The success of the Puritans in the English Revolution led to the abolition of Christmas, in both its religious form and its guise as an excuse for merriment. This spirit of perpetual Lent was echoed by Thomas Fuller; in a Childermas sermon, he advised his listeners not to be carried away in jollity but to mourn while they are in mirth. A tract of 1656 complained: “Bad joy strips God of all. No evil carries the heart so totally from God as evil joy….A man is very heartily, very totally wicked, every faculty, every sinnew stretch themselves to sin, when sinful in joys.”
To the Christmas-lover this mirthless spirit was the least comprehensible argument of his opponents and the one that stirred most resentment in the hearts of ordinary Englishmen. When Christmas was restored in 1660 with the return of the Stuart dynasty under Charles II, the right to be merry and the comfort of long custom were most celebrated. “Can the Black-moore change his skin, or the Sunne alter his continued course? Yet sooner can these things be done then my mind changed, for to keep old Christmas once again,” asserted Mrs. Custome in Women Will Have Their Will. (Far less delight was shown at the return of church services or the right to Christmas charity than at the restoration of good cheer.) A ballad “The Merry Boys of Christmas” crowed:
Then here’s a Health to Charles our King,
Throughout the world admired;
Let us his great applauses sing
That we so much desired,
And wisht among us for to reign
When Oliver [Cromwell] rul’d here:
But since he’s home returned again,
Come fill some Christmas Beer!
These holidays we’ll briskly drink,
all mirth we will devise,
No treason we will speak or think,
then bring us brave minc’d Pies:
Roast Beef and brave Plum Porridge,
our Loyal hearts to cheer:
Then prithee make no more ado,
but bring us Christmas Beer!