Christmas has been given the green light by the government this year less because it marks the birth of Christ than because retailers and the hospitality industry desperately need it to go ahead. Other feast days in the Christian calendar still belong to the church. Christmas is the feast day that a fundamentally secular nation has made its own.
It’s become part of the festive tradition for Christians to mourn this as the ultimate triumph of commercialisation and self-indulgence. But it might comfort them this year to know that their anxiety has deep roots. Folk memories of Oliver Cromwell banning Christmas — however distorted they may be — remain sufficiently enduring that the Prime Minister, one of life’s natural Charles IIs, must surely have been desperate not to be associated with them. Even so, if ever it were possible to feel sympathy with the Puritans and their conviction that ‘Revelling, Dicing, Carding, Mumming, and all Licentious Liberty’ at Christmas risked calamity for a nation, it is surely now.
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