When Parliament really did cancel Christmas...
Christmas might feel like it is cancelled because of coronavirus, but spare a thought for families who lived about 400 years ago – when Parliament outlawed the festive holidays. Here, Loughborough University’s Dr Sara Read and Dr Catie Gill look at how th
THE cancellation of Christmas celebrations, including singing, dancing, drinking, and playing games between 1644 and 1660 by Parliament will strike a chord with people today as restrictions are placed upon homes and celebrations are curtailed.
With Parliamentarian soldiers patrolling the streets to make sure no one was being merry, jolly or festive during December, 17th century families had it as tough as we do today – minus the virus, of course.
“We’re living through history right now,” said Dr Sara Read.
“In years to come, people will look back to December 2020 and sympathise with how upsetting a lockdown Christmas must have been, with people unable to celebrate in their usual ways, singing carols and partying.
“But, 375 years ago, people were reading about the imprisonment of Father Christmas – it was the 17th century version of fake news.
“Today, thanks to Twitter, the Prime Minister is able to send out a much more positive message to an even wider audience.
“Only last month – a week after the Italian PM had posted something similar – Boris Johnson tweeted an eight-year-old boy to reassure him that ‘Father Christmas will be packing his sleigh and delivering presents this Christmas!’.
“Much better than the propaganda of the 1600s.”
Like today’s satirical scrutiny by publications such as Private Eye and Charlie Hebdo, the satirists of the 1600s went to town on the suppression of seasonal revelry.
Published in January 1645/6, the anonymous writer of The Arraignment Conviction, and Imprisonment of Christmas, printed by someone under the pseudonym of Simon Minc’d Pye, penned an allegorical tale, which saw cruel Puritans imprisoning Old Father Christmas as a way of implementing the festive ban.
Back then, there was no concept of Santa as we know him.
The Old Father Christmas of this pamphlet, and various other publications, was more of a symbol of Christmas festivities.
However, in The Arraignment (prosecution), he sounded somewhat familiar: a jolly, fat man, with a long grey beard, who carried a sack full of presents, and was welcomed into the homes of rich and poor alike
– although he wore a glittering gold and silver outfit, rather than a red one.
Opponents of the oppressive Christmas ban quickly made him a martyr to the harsh Puritan diktat.
But, unlike modern-day satire, The Arraignment gave voice to the very ideas it seemed to be opposing.
Much of the pamphlet was spent summarising parliament’s position on Christmas because part of what it was doing was mocking both the pro and anti-Christmas factions.
So, readers learned of the origin of the ban and its theological pretext: to rid the calendar of the Catholic holidays which, to their way of thinking, lacked legitimacy.
It referenced the ordinance (law) responsible for banning the festive season, A Directory for Public Worship, which declared: “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy Days, having no warrant in the Word of God, are not to be continued.”
Christmas was now meant to be spent in quiet reflection.
The only holy day from now on was the Sabbath.
In mitigation to these Puritan ideals, the pamphlet’s main act of opposition was to make the sympathisers of Old Father Christmas seem like heroes. In the story, the protagonists, upon learning he was missing from prison, launched a search for him.
When they found that Old Father Christmas – “much wasted, so that he hath looked very thin” – had broken out of the jail by squeezing through the bars of his window, they offered him refuge.
The message appeared to be “don’t worry, things will soon get back to normal, Parliament won’t be able to ban Christmas for long”. This indeed was the case.
A lot of the old festivals returned in 1660, once the monarchy was restored – if indeed they ever truly went away.
The fact that the authorities kept issuing proclamations throughout the 1650s suggests they did not.
But the story does not end there.
In fact, the idea seems to haunt the popular imagination.
The 2014 British film Get Santa is not by any means a remake of The Arraignment, Conviction and Imprisoning of Christmas.
But, in much the same way, it features an unjustly imprisoned Father Christmas, played by Jim Broadbent, who has to break out of prison and rescue Christmas.
Though we like to think of Christmas as an integral part of the festive calendar, it might actually be that we cherish it most when we think that it could be taken away.
Whether this is because, like the fictional Get Santa, or like the pamphlet from 1645 it is because of other policy decisions, we know in our heart of hearts that you can lock up Old Christmas but no power on earth can keep him there.