The Real War on Christmas was waged by Christians

Ho! Ho! Ho! It's that jolly time of year again! That hilarious time in the USA when FOX News, Republicans, and rightwing Evangelicals profess outrage at the "War on Christmas." A fake outrage, of course, trotted out at years' end for political and cultural reasons, like keeping the poor in their place working for peanuts. Not to mention keeping up donations to TV evangelists with huge mansions. 

Today's War on Christmas is a Phony War. But a real war on Christmas once took place. It was several centuries ago in the UK, with spillovers into Puritan America. And guess what? It was waged by Christians. They were called Presbyterians in Scotland and Puritans in England and New England. 

In England, the Puritans were on the winning side of of the Civil War between Parliament and Charles I in the 1640s. They famously closed the London theaters as dens of immorality. They also abolished the celebration of Christmas as a "pagan celebration." They ordered that it be kept as a day of "fasting and humiliation." No singing, no dancing, no merriment at all. Try that today. 

In New England, transplanted Puritans did the same. They kept the ban in place until the 1850s. The war ended for good after President Ulysses S. Grant declared Christmas a federal holiday in the 1870s.

It may seem odd for Christians to ban Christmas, but the Puritans found no biblical justification for celebrating the birth of Christ. Nobody knew when he was born anyway (we still don't). The Puritans also associated Christmas revels with sinful, ungodly pagan rites and behavior, not to mention Papists (Catholics). 

A wit once defined a Puritan as a person who was angry because somewhere, somebody was having a good time. That is a bit simplistic and unfair to Puritans as a whole, but the accusation fit some of them.

The Scots had preceded the English in the War on Christmas, as in so many aspects of British life. After the Presbyterian Church of Scotland came to dominate Scottish religious life in the late 16th century, they abolished the celebration of Christmas. John Knox, the Calvinist preacher who led the Scottish Reformation, was a dour sort who darkened Scottish culture for centuries. 

Scotland's Christmas ceased to be a holiday of feasting, fun, and folly (if it ever was). It became just another dark, dank, and dreary winter day -- like a Scottish Sunday until recently. 

During the Civil War, Scots Presbyterians allied with like-minded English Puritans. They also made common cause in the war on Christmas. 

[Image: Parliamentary soldiers enforcing the ban on celebrating Christmas, c. 1640s, William Barns Wollen, 1900] 

In England, the Restoration of the Monarchy under Charles II ("The Merry Monarch") in 1660 also led to a restoration of traditional Christmas celebrations. They were still light years away from the materialistic orgies of today. That required the influence of grasping, greedy American capitalism.  

In Scotland, the restoration of Christmas took much longer than in England. Presbyterian leaders continued to stifle enthusiasm for Christmas enjoyment for a couple of centuries. The difference shows in the holiday hierarchy of Scotland, compared to England, and most other civilized countries.

In Scotland, Christmas comes in a distant second to Hogmanay (New Years' Eve) as a real blowout. Think about it. The canny Scots simply transferred their serious celebrating from a sacred day to a secular one. Touché, Puritans! Freud would have understood. 

If you want to witness Scots letting their hair down these days, go to Edinburgh during Hogmanay! Or, just visit any Scots pub on a Saturday night. 

Scotland's elevation of New Year spread to the rest of the globe by the 20th century. For what do we sing at midnight on 1 January? "Auld Lang Syne" by Scotland's national poet, Robert (Rabbie) Burns, of course!

PS. If you go to the USA these days, be careful not to say "Happy Holidays!" or "Seasons Greetings!" And do not write "Merry Xmas" on your cards or gifts either. You may be accused of making war on Christmas, or even of Satanism. Or, even worse, of being a liberal. 

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A Victorian Cartoonist's Christmas

Victorian Christmas cartoons tended to lack the rough, sometimes raunchy humor and social satire of their Georgian predecessors. Victorian images of Christmas were more often sentimental, nostalgic, pious, and domestic. They focused primarily on the comfortably well off, and the holiday as a time of merry family celebration. Well behaved children were an important part of the scene. There were exceptions, as we shall see.

An example of the sentimental family scene is this Punch cartoon by John Leech (1817-1864), "A Family Group, Baby Stirring the Pudding." The large-headed Mr. Punch is at the center, helping "Baby," surrounded by admiring adults and children.

The 1840s saw several important developments in the creation of today's Christmas traditions. That decade saw the introduction of the first Christmas cards, by Henry Cole, a British civil servant. This one below, said to be the very first, shows a prosperous and respectable family enjoying a holiday meal. 

The publication of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in 1843 helped reinforce the sentimental trend. John Leech's illustration of Mr. Fezziwig's Christmas party conveys a nostalgic view of the time when Ebenezer Scrooge was his young employee. The jolly, humane Fezziwig dances under the mistletoe in a room full of happy revelers. Dickens implies that this is how Christmas could be, or rather, should be. 

Fezziwig's party stands in sharp contrast to the Christmas day meal of the Cratchit family. The occasion is pious, sentimental, loving, but meager -- meager at least until the reformed Scrooge shows up with presents, a big turkey, trimmings, and a raise for Bob Cratchit. Now enlightened, Scrooge makes Christmas what it should be.

The decorated Christmas tree began to take front and center in portrayals of the holiday during the Victorian Age. The Hanoverian monarchs had introduced the Christmas tree from Germany in the 18th century. 

But few of the British adopted the custom begore the reign of Queen Victoria. Beginning in the 1840s, her German husband Prince Albert helped to popularize the Christmas Tree. The image below shows the royal family admiring Das Tannenbaum.

The Royals' Christmas dos did not always receive such positive portrayals. The 1840s was not only a time of the emergence of some modern Christmas traditions, but also of the Hungry Forties, great political and social unrest, the democratic movement known as Chartism, and the Irish Famine. 

The cartoon below, from a radical newspaper, pictures the royals and company gorging themselves on a giant Christmas pudding, or "Blom Buddin" as Prince Albert calls it. Albert is presented as a freeloader helping himself the "good tings of Angland." 

Victoria hands a plate of plum stones to John Bull, the "cook" of the pudding, and says he can lick the dish and suck the stones when the family have finished. Bull represents the people who have created the country's wealth but live on crumbs.

Victorian Christmas images, such as the one below by John Tenniel from Punch in 1883, occasionally focused on those for whom the holiday was just another day of deprivation and poverty. Here, Father Christmas confronts a poorly dressed child who lives in a cellar and knows nothing about him. "This must be altered," he says, presumably meaning such dire poverty as well as ignorance of the Great Present Giver.

Some Christmas Cartoons could be positively frightening, in a humorous way, at least. An example is George Du Maurier's Christmas cartoon in Punch, 1865. The caption refers to a naturalist who says that children should not read fables and fairy tales but read natural history instead. "Here is the result [of reading natural history] on the youthful mind" Du Maurier comments tongue-in-cheek. 

A Georgian Cartoonist's Christmas

According to contemporary cartoonists, Georgian Christmas celebrations were not the scenes of pious, orderly behavior and domestic bliss the Victorians liked to portray. Consider this cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson, from 1804, "Christmas Gambols".

Drunken servants party in the kitchen in less than spiritual fashion. What would their masters think? Perhaps they encouraged such conviviality! Party on ! The mistletoe hanging from the ceiling indicates that the servants are acting in accord with an old Christmas tradition -- up to a point. 

"At Home in the Nursery" by George Cruikshank, 1825, portrays a chaotic Christmas party for children at the home of Master and Mrs. Twoshoes. The children are certainly enjoying themselves! Not quite the pious scene Dickens portrayed of the Cratchit household in A Christmas Carol.

Lewis Walpole's, "A Pleasing Pastime, Christmas Quadrille Party," 1826 shows four gentlemen braving ice skating with hilarious results, probably after tippling a bit too much at the local pub.

"Drawing for a Twelfth Night Cake at St. Anne's Hill," was the work of George Cruikshank's father Isaac.  It portrays an all male celebration at the country house of Charles James Fox in 1799. The image emphasizes Fox's sympathy with revolutionary France, then at war with Britain (liberty caps). Twelfth night celebrations were often rather wild affairs. Like most Georgian celebrations, I suppose.

Placid or Chaotic, Enjoy your Holidays. God Bless Us All, Everyone!