Christmas is now a central festivity in Scotland, with Scots spending more on presents than the rest of the UK population- but as a Scottish festival, it has had a chequered history.
The celebration of Yule is currently associated with pre-Christian traditions, but in Scotland by the mid-sixteenth century, old beliefs had blended with new and Scots celebrated Yule as the Christian festival of the birth of Jesus Christ, while retaining old traditions and the name ‘Yule’. Many of the customs remained the same. Scots celebrated Yule as a holiday, taking the day off of work and school, closing shops, carol-singing, guising (dressing up and forming processions), carding and dicing (gambling), ‘nightwalking’, feasting and ‘extraordinary drinking’. With the Reformation in 1560 (when the Church of Scotland replaced the Catholic Church as the state religion), Yule was outlawed as a ‘superstitious, Catholic’ tradition. Yet, ‘for all their thundering’, ministers found it exceedingly difficult to stop the festivity and celebrations continued. In 1574, fourteen Aberdonian women were charged with ‘playing, dancing and the singing of filthy carols on Yule Day’, while another four were charged with cross-dressing and seasonal revelry in 1577. In 1604, schoolchildren rebelled against the prohibition of Christmas by seizing the teacher and holding him with swords, guns and other weapons.
In 1618, when Royal Order restored the right to celebrate Christmas to Perth’s Kirk, the ministers expected this to be in the form of a nativity sermon. Instead the population returned to their ‘profane’ pastimes en mass, taking two days off from their labour and beating the bellman who went through the town ringing the bell and telling them to return to work. Bakers continued to bake large loaves for Yule feasts (and were accordingly punished by the Kirk), while the Perth Session (the disciplinary apparatus of the Church of Scotland) found it necessary to repeatedly order the ‘suppressing of Yule’- claiming that it was so widely publicised that ‘none can claim ignorance’.
The ban on Christmas continued through into the twentieth century with Scots expected to work on Christmas day and the Church disapproving of excessive celebration. Despite this, children received presents and Scots continued with older festivities- if on a lesser scale than its southern neighbour. In the nineteenth century, it began to adopt many of the festivities associated with Victorian England, such as Christmas trees, decorations, presents and eventually Santa Claus. In 1958, the 25th of December was finally declared a public holiday- allowing Scots a day from work. Yet, while this is often seen as the start of Scottish Christmas, it had a much longer history!
Further Reading
Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (Yale UP, 2002).
Katie Barclay is a historian at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is enjoying a festive mince pie, looking out on eight inches of snow.
