kontextmaschine:

kropotkitten:

class-struggle-anarchism:

figgy pudding as a transitional demand

the cool thing about that song is it is a relic from when Christmas was bad ass before Washington Irving made it into the family-friendly holiday it is today. Before Irving created Christmas of today from nothing it was a drunken feast when rioting was common. Basically people would go out into the streets, get drunk, and throw snowballs at each other and shop windows. Sometimes the police would break it up but this would just make the celebrants escalate into riot. 

In 1828, a particularly violent Christmas riot in New York led the city to institute its first professional police force.

Christmas celebrations in 1800 owed more to the midwinter worship of Saturn and Bacchus than to Christ. By the second century, the Romans were regularly feasting, drinking, and cavorting like satyrs from December 17, the first day of Saturnalia, to January First. They also decorated their houses with evergreen boughs.

In the fourth century, Christians began to celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25, the winter solstice on the Roman calendar. This was a partly way to meet the challenge of pagan cults. The church tacitly agreed to let the holiday be celebrated more or less as it always was. The Christmas celebration that arose in Medieval Europe was an occasion for excess and extravagance, public lewdness, and violations of social order. In medieval and early modern Europe, celebrants often elected a “Lord of Misrule” to preside over these annual revels. In one episode in 1637 in England, the crowd gave the Lord of Misrule a wife in a public marriage service conducted by a fellow reveler posing as a minister. The affair was consummated on the spot! No wonder, New England Puritans sought to criminalize this rowdy affair.

Puritans were particularly upset by two irksome Christmas practices: One was mumming, the exchange of clothes between men and women; and even worst was the outbreak of rioting, drunkenness, and fornication. It was this raucous celebration that the New England Puritans tried to kill.

But despite the Puritans’ best efforts, Christmas in America became an excuse for dangerous hell raising. At Christmastime, men drank rum, fired muskets wildly, and costumed themselves in animal pelts or women’s clothes – crossing species and gender. In New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities, they formed Callithumpian parades, which involved beating on the kettles, blowing on penny trumpets and tin horns, and setting off firecrackers.

Then, during the early 1800s, Christmas became a cultural battleground. During the early 1800s, evangelical Protestants challenged the popular Christmas. They called for a shorter, more refined, more family-centered celebration at the end of the year, one that would banish “what is sensual and low, and very close to vice itself in the existing Saturnalia.”

So in reality, the “war on christmas” was actually waged by Puritans and later by protestants who thought it was too wild and needed to be tamed and so invented whole sale bullshit to replace the drunken, sex-filled, riotous feast it once was.

Make Christmas Libidinal Again

The general tendency of folk holidays in the absence of external pressure is to develop towards “drunken anarchy festival” and I think that’s beautiful