Christmas Day itself was a public holiday, with shops, offices and other places of work all closed, and people went to church to attend special services; over the following eleven days there were further special church services, with shops and businesses open only intermittently or for shorter hours than normal. The celebration of all Twelve Days of Christmas contained other familiar elements, though the degree to which individuals and families participated probably varied, depending upon whether they were living in London, a large provincial town or deep in the countryside, upon whether they were rich or poor and thus upon how much time and money they could afford to expend on celebrations. Churches, public buildings and private houses were often decorated with holly and ivy, rosemary and bays. People visited family, friends and colleagues, eating and drinking and exchanging presents, and the more affluent distributed ‘boxes’ containing money to servants, tradesmen and the poor. Special food and drink was available and was consumed in larger quantities than normal, including turkey and beef, mince pies, plum porridge and specially-brewed Christmas ale; taverns and taphouses did a roaring trade. Occasionally there were fireworks (though then as now they were more associated with the celebration of the failure of the Gunpowder Treason plot on 5 November), and there was also the concept of a ‘Father Christmas’, more as a figure that oversaw the community celebrations than as someone who gave presents to children. More generally, it was a period of leisure, of eating and drinking to excess, of dancing and singing, gambling, gaming and stage plays (though modern-style pantomimes did not emerge until the eighteenth century), of drunkenness and sexual immorality, a period when normal rules and self-control did not apply, a period of deliberate inversion and ‘misrule’.
