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In 1702, Poor Robin makes complaints of the falling off of Christmas festivities.
" But now landlords and tenants too In making feasts are very slow; One in an age, or near so far, Or one perhaps each blazing star; The cook now and the butler too, Have little or nothing for to do; And fidlers who used to get scraps, Now cannot fill their hungry chaps; Yet some true English blood still lives, Who gifts to the poor at Christinas gives, And to their neighbours make a feast, I wish their number were increast, And that their stock may never decay, Christmas may come again in play, And poor man keep it holy day."
Many of the popular ballads, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, refer to the same falling off in Christmas feasting, complaining of the degeneracy of the times. Poets and ballad writers, however, from the earliest times, certainly as far back as Homer, have been noted for this species of grumbling. Praising the bygone times, in order to conceal the annoyance at having had so many of our would-be-original good things said by our ancestors before us.
Nedham in his ' History of the Rebellion,' 1661, alluding to the times before the Commonwealth, says—
" Gone are those golden days of yore, When Christmas was a high day; Whose sports we now shall see no more, 'Tis turn'd into Good Friday." |
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