WI Christmas untamed

Christmas in Britain before the Victorians was more a festival than a kids holiday.
Lots of eating, drinking, and merriment. Twelfth Night used to be the last big one for a feast and presents.
Essentially a Christian Hannukah.

It's difficult not to see the holiday season becoming what it is. If Christ-Mass isn't chosen then Twelfth Night probably would be.
Factor in commercialisation of gift-giving and what really changes other than the date?
 
Not much to do on the land for farmers. Short daylight makes the work less cost-efficient in factories. Maybe those are the reasons Christmas became bigger than Eastern, despite the theological arguments?
 
"what was it before it was a family holiday- a public drunkenness by adult men holiday?"

This is actually what it was before the Vcitorians got a hold of it.

This was part of the general clean-up of morals by the Victorians, so maybe I got ahead of myself. Maybe the way to keep Christmas the way it was is to get rid of the whole Victorian thing entirely. My guess is that this was tied to the industrial revolution, and the need to get workers to report to their factory shifts on time and sober. Leisure time for workers was also greatly cut back. But no industrial revolution means big changes.

An alternative is that they manage to get rid of Christmas entirely, like they did with all the saints' days, instead of co-opting it.
 
"what was it before it was a family holiday- a public drunkenness by adult men holiday?"

This is actually what it was before the Vcitorians got a hold of it.

This was part of the general clean-up of morals by the Victorians, so maybe I got ahead of myself. Maybe the way to keep Christmas the way it was is to get rid of the whole Victorian thing entirely. My guess is that this was tied to the industrial revolution, and the need to get workers to report to their factory shifts on time and sober. Leisure time for workers was also greatly cut back. But no industrial revolution means big changes.

An alternative is that they manage to get rid of Christmas entirely, like they did with all the saints' days, instead of co-opting it.

That might require the Commonwealth of England to survive over the long term, since the Puritans tried to ban Christmas as pagan.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
The idea of "Victorian prudishness" has been greatly overestimated. It is true, of course, that Christmas celebrations in older times tended to include more drunkenness. During the Middle ages, Christmas gradually became more popular, going from a solemn mass to a feast-and-festival. The feasting, generally, was an aristocratic/elite affair, with a big see-and-be-seen component. (To the point that during the High Middle Ages, we get chroniclers noting which powerful people went where for the Christmas feast, since this told you a lot about power dynamics.) The common people did the drinking and gambling etc. -- the same chronicles describe caroling as "a lewd affair", indicating that it was indeed more of a wild, drunken thing. Much like carnival, Christmas was a chance for the populace to embrace 'misrule' and blow off steam. I useful pressure valve.

We see this up to the point where the puritans start harping on Christmas, and violent riots result. During the Enlightenment, the prominence of Christmas seems to fade. And then it's indeed brought back in Victorian times, thanks in no small part to... Charles Dickens. That's right. He basically invented modern Christmas in A Christmas Carol, presenting a totally fictionalised presentation of what "Christmas used to be", which left out all the rough bits and pretty much joined the ideal of the mass (piety) to the ideal of the feast. Caroling was re-invented as innocent, and thus we get modern Chrismas.

Of course, Christmas went through a bit of a revival on the continent, too. To some extent, the re-invented idea of Christmas probably influenced the way it developed, but Dickens was in many ways one example of a broader development. Christmas was making a bit of a comeback, in a tamer form, after it had been less prominent for a while. The fact that it was generally calmer should not be contributed to "Victorian sensibilities", because Christmas was already taking that new shape throughout the West, and not just in Victorian Britain.

Anyway, I'll repeat: it's a bit sad that the rough edges got lost. Then again, that same pressure valve remains needed. I don't know about other countries, but in the Netherlands, it's now a part of New Year's Eve. Fireworks, drunkenness, inevitable clashes with the police... You know, the way it should be. ;)
 
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