There was war on Christmas, President Trump, waged by Christians called Puritans - The ... - 0 views
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Here’s how it generally went down, according to Stephen Nissenbaum in his book “The Battle for Christmas.” On Christmas Day, the lower classes would dress up in strange costumes to “invert” their roles: Men would dress up as women, young boys as bishops, and the lowliest peasant or the town drunk might be declared the “Lord of Misrule.”
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They would gather into a mob and go around to the houses and estates of the well-to-do, making a racket, singing bawdy songs and demanding entry. Amazingly, most of the time they were let in and given alcohol, food and even money. There was gambling and promiscuity (often leading to marriages at the end of the misrule). Once the mob was satisfied, it would move on to the next rich person’s estate.
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If it seems surprising that rich people would willingly let a drunken mob in their homes and get them even drunker, that’s because the alternative was worse. If a homeowner tried to block entry, the mob would break in, destroy property, assault the homeowner, frighten his wife and children, and then take the food and drink anyway.
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the tradition served “as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits,” and thus, ultimately reinforced the hierarchy.
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Christmas misrule was largely tolerated. After all, the birth of Jesus had been tacked onto pagan traditions that had existed for centuries.
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So a period of gorging and resting was almost written into the stars, and most pagan European cultures had a holiday for this. In fact, Romans had been celebrating Saturnalia — a similar celebration of social inversion and orgiastic gluttony — for much longer before that.
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December meant three things in early Europe: The work of harvesting the year’s crops was done, the beer and wine they’d been brewing was ready to drink, and it was cold enough to slaughter animals without the meat going immediately bad. December was often the only time of year when people got to eat fresh meat.
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Puritans were fully aware of the non-Christian roots of Christmas, and unlike the Anglican church, they were having none of it
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During Puritan rule of England in the mid-1600s, they attempted to make it illegal, scheduling Parliament to meet on Dec. 25 and ordering a day of fasting and repentance. They were met with riots and insurrection.
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The Puritan ban on Christmas lasted much longer in New England, on paper from 1659 to 1681. But even after English authorities overturned the ban, it was still culturally taboo for well over a century afterward.