Tom Hodgkinson looks at how the midwinter festival has been celebrated – and condemned – through the ages

Christmas hasn’t always been about staying in with the family. In times gone by it was about going out into the streets with your mates and causing a lot of trouble.

As tonight’s “Drink” guest Sarah Clegg writes in her excellent new book The Dead of Winter on this ancient feast, the Roman midwinter festival of Saturnalia was when the world was turned upside down: slaves bossed around their masters and cross-dressing was indulged. And these customs continued under Christianity. Sarah quotes Lucian:

Drinking, noise and games and dice, appointment of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of frenzied hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water.

Later people celebrated a feast called Kalends, which was also riotous and drew the ire of the moralists of the day. One fourth-century bishop, says Sarah, complained about the cross-dressing, reporting that he saw a man:

Loose his tunic to his ankles, twine a girdle about his breast, use a woman’s sandal, put a rod of hair on his head in feminine fashion.

Christmas was a time for revelry and mayhem and continued to irritate the pious higher-ups. Anti-Christmas feeling reached its height when Puritan Oliver Cromwell tried to ban it. But, as Ronald Hutton writes in The Rise and Fall of Merry England, in the December of 1646, the lads were ready to get out there and defend their ancient right to a piss-up:

At Ipswich the defenders of Christmas held a “great mutiny”, and one of them was killed attempting to rescue their leaders from the watch. But the most celebrated disturbances were at Canterbury, where a crowd “threw up and down” the wares of twelve shopkeepers who obeyed the mayor’s direction to open for business. It then swelled in number and took over the streets, some setting up holly bushes at their door and giving free drinks. Others pelted a Presbyterian minister and opened the city gaol.

In the 19th century the feast was domesticated and tamed by the Victorians. It was much the same with the maypole. This medieval form of Tinder was turned from a sex dance into a harmless kids’ game. Christmas became a family-oriented affair, and in fact New Year, as Roland Hutton has observed, became the time for more rowdy behaviour with friends. Christmas now is for the fireside, and for thinking about the Nativity, whereas New Year is for dancing in the streets. It’s a good compromise.

For me Christmas should be about a complete cessation of toil. You should not do any work at all, but instead devote yourself to feasting and games and afternoon naps. And whether that’s with friends or family, that’s quite up to you.

How will you be doing the midwinter feast?

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