The Battle for Christmas Read online

  It was only in the fourth century that the Church officially decided to observe Christmas on December 25. And this date was chosen not for religious reasons but simply because it happened to mark the approximate arrival of the winter solstice, an event that was celebrated long before the advent of Christianity. The Puritans were correct when they pointed out—and they pointed it out often—that Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston, for example, accurately observed in 1687 that the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so “thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].”2

  Most cultures (outside the tropics) have long marked with rituals involving light and greenery those dark weeks of December when the daylight wanes, all culminating in the winter solstice—the return of sun and light and life itself. Thus Chanukah, the “feast of lights.” And thus the Yule log, the candles, the holly, the mistletoe, even the Christmas tree—pagan traditions all, with no direct connection to the birth of Jesus.3

  But the Puritans had another reason for suppressing Christmas. The holiday they suppressed was not what we probably mean when we think of a traditional Christmas. As we shall see, it involved behavior that most of us would find offensive and even shocking today—rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes.

  It may seem odd that Christmas was ever celebrated in such a fashion. But there was a good reason. In northern agricultural societies, December was the major “punctuation mark” in the rhythmic cycle of work, a time when there was a minimum of work to be performed. The deep freeze of midwinter had not yet set in; the work of gathering the harvest and preparing it for winter was done; and there was plenty of newly fermented beer or wine as well as meat from freshly slaughtered animals—meat that had to be consumed before it spoiled. St. Nicholas, for example, is associated with the Christmas season chiefly because his “name-day,” December 6, coincided in many European countries with the end of the harvest and slaughter season.4

  In our own day the Christmas season begins as early as the day after Thanksgiving for many people, and continues to January 1. But our culture is by no means the first in which “Christmas” has meant an entire season rather than a single day. In early modern Europe, the Christmas season might begin as early as late November and continue well past New Year’s Day. (We still sing about “the twelve days of Christmas,” and the British still celebrate “Twelfth Night.”) In England the season might open as early as mid-December and last until the first Monday after January 6 (dubbed “Plow Monday,” the return to work), or later.5 But it isn’t very useful, finally, to try to pin down the exact boundaries of a “real” Christmas in times past, or the precise rituals of some “traditional” holiday season. Those boundaries and rituals changed over time and varied from one place to another. What is more useful, in any setting, is to look for the dynamics of an ongoing contest, a push and a pull—sometimes a real battle—between those who wished to expand the season and those who wished to contract and restrict it. (Nowadays the contest may pit merchants—with children as their allies—against those grown-ups who resent seeing Christmas displays that seem to go up earlier and earlier with each passing year.)

  In early modern Europe, roughly the years between 1500 and 1800, the Christmas season was a time to let off steam—and to gorge. It is difficult today to understand what this seasonal feasting was like. For most of the readers of this book, good food is available in sufficient quantity year-round. But early modern Europe was above all a world of scarcity. Few people ate much good food at all, and for everyone the availability of fresh food was seasonally determined. Late summer and early fall would have been the time of fresh vegetables, but December was the season—the only season—for fresh meat. Animals could not be slaughtered until the weather was cold enough to ensure that the meat would not go bad; and any meat saved for the rest of the year would have to be preserved (and rendered less palatable) by salting. December was also the month when the year’s supply of beer or wine was ready to drink. And for farmers, too, this period marked the start of a season of leisure. Little wonder, then, that this was a time of celebratory excess.

  Excess took many forms. Reveling could easily become rowdiness; lubricated by alcohol, making merry could edge into making trouble. Christmas was a season of “misrule,” a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be violated with impunity. It was part of what one historian has called “the world of carnival.” (The term carnival is rooted in the Latin words carne and vale—“farewell to flesh.” And “flesh” refers here not only to meat but also to sex—carnal as well as carnivorous.) Christmas “misrule” meant that not only hunger but also anger and lust could be expressed in public. (It was no accident, wrote Increase Mather, that “December was called Mensis Genialis, the Voluptuous Month.”6) Often people blackened their faces or disguised themselves as animals or cross-dressed, thus operating under a protective cloak of anonymity. The late-nineteenth-century historian John Ashton reports one episode from Lincolnshire in 1637, in which the man selected by a crowd of revelers as “Lord of Misrule” was publicly given a “wife,” in a ceremony led by a man dressed as a minister (he read the entire marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer). Thereupon, as Ashton noted in Victorian language, “the affair was carried to its utmost extent.”7

  Episodes like these offered another reason, and a deeper one, for the Puritans’ objection to Christmas. Here is how the Reverend Increase Mather of Boston put it in 1687:

  The generality of Christmas-keepers observe that festival after such a manner as is highly dishonourable to the name of Christ. How few are there comparatively that spend those holidays (as they are called) after an holy manner. But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in mad Mirth….

  And Increase Mather’s son Cotton put it this way in 1712: “[T]he Feast of Christ’s Nativity is spent in Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, and in all Licentious Liberty … by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Reveling …”8

  Even an Anglican minister, a man who approved of “keeping” Christmas (as it was then put), acknowledged the truth of the Puritans’ charges. Writing in 1725, the Reverend Henry Bourne of Newcastle, England, called the way most people commonly behaved during the Christmas season “a Scandal to Religion, and an encouraging of Wickedness.” Bourne admitted that for Englishmen of the lower orders the Christmas season was merely “a pretense for Drunkenness, and Rioting, and Wantonness.” And he believed the season went on far too long. Most Englishmen, Bourne claimed, chose to celebrate it well past the official period of twelve days, right up to Candlemas Day on February 2. For that entire forty-day period, it was common “for Men to rise early in the Morning, that they may follow strong Drink, and continue untill Night, till Wine inflame them.”

  Bourne singled out two particularly dangerous seasonal practices, mumming and (strange to modern readers) the singing of Christmas carols. Mumming usually involved “a changing of Clothes between Men and Women; who when dressed in each other’s habits, go from one Neighbor’s house to another … and make merry with them in disguise.” Bourne proposed that “this Custom, which is still so Common among us at this Season of the Year, [be] laid aside; as it is the Occasion of much Uncleanness and Debauchery.” As for singing Christmas carols, that practice was a “disgrace,” since it was “generally done, in the midst of Rioting and Chambering, and Wantonness.”9 (“Chambering” was a common euphemism for fornication.) It was another Anglican cleric, the sixteenth-century bishop Hugh Latimer, who put the matter most succinctly: “Men dishonour Christ more in the twelve days of Christmas, th
an in all the twelve months besides.”

  The Puritans knew what subsequent generations would forget: that when the Church, more than a millennium earlier, had placed Christmas Day in late December, the decision was part of what amounted to a compromise, and a compromise for which the Church paid a high price. Late-December festivities were deeply rooted in popular culture, both in observance of the winter solstice and in celebration of the one brief period of leisure and plenty in the agricultural year. In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Saviors birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been. From the beginning, the Church’s hold over Christmas was (and remains still) rather tenuous. There were always people for whom Christmas was a time of pious devotion rather than carnival, but such people were always in the minority. It may not be going too far to say that Christmas has always been an extremely difficult holiday to Christianize. Little wonder that the Puritans were willing to save themselves the trouble.

  THE PURITANS understood another thing, too: Much of the seasonal excess that took place at Christmas was not merely chaotic “disorder” but behavior that took a profoundly ritualized form. Most fundamentally, Christmas was an occasion when the social hierarchy itself was symbolically turned upside down, in a gesture that inverted designated roles of gender, age, and class. During the Christmas season those near the bottom of the social order acted high and mighty. Men might dress like women, and women might dress (and act) like men. Young people might imitate and mock their elders (for example, a boy might be chosen “bishop” and take on for a brief time some of the authority of a real bishop). A peasant or an apprentice might become “Lord of Misrule” and mimic the authority of a real “gentleman.”10 Increase Mather explained with an anthropologist’s clarity what he believed to be the origins of the practice: “In the Saturnalian Days, Masters did wait upon their Servants…. The Gentiles called Saturns time the Golden Age, because in it there was no servitude, in Commemoration whereof on his Festival, Servants must be Masters.” This practice, like so many others, was simply picked up and transposed to Christmas, where those who were low in station became “Masters of Misrule.”11 To this day, in the British army, on December 25 officers are obliged to wait upon enlisted men at meals.*

  The most common ritual of social inversion during the Christmas season involved something that is associated with Christmas in our own day—we would call it charity. Prosperous and powerful people were expected to offer the fruits of their harvest bounty to their poorer neighbors and dependents. A Frenchman traveling in late-seventeenth-century England noted that “they are not so much presents from friend to friend, or from equal to equal …, as from superior to inferior.”12 That may sound familiar enough. But the modern notion of charity does not really convey a picture of how this transaction worked. For it was usually the poor themselves who initiated the exchange, and it was enacted face-to-face, in rituals that would strike many of us today as an intolerable invasion of privacy.

  At other times of the year it was the poor who owed goods, labor, and deference to the rich. But on this occasion the tables were turned—literally. The poor—most often bands of boys and young men—claimed the right to march to the houses of the well-to-do, enter their halls, and receive gifts of food, drink, and sometimes money as well. And the rich had to let them in—essentially, to hold “open house.” Christmas was a time when peasants, servants, and apprentices exercised the right to demand that their wealthier neighbors and patrons treat them as if they were wealthy and powerful. The Lord of the Manor let the peasants in and feasted them. In return, the peasants offered something of true value in a paternalistic society—their goodwill. Just when and how this actually happened each year—whether it was a gracious offering or the forced concession to a hostile confrontation—probably depended on the particular individuals involved as well as the local customs that had been established in years past (and which were constantly being “re-negotiated” through just such ritualized practices as these).

  This exchange of gifts for goodwill often included the performance of songs, often drinking songs, that articulated the structure of the exchange. These songs (and the ritual as a whole) bore a variety of names. One name that is still known in our culture is that of wassailing, and I shall take the liberty of using this word to refer to a whole set of similar rituals that may have had other names. Wassailers—roving bands of youthful males—toasted the patron’s well-being while drinking the beer he had been kind enough to supply them. Robert Herrick included this wassail in his 1648 poem “Ceremonies for Christmasse”:

  Come bring, with a noise,

  My merrie, merrie boys,

  The Christmas log to the firing;

  While my good dame she

  Bids ye all be free [i.e., with the alcohol]

  And drink to your heart’s desiring….13

  The wassail usually possessed an aggressive edge—often an explicit threat—concerning the unpleasant consequences to follow if the beggars’ demands were not met. One surviving wassail song contains this blunt demand and threat:

  We’ve come here to claim our right….

  And if you don’t open up your door,

  We will lay you flat upon the floor.

  But there was also the promise of goodwill if the wassailers were treated well—toasts to the patrons health and prosperity. (It is the promise of goodwill, alone from this ritualized exchange, that has been retained in the modern revival of old Christmas songs.) The following wassail was sung on the Isle of Man by bands of young men who marched from house to house begging for food:

  Again we assemble, a merry New Year

  To wish to each one of the family here….

  May they of potatoes and herrings have plenty,

  With butter and cheese, and each other dainty….

  One song that has recently been revived, the “Gloucestershire Wassail,” shows the drinkers going from one well-to-do house to another (“Wassail! Wassail! all over the town”). At each stop they wish their patron a successful harvest, the fruits of which are to be shared with them (“God send our master a cup of good beer…. God send our mistress a good Christmas pie …”). Each verse amounts to a toast that ends in a fresh round of drinks (“With my wassailing bowl I drink to thee”)—to the master and mistress, to their horse, to their cow, to anything at all that can be toasted.14

  It was not enough for the landlord to let the peasants in and feed them. On this one occasion he had to share with them his choicest food and drink, his private stock. Robert Herrick included a couplet to this effect in the poem quoted above: “Drink now the strong beere, / Cut the white loaf here.” (The emphasis is on the “strong beere,” the “white loaf.”) When the wassailers on the Isle of Man had sung their verses, they were, in the words of the folklorist who recorded their ritual, “invited into the house to partake of the best the family can afford.” The final verse of the “Gloucestershire Wassail” opens with just such a demand for choice beer (“Come, butler, draw us a bowl of the best / Then we hope your soul in heaven shall rest”), but the threat follows quickly: “But if you draw us a bowl of the small [i.e., weak beer], / Then down will come butler, bowl, and all.”15

  In an agricultural economy, the kind of “misrule” I have been describing did not really challenge the authority of the gentry. The historian E. P. Thompson has noted that landed gentlemen could always try to use a generous handout at Christmas as a way of making up for a year’s accumulation of small injustices, regaining in the process their tenants’ goodwill. In fact, episodes of misrule were widely tolerated by the elite. Some historians argue that role inversions actually functioned as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits, and that by inverting the established hierarchy (rather than simply ignoring it), those role inversions actually served as a reaffirmation of the existing social order.16 It was al
l a little like Halloween todays—when, for a single evening, children assume the right to enter the houses of neighbors and even strangers, to demand of their elders a gift (or “treat”) and to threaten them, should they fail to provide one, with a punishment (or “trick”).

  This kind of trick-or-treat ritual is largely nonexistent today at Christmas, but vestiges of it do remain. Take, for instance, a December 1991 article in Money magazine, which warns its readers to “Tip Defensively” at Christmas: “‘At holiday time you must show people who work for you that you appreciate good service,’…. Translation: if you don’t, you’ll suffer the consequences all next year (Day-Glo hair tinting or sprinkler-soaked newspapers)…. Keep in mind a kind of reverse Marxism: to each according to your need. That is, tip most generously those who can do you the most damage.”17

  PROSECUTING THE CHRISTMAS-KEEPERS, 1620–1750

  In early modern Europe, all this postharvest behavior operated within (though at the boundaries of) the normal social order. It was part of a cultural world that went back thousands of years and involved the yearly agricultural cycle, which defined and integrated work and play, with times of intense labor followed by periods of equally intense celebration. This seasonal cycle, perhaps more than anything else, was what determined the texture of people’s lives. It was even appropriated by the Church (as the Christmas season itself had been) and given a religious gloss, whereby times of celebration were associated with any number of official saints’ days that were generally observed with more revelry than piety.

  Here was exactly what the Puritans tried to suppress when they came to power in England, and New England, in the middle of the seventeenth century. It was this entire cultural world, with its periodic seasons of labor and festivity—and not just Christmas itself—that Puritans felt to be corrupt, “pagan,” evil. It was this world that they systematically attempted to abolish and “purify.” They wished to replace it with a simpler, more orderly culture in which people were more disciplined and self-regulated, in which ornate churches and cathedrals were replaced by plain “meetinghouses,” in which lavish periodic celebrations—the seasonal cycle itself—were replaced by an orderly and regular succession of days, punctuated only by a weekly day of rest and self-examination, the Sabbath.