The anxieties that long ago shadowed Christmas are back

Christmas has been given the green light by the government this year less because it marks the birth of Christ than because retailers and the hospitality industry desperately need it to go ahead. Other feast days in the Christian calendar still belong to the church. Christmas is the feast day that a fundamentally secular nation has made its own.

It’s become part of the festive tradition for Christians to mourn this as the ultimate triumph of commercialisation and self-indulgence. But it might comfort them this year to know that their anxiety has deep roots. Folk memories of Oliver Cromwell banning Christmas — however distorted they may be — remain sufficiently enduring that the Prime Minister, one of life’s natural Charles IIs, must surely have been desperate not to be associated with them. Even so, if ever it were possible to feel sympathy with the Puritans and their conviction that ‘Revelling, Dicing, Carding, Mumming, and all Licentious Liberty’ at Christmas risked calamity for a nation, it is surely now. Parliament in 1643 summoned England to mark the midwinter season with ‘solemn humiliation’ rather than with the traditional festivities because it dreaded that a festival of life might be transformed into a sump of death. Puritans were not killjoys for the sake of it. They were deeply serious, principled people. In 2020 they have many heirs.

So too, however, do those who opposed them. Today, as in the 17th century, the yearning to feast and make merry in the sombre depths of midwinter ranks as something more than mere irresponsibility. On Christmas Day in 1608, settlers in Jamestown wandering the snowy American wilderness ‘were never more merry, nor fed on more plentiful of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-foule, and good bread; nor never had better fires in England’.