Wish You Very Happy Marry Christmas DAY 2020 FORM :-
LAKSHY DREAM FOUNDATION
To understand why, first we have to establish how Christmas was celebrated back then. It was not a holiday to visit family and exchange gifts. There was no Santa Claus or reindeer or special attention given to kids. There wasn’t even a candlelight church service of lessons and carols like many Christians attend today.
Here’s how it generally went down, according to Stephen Nissenbaum in his book “The Battle for Christmas.” On Christmas Day, the lower classes would dress up in strange costumes to “invert” their roles: Men would dress up as women, young boys as bishops, and the lowliest peasant or the town drunk might be declared the “Lord of Misrule.”
They would gather into a mob and go around to the houses and estates of the well-to-do, making a racket, singing bawdy songs and demanding entry. Amazingly, most of the time they were let in and given alcohol, food and even money. There was gambling and promiscuity (often leading to marriages at the end of the misrule). Once the mob was satisfied, it would move on to the next rich person’s estate.
These mobs would generally roam until Epiphany — Jan. 6 — hence, “the twelve days of Christmas.” But some places, the mobs would carry on until February.
If it seems surprising that rich people would willingly let a drunken mob in their homes and get them even drunker, that’s because the alternative was worse. If a homeowner tried to block entry, the mob would break in, destroy property, assault the homeowner, frighten his wife and children, and then take the food and drink anyway.
You can see this in the wassails and “carols” the mob sang. While focusing on being merry, many of them contained a threat. For example, a carol from the 1600s that began, “Come bring with a noise/My merrie merrie boys/The Christmas log to firing,” ended like this: “And if you don’t open up your door/We will lay you flat upon the floor.”
Plus, Nissenbaum wrote, the tradition served “as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits,” and thus, ultimately reinforced the hierarchy.
The same was true of religious leaders. Though one 16th-century Anglican bishop complained that “men dishonor Christ more in the twelve days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides,” Christmas misrule was largely tolerated. After all, the birth of Jesus had been tacked onto pagan traditions that had existed for centuries.
December meant three things in early Europe: The work of harvesting the year’s crops was done, the beer and wine they’d been brewing was ready to drink, and it was cold enough to slaughter animals without the meat going immediately bad. December was often the only time of year when people got to eat fresh meat.
So a period of gorging and resting was almost written into the stars, and most pagan European cultures had a holiday for this. In fact, Romans had been celebrating Saturnalia — a similar celebration of social inversion and orgiastic gluttony — for much longer before that.
Puritans were fully aware of the non-Christian roots of Christmas, and unlike the Anglican church, they were having none of it. If God had wanted Christians to celebrate Christ’s birth, then the Bible would have been more specific about what day he was born, they argued.
During Puritan rule of England in the mid-1600s, they attempted to make it illegal, scheduling Parliament to meet on Dec. 25 and ordering a day of fasting and repentance. They were met with riots and insurrection.
The Puritan ban on Christmas lasted much longer in New England, on paper from 1659 to 1681. But even after English authorities overturned the ban, it was still culturally taboo for well over a century afterward.
In 1687, Puritan Rev. Increase Mather published “A Testimony against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by Some in New-England,” in which he said anyone who acknowledged Christmas was “willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian.”
A generation later, his son, the Rev. Cotton Mather, said the “Feast of Christ’s Nativity is spent in Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, and in all Licentious Liberty” and would be better referred to as “the Devil’s Mass.”
