The Battle for Christmas (3 page)

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, than 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.

T
HE
P
URITANS
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”:

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:

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:

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 all 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

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.

Christmas was an important (and symbolically charged) expression of this cultural world, and the Puritans attacked it with particular intensity. In England, the Puritan Parliament made a point of holding regular sessions each December 25 from 1644 through 1656, and it did what it could to suppress the traditional observance of the date. (In 1644 Parliament actually decreed that December 25 was to be observed as a day of fasting and repentance—for the sinful way the occasion had been made into a time of “giving liberty to carnall and sensual delights.”)
¹⁸
One unhappy Englishman referred to those delights as nothing more than “liberty and harmless sports … [by] which the toiling plowswain and labourer were wont to be recreated, and their spirits and hopes revived for a whole twelve month.” But the Puritans had made these innocent customs “extinct and put out of use … as if they never had been…. Thus are the merry lords of misrule suppressed by the mad lords of bad rule at Westminster [i.e., Parliament].”
¹⁹

“The Tryal of Father Christmas
.” The title page of a 1686 British book mocking the Puritans who had suppressed Christmas—and who had been out of power in England for some twenty-five years when this book was published. The Puritan jurors in this trial bore such names as “Mr. Cold-kitchen,” “Mr. Give-little,” and “Mr. Hate-good.”
(Courtesy, Mark Bond-Webster)