I wouldn’t like to be one myself, of course, but I think the Puritans are sometimes painted with too broad a brush; they must have held some appeal for everyday people, especially in the early days, otherwise nobody would have joined. If they were only furious killjoys who hated fun, I mean, and the Jacobean and Tudors were such a laugh riot, why would anybody have made the switch?
I think it must have been a bit like how by January most people start saying they overdid it with holiday parties this year, they went out too much, they’re looking forward to staying in a bit and catching up on movies or reading at home. Perfectly natural reaction to going all-out. Do you have any idea how many parties people had to go to during the late Renaissance? A new festival every day, it sounded like, and you couldn’t just put in an appearance and then go home, you had to participate in the culture of popular laughter all night in order to depressurize social institutions, I’m pretty sure. I couldn’t keep up with it, I’ll tell you that much. The Puritans could certainly have gotten me to at least look at a flyer if they caught me heading home in the small hours after electing some jerk I had to treat like a king for the next fortnight as the Lord of Misrule.
Are you sick and tired of the Renaissance ritual year?
Have you become fed up with being expected to know what the hell is the “carnivalesque”?
Do you agree that there are too many festivals these days?
It’s not just Christmas on Christmas Day anymore —
It’s Christmastide
and before that it’s Advent
and after that it’s Twelfth Night and Epiphanytide
And don’t forget Twelvetide!!! That’s in the mix too
And sometimes it’s not Christmas it’s Yule
OUR PLATFORM IS SIMPLE: NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO PARTY ON A TUESDAY MORNING IN THE DEAD OF WINTER
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