In the first half of the 17th century Christmas was both an important religious festival and it was also an eagerly anticipated extended holiday period, running from Christmas Day until Twelfth Night, that was celebrated as jubilantly as it is today. However, the advent of an increasingly puritanical government in the 1640s led to a variety of measures designed to eradicate the celebration of Christmas and this eventually culminated in an outright ban on the festival.

There were many 17th century Christmas traditions and pastimes that would appear familiar to modern day readers. Christmas Day itself was a public holiday and churches held special services to mark the birth of Christ. Further services were held over the holiday period and many businesses and workplaces operated shorter working hours than usual.

Public buildings and private dwellings were frequently adorned with decorations of holly and ivy and rosemary and bays. Friends and families exchanged gifts and the wealthy disbursed Christmas boxes to their servants, tradesmen and the poor. Special festive food such as roast beef, minced pies and plum porridge were consumed, and a seasonal Christmas ale was imbibed. The Christmas period was also a time for leisure, and the populace revelled in diversions such as singing, dancing, stage-plays and gambling.

However, the puritans considered the lengthy holiday period to simply be an excuse for excessive drunkenness and immoral behaviour. Indeed, Philip Stubbes neatly summarised the puritan position on Christmas in his book The Anatomie of Abuses. Stubbes complained that ‘more mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides,’ and that Christmas was, ‘to the great dishonour of God.’

Moreover, the puritans also believed that there was no biblical justification for Christmas and they viewed the festival (‘Christ’s Mass’) as an unwelcome remnant of the Roman Catholic faith.

The process of outlawing Christmas began in the early 1640s as power began to move away from Charles I towards a puritan dominated Parliament.

In 1644 Christmas Day fell upon the last Wednesday of the month. Shortly before the start of the Civil War, in January 1642, Charles I had consented to Parliament’s demands that the last Wednesday in every month should become a fast day. Rather than permit the population to devour their traditional Christmas feast Parliament declared that the designated feast day should be observed. Furthermore, Parliament insisted that the occasion should be met with ‘more solemn humiliation’ than usual because of ‘our sins, and the sins of our forefathers who have turned this Feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights’.

The puritan attack upon the festival of Christmas continued and in the following year Parliament published a new Directory of Public Worship. The directory was based upon stringent puritanical ideals and pronounced that Christmas could no longer be observed. ‘Festival days, vulgarly called Holy days,’ it declared, ‘having no Warrant in the Word of God, are not to be continued.’

An additional Parliamentary ordinance was passed in June 1647 that confirmed that the feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun had been abolished and that their celebration was a punishable offence. Nevertheless, Christmas festivities remained enduringly popular and further legislation was passed throughout the 1650s to maintain and reinforce its abolition. In 1652, for instance, a proclamation issued on 24 December asserted that shops and markets should stay open on 25 December. Similarly, the Lord Mayor of London was beseeched by the Council of State in 1657 to prevent any Christmas celebrations in the capital.

The puritans were persistent in their efforts to prohibit Christmas. However, the repeated injunctions the government were forced to make throughout the period of the Commonwealth suggest that the public did not share their puritanical beliefs when it came to Christmas.

Many people simply ignored the government’s edicts and continued to mark the day as an important religious event and as a holiday.

Clandestine religious services, usually at home, were still held. As Brian Duppa, the Bishop of Salisbury, pointed out in 1655, congregations continued ‘to offer up the public prayers and sacrifices of the church, though it be under private roofs’ and he had never heard of anyone being ‘disturbed or troubled for doing it’. Similarly, the diarist John Evelyn received the sacrament in 1656 at ‘Dr Wild’s lodging, where I rejoiced to find so full an assembly of devout and sober Christians’.

However, there were dangers in partaking in a public service. In 1657, for example, Evelyn attended a church service in Exeter House Chapel on the Strand, only to have it invaded by soldiers. ‘As we went up to receive the Sacrament,’ he vividly recalled in his diary, ‘the miscreants held their muskets against us, as if they would have shot us at the altar.’

Parliament’s attempts to abolish the customary Christmas holiday were even less successful. Indeed, Sir Henry Mildmay informed the House of Commons on 27 December 1652 that on the 25th there had been ‘very wilful and strict observation of the day commonly called Christmas Day throughout the cities of London and Westminster, by a general keeping of their shops shut up and that there were contemptuous speeches used by some in favour thereof ’. In the same year, The Flying Eagle reported that the ‘taverns and taphouses’ were at full capacity on Christmas Day. Similarly, the staunch puritan Ezekiel Woodward acknowledged in 1656 that prohibiting the celebration of Christmas was a significant challenge as ‘the people go on holding fast to their heathenish customs and abominable idolatries, and think they do well’.

Moreover, puritan attempts to prevent the celebration of Christmas could encounter fierce resistance and, on occasion, violence and civil disorder. In London, on Christmas Day 1643, for instance, a group of apprentices forced the closure of any shops which had opened for business. In 1647 a mob prevented the Lord Mayor of London and his marshals from removing the Christmas decorations which had been draped over a water conduit in Cornhill. The confrontation turned violent and ended with arrests and injuries.

Conflicts over Christmas were not solely confined to the capital. In Bury St Edmunds, for example, on Christmas Day 1646 a gang of apprentices stopped local businessmen opening for trade. Similarly, in Canterbury on Christmas Day 1647 violent riots broke out in response to the ban on Christmas and it took the mayor days to restore order. Moreover, the Kingdom’s Weekly Post explained, in December 1647, that in some places in the country people were so desperate for a sermon on Christmas Day that the ‘church doors were kept with swords and other weapons defensive and offensive whilst the minister was in the pulpit’.

There can be little doubt that the puritans upset and alienated a significant proportion of the population with their prohibition on Christmas festivities. It is also likely that, despite the pressures and intimidation they faced, many people continued to practise the traditional customs and celebrated the secular and religious elements of the season. As we have seen, the puritans managed to drive the religious celebration of Christmas into the private sphere but failed to convince the populace that fasting and solemn contemplation were more worthy activities to undertake at Christmas time than their traditional festivities.

The Restoration of Charles II saw all the legislation of the period 1642–1660 repealed and the public were once again free to observe the Christmas period in any way they chose.

Further reading:

Gray, Annie (2021) At Christmas We Feast: Festive Food Through the Ages, Profile Books

Pimlott, J.A.R. (1978) The Englishman’s Christmas: A Social History, Harvester Press