In this England's governing regime followed the bleak example of religious Reformists in Scotland. They legislated against the 'Heathen traditions' of carols; the frivolity of decorated trees in home and church; the immorality of traditional English Kissing Boughs; the garnering of pagan 'lust-inducing' mistletoe, together with all pageants and joyful singing and dancing during the Twelve Days of Christmas.
Such laws had been enforced in Scotland for nearly 100 years. In 1573 magistrates punished miscreants in St. Andrews for the 'observing of superstitious days, especially of Yule Day'. Two years later in Aberdeen, a group of ladies were similarly punished for 'playing, dancing and singing of filthy carols on Yule Day at even'. (It is worth noting that carol singing was accompanied by dance in earlier times).
A winter of unrelieved gloom enveloped the now Puritan England as any glimmer of seasonal joy and light was extinguished together with the 'popish superstitions of Saint's Days'. The Feast of the Nativity and its concomitant 12 Days of celebration was abolished. Christmas Day itself became just another gloomy working day in a gloomy week at the cold tag end of a gloomy year.
Fun and festivals returned with the 1660 Restoration of that sensual womaniser King Charles II and his reprobate Court. And, at the turn of the 19th Century 150 years later, the portly 'Prinnie', (Britain's future King George IV and Queen Victoria's uncle), pursued his own decadent version of fun and festivity within his Brighton Pavilion surrounded by a hedonistic coterie of revellers. Their singleminded gluttonous debauchery was lampooned by the press. Such 'festive' holiday spirit was not shared with the rest of the country and national memories of such scandalous royal behaviour were to colour Queen Victoria's attitude for life.
Illus: Gillray's 1792 cartoon of 'Prinnie', the obese Prince Regent
When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the Industrial Revolution was changing the face of England's countryside and tearing down the long established social fabric of a once rural Britain. For the common man, woman and every able bodied child toiling in the newly opened coalmines and industrial mills in the rapidly burgeoning, smoke-filled and unhealthy towns, Christmas was as cold, colourless and pennypinched as the drab rest of their painfully short and humdrum lives.
The change from Christmas drabness to Christmas light was as sudden as the conversion of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Its author, Charles Dickens, was no stranger to poverty himself in his earlier years. He published A Christmas Carol late in 1843, penning it in a three months burst of explosive creative passion. It was a personal social indictment and plea for the replacement of pecuniary greed and avarice with charity at Christmas time. It underlined the Royal message emanating from the Palace. Two years earlier Prince Albert had initiated his new concept of 'Family Caring at Christmas', promoting a brand new royal image, with the Queen, himself and baby children, pictured together around a decorated Weinachtsbaum; a 'Christmas Tree' of light. This was a far cry from the centuries of mindless Royal revels of medieval, Stuart and Regency England; a deliberate response by the Prince Consort and his Queen to a nascent mood of social responsibility generated by by social reformers and fostered by the press.
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