Christmas Banned in England

In 1644 an Act of Parliament was passed banning Christmas in England. All aspects of the celebration were made illegal, including the display of holly, ivy and Christmas decorations, and the consumption of typical Christmas fare, including mince pies and Christmas pudding. The ban came about because Cromwell's Puritan regime took a dim view of the Christmas mass, which they saw as a relic of Roman Catholicism, as well as the secular excesses of the Christmas feast, which included dancing, singing, eating huge meals of roast beef, plum porridge and minced pies, and drinking gin and special Christmas ale, all of which were often accompanied by gambling, drunkenness and promiscuous behaviour. To enforce the ban, soldiers were ordered to patrol the streets of London to make sure that no shops or businesses closed for a holiday, to arrest anybody caught celebrating Christmas and to seize any special Christmas fare.

You'll be pleased to know, the ban was lifted in 1660 but, eating mince pies and Christmas pudding is still illegal, as the laws remain unrevoked, so, technically, the police could seize your mince pies or even your Yule log if they wanted to.

England is not alone. I was once an outlaw Santa Claus in Saudi Arabia, where the public celebration of Christmas is still not allowed. Bizarrely, the Santa Claus outfit had to be collected from a Saudi princess's palace, where it was less likely to be seized by the authorities. When the Live Aid record 'Do They Know It's Christmas' was released to raise money for famine victims in Africa, the headline in the Arab News, ironically, read, "Do They Know It's .................?' Best-selling Record of All Time." This was because even publishing the word 'Christmas' could result in a newspaper being closed down and its editor being arrested by the Saudi religious police.

Merry Christmas everyone, and take care nobody finds out about your illegal stash of mince pies.

Corner View - Traditions

Most traditions, including Christmas, are related to the scapegoat mechanism, which is at the root of all human behaviour. Although it was Kenneth Burke who discovered what had been lying in wait for us for so many centuries, it was René Girard who first really understood its significance. In order for humans to bond and operate effectively, we need to isolate a scapegoat and kill or punish him/her/it ruthlessly, be it a goat, a sheep, a turkey or a fellow human being.

The top photo is of the Temple of Baal at Baalbeck in Lebanon, possibly the most monumental building ever constructed by man, and the greatest temple ever to the cult of scapegoatism. Human sacrifice took place there on a massive scale.


When I was there in the summer of 2006, two Israeli soldiers, who'd just been captured, were being held in an adjacent building, and were about to be sacrificed. One thousand other people were killed in the war to rescue them. There is no blame, only human tradition. There have always been scapegoats. Sometimes we nail them to crosses, sometimes we burn them on bonfires, sometimes we make effigies of them and beat them to death, sometimes we bully them at school, sometimes we have commissions to weed them out, sometimes we gas them in concentration camps. We usually laugh about it at the time: it is our way and our tradition. In the part of the world I live in, the greatest tradition is to kill a goat: the scapegoat.

Write Away

I was invited to contribute to the WriteUp Cafe. I have posted an extract from The Mongolian Girl there. Please visit the site and rate and comment on it.

Also, Jade Meng kindly invited me to write a guest article for her site Dream of Jade. Please take time to pay a call there too and leave a comment. Thank you.