23rd November 2013
Lemondrop Christmas Cards…
Sixpences
We have just taken delivery of our fab new christmas cards, and are busy sticking genuine sixpences to the front (cheers Dave).
What year will you get?
A 1966 is proving popular.
A bit of sixpence trivia for those of you into that sort of thing…
Brian May uses a sixpence as a plectrum.
The sixpence is seen as a lucky charm for brides. There is an old rhyme which goes “Something old, something new / Something borrowed, something blue / And a sixpence for her (left) shoe.”
As the supply of silver threepence coins slowly disappeared, sixpences replaced them as the coins put into Christmas puddings; children would hope to be the lucky one to find the sixpence, no doubt also encouraging them to eat more pudding.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 4, Scene 2), we learn that by his absence (ensorcelled in Titania’s bower), Bottom the Weaver will forgo sixpence a day for life from the Duke. In Elizabethan times, six pence was roughly a day’s wage for rustic labour in the provinces. With it, one might buy two dinners, six performances of Hamlet among the groundlings at the Globe Theatre, or an unbound copy of the play itself.
“I’ve Got Sixpence” a traditional song, runs:
- I’ve got sixpence. Jolly, jolly sixpence.
- I’ve got sixpence to last me all my life.
- I’ve got twopence to spend and twopence to lend
- And twopence to send home to my wife.[2]
Merry Christmas,
Nick & Dave x