Legal Brief for December, 2016

Can Christmas Be Abolished?

It seems hard to believe in this day and age that anyone would object to the celebration of Christmas, either as a secular festival of goodwill, or a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, let alone abolish it entirely.  At one point however in the mid-1600's in England, Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Parliament which ruled England at the time, did just that.  The roots of the Puritans crusade against Christmas lay in the earlier transition in the mid-1500's of England from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.

This transition began famously under the rule of Henry VIII and his desperate attempts to have a male heir, and his feud with the Pope in Rome over whether his first marriage should be annulled.  After swinging back and forth between succeeding monarchs, by the early 1600's under Elizabeth I, England was a solidly Protestant country.  There were however still elements of the public who maintained their Catholic loyalties, and who met secretly in their homes for the celebration of the Catholic mass.  This caused considerable concern among the political rulers about where the loyalty of such subjects ultimately lay - with the reigning monarch and government of England or with the Pope in Rome.  It was suspected that in fact these citizens would give their primary allegiance to the Pope, which rendered them treasonous in the eyes of the rest of the populace.

When this political status was combined with the fact that Catholic faith put a particularly heavy emphasis on the celebration of Christ's Mass as the primary holy day of the year (whereas the new Protestant faith was focused more on the celebration of Christ's resurrection at Easter), there began an increasing momentum in some elements of English society as the 1600's moved along to clamp down on the celebrations of Christmas, in order to suppress what was left of the Catholic faith in England.  Christmas was characterized as "a popish festival with no biblical justification".  Of further concern was that in addition to the religious celebration at Christmas there had also developed a purely secular set of traditions and events, many of which apparently involved eating and drinking to excess, gambling and dancing, staging of plays and pantomimes and other such scandalous behaviours, which lasted over the 12 day period from Christmas Day to New Year's Day.

All of these circumstances were too much for the spartan mindset of the Puritans to put up with any longer.  One of their first acts after gaining power after triumphing over Charles I in the English Civil War, which ran during the mid 1640's, was to enact a law that literally banned the celebration of Christmas, replacing it with a day of fasting.  Not surprisingly, this was not met with universal support.  In the ensuing years protests broke out each year at Christmas against the strictness of the new measures, and one year Canterbury was controlled by rioters for several weeks.

With the overthrow of Cromwell and the Puritans in 1660 and the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II, the measures which had banned the celebration of Christmas were overturned, and both the religious and secular elements of Christmas could once again be celebrated openly and with all the exuberance that the people could muster.