman’s Pool,” reveals something startling to readers raised on Victorian Christmas fiction: in parts of Presbyterian Scotland, Christmas simply didn’t exist as a cultural event. It wasn’t celebrated, wasn’t marked, wasn’t particularly noticed. For the Cameronians—strict Covenanters who viewed feast days as papist nonsense—the 25th of December was just another winter’s day, and one on which you still had work to do.

This is about as far from Dickensian Christmas as it’s possible to get.

When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, he helped cement an idea of Christmas that still shapes our expectations today: urban, abundant, transformative. Scrooge’s London is all fog and gaslight, crowded streets and shop windows, the possibility of plenty if only hearts can be opened and purses loosened. The Cratchit family’s Christmas dinner is meagre by Scrooge’s standards, but it’s still a feast—goose and pudding, warmth and togetherness, the deliberate creation of plenty from scarcity.

Bob Cratchit earns fifteen shillings a week. Gray Stiel, Crockett’s shepherd, makes twenty-five pounds a year—and out of that he must feed himself and his orphaned nephew. Indeed Gray’s life savings is some seventeen shillings and ninepence. The economic reality is grinding. There will be no goose at Nethertoun, no pudding, no gathering of relatives. There will be porridge, and if you’re fortunate, there will be enough.

The cultural gap between Dickens’s London and Crockett’s Galloway is more than geographical. It’s the difference between urban poverty that still allows for occasional celebration and rural poverty that is simply survival, day after day, season after season. Dickens writes from within a culture where Christmas matters, where it can be corrupted by greed (Scrooge) or redeemed by generosity (Scrooge reformed). Crockett writes from within a culture where Christmas is barely a rumour, something that happens elsewhere, to other people, in that curious place called England.

Yet “The Packman’s Pool” is unmistakably a Christmas story, and a devastating one. Its plot concerns Gray Stiel’s crisis on Christmas Eve: his wastrel brother Allan has returned, threatening to take young Robin away unless Gray can produce ten pounds—a sum we already know is far outwith his means. Gray looks for an alternative by humbling himself to ask for a loan from his employer, the man who also stole the woman he loved. When that fails the final choice—and Gray contemplates it seriously—is murder. He will meet Allan at the Packman’s Pool on Christmas morning, and one way or another, Robin will be safe.

What happens at that dark pool “amid a perfection of whiteness” is not what Dickens would have written. There is no ghostly intervention, no moral awakening, no last-minute change of heart. Instead, Gray discovers Allan’s body, frozen to death in the snow. His brother is dead. Robin is safe. Murder will not be necessary.

And Gray Stiel, looking at the corpse, recognises it as “the best Christmas gift that could have come to the cothouse of Nethertoun.”

This is Christmas as harsh mercy rather than abundant blessing. The gift is not plenty but removal—the elimination of threat, the prevention of sin, the quiet erasure of a life that had become purely destructive. When Dickens wants to redeem someone, he shows them the error of their ways and lets them change. When Crockett faces the same problem, he lets the Galloway winter do its work. Death is the gift. Survival is the blessing.

Back at the cothouse, Robin sits down to his porridge, still ignorant of Christmas, still ignorant of his uncle’s anguish, still ignorant of the violence that almost occurred in his name. He remembers belatedly to say grace—even porridge deserves thanksgiving—and then offers his own verdict on the holiday he doesn’t understand: “Christmas or no Christmas, porridge is hard to beat.”

It’s a line that could seem comic, the innocent observation of a child who knows no better. But Crockett means it seriously. In the world of Nethertoun, in the world of men like Gray Stiel who labour in all weathers for wages that barely sustain life, porridge isn’t a poor substitute for Christmas plenty. Porridge is sufficiency. Porridge is survival. Porridge is what you have earned through honest work, and when you’re not sure where the next meal is coming from, sufficiency is everything.

Dickens’s great insight was that generosity creates abundance, that the sharing of wealth can redeem both giver and receiver. Crockett’s insight is darker and perhaps truer to the experience of rural poverty: sometimes the only gift possible is absence, the only abundance is enough, the only celebration is survival itself.

The final line of the story “For death as well as life is the gift of God.” is a claim that would sit uncomfortably in the warm glow of a Dickensian Christmas. But in the cold clarity of a Galloway winter, it has the ring of hard-won truth.

This is what a Cameronian Christmas looks like. Not the absence of celebration, but the transformation of it into something starker and stranger. Not abundance but adequacy. Not presents but presence—the presence of God in the weather, in the working of providence, in the simple fact of another day survived.

Robin doesn’t know what Christmas is, but he knows what matters: work, shelter, food, the affection of his uncle, the grace before meals. In the Scotland of Crockett’s fiction, that’s not deprivation. That’s everything. That’s the gift.

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About this series: This article is Part One of our dip into S.R. Crockett’s Christmas stories, examining how this neglected master of Scottish fiction created an alternative to Victorian Christmas sentimentality. Next week we’ll have “Winter’s Work: Snow as Character in Crockett’s Christmas.”

You can read the story for yourself in our Christmas Special section of the Library