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In the build-up to Christmas 2008, let's start with an alternative view, described by Alternativity:

"Many find Christmas a stressful and busy time of year and wish for something different, but don’t know where to start. Alternativity has ideas about getting started; we offer materials and workshops to help you explore how to take control of your celebrations and make advent a time of peace and joy. We recognize that is isn’t easy to go against the flow so offer simple steps towards celebrating the freedom, joy and peace offered by the coming of the Messiah."

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Christmas in Scotland

This article by Amy McNeese was first published in the Church of Scotland magazine, Life & Work, and is reproduced with permission.

For almost 400 years, Christmas was banned in Scotland. At the height of the Reformation, in 1583, when anything smacking of Catholicism and idolatrous excess was thrown out with contempt, Christmas and all its trappings was wiped off the official calendar. On December 25th, not so much as a plum pudding was allowed to steam.

There was nothing half-hearted about this gesture. Reinforced by the hard arm of the law, this was a ban that had bite. Over the centuries that followed, many a casual offender was called to account for Christmas transgressions, and no seasonal leniency was shown.

This was an age when religious belief could mean the difference between life and a very nasty death. Whereas nowadays many Christians look on aghast at the crazy commer­cialism of modern gift-buying, they wouldn’t dream of taking serious steps to stop others celebrating as they wish. Back in the 16th century, however, this is exactly what they did.

The stripping of Christmas into a day of normal activity and religious introspection was a cause adopted with zeal by Presbyterians throughout Scotland. Newly freed from Catholicism, the country found Christmas a very public way of declaring its hard-won creeds.

Such was the Scots’ passion for spreading their faith that within a couple of centuries of the ban, the feasting, drinking, gambling and ‘guising’ of the medieval Church had long since died out in Britain as a whole. The Church of Scotland and the reformer John Knox take the credit for this. While German theologian Martin Luther had a fondness for Christmas, Knox soundly condemned it, both because of its ‘popish’ overtones and because of its association with ‘feasting, acting and other vices’.

The Kirk’s influence spread spectacularly. Scottish Presbyterians, when called on for support by the Puritans of the English Parliament in 1644, did so on the understanding that their allies would in exchange impose the ban on Christmas. For over a decade traditional English Christmas festivities were prohibited, and any transgression sternly punished. Even so, this decree was widely violated by a deeply resentful nation, and a second enforcement act was passed in 1647.

Again the people rebelled, this time so forcefully that armed officers had to be sent to remove evergreens decorating St Margaret’s Church, near the English Parliament itself. Rioting broke out in London, Kent, Oxford, Canterbury and Ipswich, in which several people were killed. A petition with more than 10,000 signatures demanded either the restoration of Christmas or else the king back on the throne. At least one historian believes that these unpopular laws may have played a part in the English cry for the Restoration of the crown.

Even after the bans were revoked in England in 1660, Puritans and other Non-Conformists “ranted against Anti-Christ’s-masse and those Masse-mongers and Papists who observe it”, and were commonly known to “inveigh against New Year gifts and evergreens, or to attack the Pope by refusing to eat plum-broth; or to condemn those who ate mince-pies as Papists and idolaters”. There was even objection to the word Christmas because it incorporated the Popish ‘mass’.

These attitudes were carried to the New World by English Puritans, Quakers, Baptists and Scottish Presbyterians. In America, reprisals were as harsh here as back in Scotland. In Massachusetts a five-shilling penalty was imposed on anyone found feasting or shirking work on Christmas Day, and in 1621 the Governor of Plymouth Colony reprimanded some “lusty young men” whom he found on Christmas “pitching ye barr, and some playing at stoole-ball and such like sports”.

A hundred years later the Quakers were still ranting against the Christmas pie as “an invention of the scarlet whore of Babylon, an hodge podge of superstition, Popery, the Devil and all his works”.

From this period in Scotland there is the story of a woman who was daringly cooking a special supper for the day. Looking out of her window she saw the minister coming towards her cottage. She quickly hid the cooking pot in the only place she could think of, under the blanket on her bed. The minister came in, and despite the woman’s attempts to hurry him away sat talking for ages. After a time, the blanket caught fire, the supper was ruined and the bed was burned. The woman was forced, in penance, to sit on a stool at the front of the Kirk and endure the condemnation of elders and neigh­bours alike.

Well into the Enlightenment era, Scots held fast to their austerity. For many, Scottishness was in a large part defined by membership of the Kirk, in contrast with the Episcopalian English or Catholic Irish (Catholicism was not legalized until 1829). For almost four cen­turies Scottish society, by and large, rejected the ostentatious display and over-consumption which had become hallmarks of the Christmas festival in England and elsewhere. It was one way of declaring their individuality.

Despite the tenacious legacy of severe Presbyterianism, by the 1900s Christmas was beginning to infiltrate the country. It arrived in small pockets, from Anglicans following English customs, to more liberal-minded churchgoers interested in the customs of their neighbours down south and across the Atlantic. It came, however, in a small way. Stockings were hung on mantelpieces and carols sung in Church. Yet New Year remained the pre-eminent festival, and in many homes presents were still swapped on Hogmanay rather than Christmas Day.

But as the century progressed, three things changed the face of the Scottish Christmas. Most importantly, perhaps, was the influence of World War Two. Abroad and in the company of English soldiers, many Scots experienced their first proper Christmas dinner. Once tasted, it was never forgotten. On their return home, these servicemen began to celebrate the festival with some style, and gradually their ideas took root. The advent of radio and the spread of national newspapers, both carrying foreign ideas of Christmas, a helped change attitudes.

And finally, as the middle of the century approached and people grew wealthier and more adventurous, Christmas became a good excuse to be a little lavish. By the 1950s you could buy tinsel and Christmas trees and fairy lights, and nearly everyone did, much to the disgust of some Presbyterian diehards. “Just a lot of silly sheep, all copying each other,” was one older woman’s reaction to the sparkling Christmas tree in all her neighbours’ windows.

Even so, while Christmas Day was a holiday in England, the Scot worked on. One kiltmaker from tbe Royal Mile in Edinburgh remembers: “It was a regular working day, nothing special. I remember coming into work and they [the city workers] were digging up the street, you know, repairing it. The street was all torn up; it was just another business day.” Visitors from the south were horrified and depressed at such sights, but they were not to last much longer.

When the ban was officially lifted, the change came quietly. In 1954, the minister of St Giles preached an impassioned Watch Night Service calling for industrialists to make Christmas Day a public holiday. Four years later, in 1958, his wish was granted. It was official acknowledgement of a quiet revolution which had been taking place throughout the century. But from its early manifestations, nobody could have anticipated the speed with which the festival would develop.

In the space of a few years, the thrifty, low-key, still largely religious festival had turned into a commercial merry-go-round. It was a measure of increas­ing wealth, and the need for distraction and comfort, as well as an indication of declining interest in the Christian heart of the anniversary.

For those who remember the old-style Christmas, Charles McEwan’s recollections of his 1930s childhood will strike a chord: “Most of the presents in our family were given by Gran, because we were quite poor, and she would always give them on New Year’s morning. They’d be wrapped in brown paper - no decorative paper in those days. I once, in all innocence, asked her: ‘Why do we not celebrate Christmas?’ Her answer still staggers me; she said, ‘We’re no heathens, laddie.’ I think what she meant was that the English celebrated Christmas and they were heathens.”

But for those in danger of forgetting the heartfelt joy of welcoming back Christmas, Charles McEwan again captures the mood: “I went back to Rome and Allied Command. We were really in with a lot of English blokes, and we found out that they were an awfully nice bunch. When it came to Christmas time they used to say: ‘Leave it to us, Jock!’ and they would provide food, bake, and do all sorts. That was the time we really discovered Christmas and carried on this tradition of thinking so much about it. It was great - my granny was wrong!”