Modern puritans are trying to spoil our Christmas fun

EAT, DRINK AND BE MERRY: The average Christmas dinner contains 6,000 calories survive among these spoilsports. A few years ago the TUC warned that the mistletoe was not a festive piece of foliage but a possible vehicle for sexual harassment. “There won’t be much Christmas cheer in your workplace if your winter wonderland turns out to be a danger zone,” said Frances O’Grady of the TUC.

But by far the most intense source of puritanical reproach is focused on our traditional habit of indulgence in rich food and drink over the Christmas period. It is precisely because this is a time for conspicuous ingestion that the fingerwaggers are so aggrieved. In 1643 the anti-royalist parliament expressed its outrage that the Christmas holiday was “giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights”.

The public health lobbyists feel exactly the same way today. They are appalled that over Christmas the public is estimated to put down its throat 250million pints of beer, 35million bottles of wine, 10million turkeys and 25million Christmas puddings, each slice of which contains more than 1,000 calories. The average Christmas dinner contains 6,000 calories – far beyond the officially recommended range for men of 2,500 calories a day.

In their effort to change our ways the health advisers have been churning out their admonitions. “Make open-top mince pies, using less pastry,” urges the NHS Healthy Choices website, adding that dates should be swapped for chocolates.

In place of plum pudding, suggests the BBC’s Good Food guide, why not have sticky cinnamon figs? The Public Health Agency in Northern Ireland tells revellers to alternate “alcoholic drinks with water”, “avoid rounds”, “know your limits” and “drink slowly” in “sips not gulps”. I am sure that advice was eagerly followed in my home city of Belfast.

The modern puritans like to present their gospel of misery as a form of social concern. One of their key arguments is that excess is a civic vice because of the supposed burden it places on the NHS, especially through obesity. Such lectures are a direct consequence of having a vast, monolithic health service subsidised entirely by public funds, where citizens are held to have a duty to be healthy in order to reduce costs. But this is nonsense since smokers, drinkers and heavy eaters pay far more in taxes than they take out in treatment.

History shows that hostility to pleasure has always been manifested by jealous personality types, who think joylessness and austerity are virtues.

AS THE great American journalist HL Mencken wrote, the puritan is haunted by “the fear that someone, somewhere may be having fun”. The spirit of the ironhearted Cromwellian can be found in the 19th-century Victorian matron clucking about respectability, the 20thcentury hair-shirted Marxist railing at capitalism and the 21st-century green campaigner who sees all materialism as a form of evil.

What the busybodies seek is the chance to parade their moral superiority and to exert control. That is why they so eagerly wield the weapons of bureaucracy, including sugar taxes, equality audits, healthy drinking limits, calorie counters, environmental regulations and public health warnings.

But the best way to deny them influence is by celebrating with gusto.

‘Busybodies want to exert control over us’