If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!
A Christmas Carol, written by Charles Dickens and published in December 1843, is a much loved Christmas tale. Its protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, starts out as a miserable miser who hates Christmas and following a series of visits from the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come is transformed into a much kinder gentleman. Dickens’ story employs a clichéd trope: miserable or bad people view Christmas with contempt. Similarly, in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham, cries:
Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.
Surely no one has actually followed through on such an idle threat and actually cancelled Christmas? Well, it just so happens that the unthinkable did happen during the English Civil War and Christmas, as we know it, was indeed cancelled!
Over the course of the 1630s the Puritans increasingly objected to how Christmas was celebrated. As Mark Stoyle states, the boisterous nature of the festivities and its deep-rooted ties to the Catholic faith presented the Puritans with a theological issue. Many Puritans tolerated, rather than celebrated, Christmas. However, following the rebellion of the Presbyterians Scots against King Charles I in 1637, this would soon change. As tensions over political and religion grew between the King and Parliament so too did the Puritans’ desire to abandon Christmas. Many leading Parliamentarians, such as Oliver Cromwell, were themselves Puritans and increasingly over the early 1640s religion became political and politics obsessed with religion.
The Puritans believed that the true meaning of the Christmas festival had been lost and instead turned into an exercise of ‘pretending [to] the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights’. From 1643 onwards, attempts were made to ‘normalise’ Christmas day. Many puritan tradesmen in London opened their shops for business on 25th December and MPs turned up to sit in Parliament. In 1644, an Act of Parliament was passed that officially cancelled Christmas.
Christmas was replaced with a day of fasting, designed to remind participants of the true meaning of the festival. The gluttonous festivities which had included ‘pilchards, anchovies, pickled-herring, white and red dried sprats, neats tongues, stockfish, harg’d beefe, mutton, raw bacon, brand-wine… durty puddings, and flapdraggons’, were to be no more.
Unsurprisingly, there was resistance to Parliament’s attempts to call off Christmas. Clashes between those in favour of the traditional festivities (a mixture of Royalists and less fervent Protestants) and Puritans were common. In 1643, facing the prospect of working on Christmas Day, many of the apprentice boys of London rose up in violent protest against their shopkeepers, forcing them to shut-up shop again. In December 1647, another pro-Christmas riot occurred in Ipswich. A protester, supposedly named Christmas, was reportedly killed and as Stoyle suggests was an incident that was taken to be symbolic: Parliament had ‘killed’ Christmas. A country already at war over issues of religion and politics, was now fighting over longstanding Christmas customs and traditions.
In December 1650, a report to the Council of the State revealed that the Commonwealth were still struggling to suppress Christmas festivities. It was requested that ‘Parliament… consider further provisions and penalties for abolishing and punishing those old superstitious observations’. Following the King’s execution, the observance of Christmas festivities became less common, but it is clear many continued celebrate in the privacy of their homes.
The fight for Christmas festivities went beyond protests and riots. The royalist satirical work of John Taylor captures the way in which the war over Christmas spilled into the world of pamphleteering. He created various pamphlets including The Complaint of Christmas (1631), A Tub Lecture (1643) and The Vindication of Christmas (1652) that criticised the abandonment of Christmas. Designed in part to capture the popular imagination and stir-up resentment towards Parliament, and equally line his empty pockets with profits, these pamphlets clearly show that Christmas was not forgotten.
In The Vindication of Christmas, Taylor tells a story in which the festivities were continued, including people singing the following carol:
Let’s dance and sing, and make good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year:
Drum horseheads dry, let flagons flood
For now the Bells shall ring;
Whilest we endeavour to make good
The Title’gainst a King
Taylor’s work proved to be popular on account of its subversive nature. His carol seamlessly intertwines issues surrounding Christmas whilst not so subtlety addressing what he felt had been wrongs carried out against the King.
The cover of Taylor’s Vindication depicts the seventeenth century portrayal of Christmas – the man in the middle – who brings with him ‘good cheere.’ As we can clearly see from this print, Taylor’s mocking representation of Christmas being greeted in two vastly different ways, visually captured the difference between the two camps. One man tells him to ‘keep out, you come not here’, whereas the other rejoices declaring ‘Old Christmas welcome; Do not fear’. This neatly illustrates how the Christmas festival was framed and incorporated into the much larger struggle between Royalists and Parliamentarians.
With the restoration of Charles II in 1660 Christmas and the old customs were restored. As the diarist, Samuel Pepys, records, the churches on Christmas morning were decorated with rosemary and ivy. His Christmas dinner also consisted of mutton, beef, oysters, neats tongue and anchovies, as well as Margate ale. Christmas was back and England’s traditions, both monarchical and festive, had been restored.
Wishing you all a Merry Christmas.
By Elena Rossi and Steven Franklin.
Elena is a third year undergraduate student in the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. Steven Franklin is a Citizens Project Officer and PhD researcher at Royal Holloway.
