Sunday, December 12, 2010 3:49:10 AM
Christmas Caroling Tradition Pioneered by Drunks
Christmas carolers: cheery singers or drunks? It seems the first carolers in history were a bit of both.
Getty Images
November 28, 2010
Christmas caroling has long been a favorite tradition of church groups, elderly choirs and children, but did you know that the first groups of carolers were nothing but a bunch of rowdy drunks?
That's the tune from David McKillop, senior vice president of programming for the History Channel, who recently talked to AOL News about the network's upcoming holiday special, "The Real Story of Christmas [ http://www.episodeinfo.tv/upcoming/the-real-story-of-christmas-premieres-on-history-at-29-nov ]," premiering Nov. 29 at 9 p.m. ET.
The TV special examines the surprising historical origins of our most bizarre Christmas customs, including why some of us go door to door singing holiday songs to any strangers who will listen.
McKillop said the origin of caroling dates back to the pagan celebration of the winter solstice, when Christmas [ http://www.history.com/topics/christmas ] was regarded as a festival of pure joy and drunken revelry. Oh, and prayer was involved somewhere in there too.
According to McKillop, groups of poor medieval carolers would go around to houses singing and begging for food and drinks, threatening to throw rocks through the windows of anyone who refused to give them a handout.
They literally "went medieval" on people.
"They would get very, very rowdy. Eventually, the drunken revelry got too out of hand, and Christmas was banned [ http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_puritans.html (below)] for years in America in the 16th and 17th centuries," explained McKillop.
Sheesh. Sounds like an episode of "Carolers Gone Wild." If you don't open your door to singing strangers this year, no one will blame you.
McKillop said those same ancient winter-solstice celebrations -- which usually lasted 12 days [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas ] -- gave rise to the tradition of burning a yule log [ http://www.noelnoelnoel.com/trad/yulelog.html ], often mentioned in classic Christmas songs.
"People would try to find the biggest log possible to burn in a fireplace, to keep the light and warmth going during the 12 days of the feast," he said.
Another fun fact: Santa Claus wasn't always so chummy and cheery. In fact, he was kind of a downer who ran with a bad crowd.
McKillop said the St. Nick of old European legend was said to be accompanied not by elves but by an impish little devil creature named "Krampus [ http://www.krampus.com/ ]" who beat up and kidnapped naughty children.
"If kids were bad, Krampus would leave them bad gifts. I think that's where the idea of giving people coal for Christmas first sprouted. That Krampus was mean," said McKillop.
As for giving and receiving presents on Christmas, he said that particular custom's origin varies around the world, depending on whom you ask.
"Some Catholics and Christians will trace it all the way back to the birth of Christ, when gifts were supposedly brought to the baby Jesus. Others link gift giving to the Romans' winter celebrations, the only time of the year when the rich would give their slaves gifts of food and such."
Pictured is the White House Christmas tree in 2009. But where did the tradition of Christmas trees originate?
Alex Wong, Getty Images
But what about other holiday traditions we practice, like putting a big, live, shedding tree in our living rooms each season and hanging stockings on the chimney with care?
McKillop said more modern practices like these can all be linked to a single "tipping point" in history that changed the course of Christmas forever.
The year was 1823. The game changer was New York author Clement Clarke Moore [ http://www.nightbeforechristmas.biz/moore.htm ], the man who wrote the poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas," otherwise known as "The Night Before Christmas [ http://www.nightbeforechristmas.biz/03poem.htm ( http://www.nightbeforechristmas.biz/ )]."
"In that single poem, Moore gave us our modern-day version of Santa Claus, stockings and reindeer -- all of the Christmas traditions we still live by and follow today. He changed it all," explained McKillop. "From 1823 forward was when Christmas as we know it began. All of the traditions from different cultures -- Jewish, Christian, Scandinavian celebrations -- all came together at that point."
Although variations of the Christmas tree had been around since the 16th century, McKillop said, dragging an evergreen into our homes became a modern mainstay in 1848 after a magazine in London published a photograph of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria [ http://www.christmasmagazine.com/en/deco/tree17.asp ] posing in front of a decked-out fir.
"The British went crazy for the photo and started putting up Christmas trees in their homes. Later, an American magazine copied and altered the image of the royal family to look like an American family and circulated the trend around the United States," he explained.
Video [embedded]: Strange Christmas Traditions
http://www.history.com/videos/strange-christmas-traditions
Lastly, the history buff revealed that the origins of Santa's right-hand reindeer, Rudolph [ http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/rudolph.asp ], go back to 1939, to a Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago. That's when an employee by the name of Robert L. May created the lovable red-nosed sidekick in an effort to promote a Christmas coloring book sold by Montgomery Ward.
"Clement Moore hinted at reindeer in 'Night Before Christmas,' and May's idea of Rudolph took it even further. Christmas traditions have a way of building on each other over the centuries," explained McKillop. "Christmas is one of the most complex holidays we celebrate in terms of its roots, because it transcends so many cultures. It goes back in time 2,000-plus years."
Now, off you go to hang those stockings, decorate that Christmas tree, buy overpriced presents, sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" to strangers and wait for Santa. And drink and be merry, of course.
© 2010 AOL Inc.
http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/christmas-caroling-tradition-pioneered-by-drunks/19726031
=====
Puritans & Christmas
During the Reformation, many Protestant churches saw Christmas as an intrinsically Catholic holiday and deemphasized its importance. English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians in particular voiced their disapproval of the Christmas holiday. The most vociferous opponents of Christmas were the English and American Puritans, but Calvinists and Presbyterians also were offended by the Catholic-tainted pageantry of the Christmas holiday.1 In 1644, the English Parliament, seeing too much frivolity and irreligion associated with Christmas festivities, declared by law that it should be a day of penance rather than a feast day. By 1652, Christmas observance in England was banned both in and out of church.2
The New Englanders who gave America the traditions of Thanksgiving Day, Thanksgiving Day proclamations, the Mayflower Compact, John Winthrop's "City on a Hill," and election-day sermons criminalized the celebration of Christmas.
In 1659, in an atmosphere of tension over Anglicanism, other heresies, new trade, and general disarray, the Massachusetts Bay General Court banned the keeping of Christmas by 'forebearing of labour, feasting, or any other way.' The law aimed to prevent the recurrence of further, unspecified 'disorders' which had apparently arisen in 'seurerall places…by reason of some still observing such Festiualls,' and provided that 'whosoeuer shall be found observing any such day as Xmas or the like…' would be fined.3
Thus, devout English-speaking conservative Christian Protestants were the first and most vociferous warriors against Christmas and banned its celebration because it had so far departed from their version of the true Christian message.
The Massachusetts and English Puritans ultimately retracted their total ban on Christmas celebrations.4 A century later, by the last quarter of the 18th century, some Protestant denominations, including Baptists, slowly began to incorporate Christmas into their religious services. While it was not an official holiday, and while government institutions continued to take no note of it, it became an increasingly popular annual event, albeit for a minority of Americans.5 Many prominent figures, including the man who was perhaps the 19th century's most famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, continued to keep the holiday at arm's length.6 Thus, in the hundred years after the Revolution, Americans had still not integrated Christmas celebrations into their lives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Samuel Goodrich, both New Englanders, recalled the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and "training day" as the only "great festivals" of their childhood in the early 19th century. "An 80-year-old New Yorker wrote that in 1818 his boarding school allowed only two week-long vacations, plus the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, during the entire year. Christmas and New Year's Day were ignored."7 "The Youth's Friend, an American Sunday School Union magazine for children, did not mention Christmas as anything more than a date until 1846."8
For the History Channel's take on seventeenth-century efforts by the Puritans to ban Christmas [ http://www.history.com/topics/christmas ].
---
1 Bruce David Forbes, "Christmas Was Not Always Like This: A Brief History," Word and World vol. 27 (2007), 402.
2 Ibid., 403.
3 Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 225-26.
4 George E. Ellis, The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1685 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888), 122.
5 Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639-1723 (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 203.
6 "Finally in 1681, Massachusetts issued a repeal…. Still, in 1686, Puritan militants barred newly appointed English Governor Andros from holding his Christmas services in their meeting house and forced him to move to the Boston Town Hall." Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 14.
7 Ibid., 17.
8 Ibid., 62.
-----
Learn More
>> Christmas' Origins
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_origins.html
>> Christmas Law
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_law.html
>> Santa Claus
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_santa.html
>> Christmas Evergreens
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_evergreens.html
>> A Weighin' the Mangers
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_mangers1.html
>> The Origin of Crèches
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_mangers2.html
>> Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_dickens.html
>> Celebrating Christmas in America
http://www.aclu.org/celebrating-christmas-america
>> Learn more about our work on religion and belief
http://www.aclu.org/religion-belief
-----
© ACLU (emphasis in original)
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_puritans.html
=====
and of course -- Zeitgeist, part 1 -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2740987755232169561 ([items linked in] http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53491720 )
---
also (items linked in):
specifically in re the (seriously dumbass) attempt to invoke "the fundamental principles of America" in http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=57653355 , http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54833454 (and preceding and following)
and more generally, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=57342847 (and preceding)
Christmas carolers: cheery singers or drunks? It seems the first carolers in history were a bit of both.
Getty Images
November 28, 2010
Christmas caroling has long been a favorite tradition of church groups, elderly choirs and children, but did you know that the first groups of carolers were nothing but a bunch of rowdy drunks?
That's the tune from David McKillop, senior vice president of programming for the History Channel, who recently talked to AOL News about the network's upcoming holiday special, "The Real Story of Christmas [ http://www.episodeinfo.tv/upcoming/the-real-story-of-christmas-premieres-on-history-at-29-nov ]," premiering Nov. 29 at 9 p.m. ET.
The TV special examines the surprising historical origins of our most bizarre Christmas customs, including why some of us go door to door singing holiday songs to any strangers who will listen.
McKillop said the origin of caroling dates back to the pagan celebration of the winter solstice, when Christmas [ http://www.history.com/topics/christmas ] was regarded as a festival of pure joy and drunken revelry. Oh, and prayer was involved somewhere in there too.
According to McKillop, groups of poor medieval carolers would go around to houses singing and begging for food and drinks, threatening to throw rocks through the windows of anyone who refused to give them a handout.
They literally "went medieval" on people.
"They would get very, very rowdy. Eventually, the drunken revelry got too out of hand, and Christmas was banned [ http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_puritans.html (below)] for years in America in the 16th and 17th centuries," explained McKillop.
Sheesh. Sounds like an episode of "Carolers Gone Wild." If you don't open your door to singing strangers this year, no one will blame you.
McKillop said those same ancient winter-solstice celebrations -- which usually lasted 12 days [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas ] -- gave rise to the tradition of burning a yule log [ http://www.noelnoelnoel.com/trad/yulelog.html ], often mentioned in classic Christmas songs.
"People would try to find the biggest log possible to burn in a fireplace, to keep the light and warmth going during the 12 days of the feast," he said.
Another fun fact: Santa Claus wasn't always so chummy and cheery. In fact, he was kind of a downer who ran with a bad crowd.
McKillop said the St. Nick of old European legend was said to be accompanied not by elves but by an impish little devil creature named "Krampus [ http://www.krampus.com/ ]" who beat up and kidnapped naughty children.
"If kids were bad, Krampus would leave them bad gifts. I think that's where the idea of giving people coal for Christmas first sprouted. That Krampus was mean," said McKillop.
As for giving and receiving presents on Christmas, he said that particular custom's origin varies around the world, depending on whom you ask.
"Some Catholics and Christians will trace it all the way back to the birth of Christ, when gifts were supposedly brought to the baby Jesus. Others link gift giving to the Romans' winter celebrations, the only time of the year when the rich would give their slaves gifts of food and such."
Pictured is the White House Christmas tree in 2009. But where did the tradition of Christmas trees originate?
Alex Wong, Getty Images
But what about other holiday traditions we practice, like putting a big, live, shedding tree in our living rooms each season and hanging stockings on the chimney with care?
McKillop said more modern practices like these can all be linked to a single "tipping point" in history that changed the course of Christmas forever.
The year was 1823. The game changer was New York author Clement Clarke Moore [ http://www.nightbeforechristmas.biz/moore.htm ], the man who wrote the poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas," otherwise known as "The Night Before Christmas [ http://www.nightbeforechristmas.biz/03poem.htm ( http://www.nightbeforechristmas.biz/ )]."
"In that single poem, Moore gave us our modern-day version of Santa Claus, stockings and reindeer -- all of the Christmas traditions we still live by and follow today. He changed it all," explained McKillop. "From 1823 forward was when Christmas as we know it began. All of the traditions from different cultures -- Jewish, Christian, Scandinavian celebrations -- all came together at that point."
Although variations of the Christmas tree had been around since the 16th century, McKillop said, dragging an evergreen into our homes became a modern mainstay in 1848 after a magazine in London published a photograph of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria [ http://www.christmasmagazine.com/en/deco/tree17.asp ] posing in front of a decked-out fir.
"The British went crazy for the photo and started putting up Christmas trees in their homes. Later, an American magazine copied and altered the image of the royal family to look like an American family and circulated the trend around the United States," he explained.
Video [embedded]: Strange Christmas Traditions
http://www.history.com/videos/strange-christmas-traditions
Lastly, the history buff revealed that the origins of Santa's right-hand reindeer, Rudolph [ http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/rudolph.asp ], go back to 1939, to a Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago. That's when an employee by the name of Robert L. May created the lovable red-nosed sidekick in an effort to promote a Christmas coloring book sold by Montgomery Ward.
"Clement Moore hinted at reindeer in 'Night Before Christmas,' and May's idea of Rudolph took it even further. Christmas traditions have a way of building on each other over the centuries," explained McKillop. "Christmas is one of the most complex holidays we celebrate in terms of its roots, because it transcends so many cultures. It goes back in time 2,000-plus years."
Now, off you go to hang those stockings, decorate that Christmas tree, buy overpriced presents, sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" to strangers and wait for Santa. And drink and be merry, of course.
© 2010 AOL Inc.
http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/christmas-caroling-tradition-pioneered-by-drunks/19726031
=====
Puritans & Christmas
During the Reformation, many Protestant churches saw Christmas as an intrinsically Catholic holiday and deemphasized its importance. English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians in particular voiced their disapproval of the Christmas holiday. The most vociferous opponents of Christmas were the English and American Puritans, but Calvinists and Presbyterians also were offended by the Catholic-tainted pageantry of the Christmas holiday.1 In 1644, the English Parliament, seeing too much frivolity and irreligion associated with Christmas festivities, declared by law that it should be a day of penance rather than a feast day. By 1652, Christmas observance in England was banned both in and out of church.2
The New Englanders who gave America the traditions of Thanksgiving Day, Thanksgiving Day proclamations, the Mayflower Compact, John Winthrop's "City on a Hill," and election-day sermons criminalized the celebration of Christmas.
In 1659, in an atmosphere of tension over Anglicanism, other heresies, new trade, and general disarray, the Massachusetts Bay General Court banned the keeping of Christmas by 'forebearing of labour, feasting, or any other way.' The law aimed to prevent the recurrence of further, unspecified 'disorders' which had apparently arisen in 'seurerall places…by reason of some still observing such Festiualls,' and provided that 'whosoeuer shall be found observing any such day as Xmas or the like…' would be fined.3
Thus, devout English-speaking conservative Christian Protestants were the first and most vociferous warriors against Christmas and banned its celebration because it had so far departed from their version of the true Christian message.
The Massachusetts and English Puritans ultimately retracted their total ban on Christmas celebrations.4 A century later, by the last quarter of the 18th century, some Protestant denominations, including Baptists, slowly began to incorporate Christmas into their religious services. While it was not an official holiday, and while government institutions continued to take no note of it, it became an increasingly popular annual event, albeit for a minority of Americans.5 Many prominent figures, including the man who was perhaps the 19th century's most famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, continued to keep the holiday at arm's length.6 Thus, in the hundred years after the Revolution, Americans had still not integrated Christmas celebrations into their lives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Samuel Goodrich, both New Englanders, recalled the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and "training day" as the only "great festivals" of their childhood in the early 19th century. "An 80-year-old New Yorker wrote that in 1818 his boarding school allowed only two week-long vacations, plus the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, during the entire year. Christmas and New Year's Day were ignored."7 "The Youth's Friend, an American Sunday School Union magazine for children, did not mention Christmas as anything more than a date until 1846."8
For the History Channel's take on seventeenth-century efforts by the Puritans to ban Christmas [ http://www.history.com/topics/christmas ].
---
1 Bruce David Forbes, "Christmas Was Not Always Like This: A Brief History," Word and World vol. 27 (2007), 402.
2 Ibid., 403.
3 Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 225-26.
4 George E. Ellis, The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1685 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888), 122.
5 Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639-1723 (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 203.
6 "Finally in 1681, Massachusetts issued a repeal…. Still, in 1686, Puritan militants barred newly appointed English Governor Andros from holding his Christmas services in their meeting house and forced him to move to the Boston Town Hall." Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 14.
7 Ibid., 17.
8 Ibid., 62.
-----
Learn More
>> Christmas' Origins
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_origins.html
>> Christmas Law
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_law.html
>> Santa Claus
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_santa.html
>> Christmas Evergreens
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_evergreens.html
>> A Weighin' the Mangers
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_mangers1.html
>> The Origin of Crèches
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_mangers2.html
>> Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_dickens.html
>> Celebrating Christmas in America
http://www.aclu.org/celebrating-christmas-america
>> Learn more about our work on religion and belief
http://www.aclu.org/religion-belief
-----
© ACLU (emphasis in original)
http://www.aclu.org/christmas/xmas_puritans.html
=====
and of course -- Zeitgeist, part 1 -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2740987755232169561 ([items linked in] http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53491720 )
---
also (items linked in):
specifically in re the (seriously dumbass) attempt to invoke "the fundamental principles of America" in http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=57653355 , http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54833454 (and preceding and following)
and more generally, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=57342847 (and preceding)
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
