On the last day of November, Holy Family Catholic Church in Brentwood, Tennessee, hosted a casual Christmas carol singalong and an ugly sweater competition, with cocktails.<\/p>\n
Five days later, Calvary Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Minn., hosted a lunchtime carols and cocktails, proving that even at high noon, it\u2019s 5 p.m. somewhere.<\/p>\n
The long marriage of Christmas and liquor \u2014 Christmas \u201ccheer,\u201d as it is sometimes known \u2014 has been institutionalized of late in relatively civilized carols and cocktails events like these.<\/p>\n
Indeed, knocking one back while singing a Christmas tune has become a preferred way for even secular groups to celebrate Yuletide. Earlier this month, the Hammond Regional Arts Center in Louisiana served champagne cocktails mixed with peppermint schnapps in glasses rimmed with melted chocolate and peppermint sprinkles as visitors requested seasonal favorites from a karaoke machine.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we have it, we\u2019re playing it,\u201d said Tara Bennett, the arts center\u2019s media coordinator. \u201cWe\u2019re ecumenical to all religions, especially during the holiday season.\u201d<\/p>\n
In that same spirit, Amar, a Washington, D.C., charitable foundation, held a \u201cChristmas for a Cause\u201d bash featuring cocktails, carols and an ugly sweater contest \u2014 all to benefit Iraqi, mostly Muslim, women entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n
Lately even the feast\u2019s patron saint has been driven to drink. The film \u201cBad Santa,\u201d featuring an alcoholic St. Nick played by Billy Bob Thornton, is regularly named to \u201cBest Christmas Movies to Stream\u201d lists. Search \u201cdrunk Santa\u201d on the stock photo service site Shutterstock and you\u2019ll get 37 pages of hits, some barely safe for work. It\u2019s little wonder, perhaps, that the jolly old elf would hie up on the lawn with such a clatter.<\/p>\n
The fact is, however, that combining Christmas and booze is deeply consistent with the holiday\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
Judith Flanders, a British historian and author of \u201cChristmas: A Biography,\u201d sketches a story of Christmas merriment that would make many a nun blush.<\/p>\n
When the church first designated Dec. 25 as Nativity day in the fourth century, Christmas was already more a feasting celebration than a religious one. \u201cWithin 30 years of that first celebration, the then-archbishop of Constantinople was already scolding his flock for \u2018feasting to excess\u2019 and dancing rather than spending the day in religious observance,\u201d said Flanders.<\/p>\n
By the fifth century, \u201cWassail\u201d (\u201cGood health,\u201d in Anglo-Saxon) was a standard Christmas toast and synonymous with drinking, according to the 12th-century British cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth.<\/p>\n
Christmas music was similarly bound up with hooch from the start. The first English (or Anglo-Norman) Christmas carol is really a drinking song. After the first line, \u201cLords, by Christmas and the host,\u201d the rest is \u201cpurely drink,\u201d said Flanders. It continues: \u201cDrink it well. Each must drain his cup of wine, And I the first will toss off mine… Cursed be he who will not say, Drinkhail!\u201d<\/p>\n
By the 17th century, the bishop of Exeter, in southwest England, had called Christmas \u201cthe time of the whole year, for eating and drinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Across the pond in the burgeoning Colonies, the boozy flavor of Christmas had survived the Atlantic crossing so well that the Massachusetts Puritan leader Increase Mather chastised Christians for spending the holidays drinking and gambling and in \u201crevellings\u201d and \u201cmad mirth.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the 19th century, taverns and inns in the United States often served free alcohol on Christmas, including spiked eggnog. One woman was told that the eggnog would be good if \u201cit\u2019s got Christmas enough in it,\u201d Flanders said. \u201c\u2018Christmas\u2019 here (was) literally a synonym for alcohol.\u201d Eggnog recipes in the 19th century often had nearly one part alcohol to each two parts of milk.<\/p>\n
Looking further back, we find that Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century Greek bishop who is the inspiration for Santa Claus, is also the patron saint of barrel-makers. A medieval tale centers on three boys who are murdered by an evil butcher or innkeeper and stuffed into pickling barrels. Nicholas arrives, does some detective work and revives the dead boys.<\/p>\n
Dramatic productions and paintings long portrayed this story, and over time St. Nicholas came to be seen as the patron saint of children. Though the gruesome nature of the murder mystery is de-emphasized, depictions of the saint often include the three young men he saved and barrels.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Nicholas is a patron of barrels, he must also be a patron of what normally goes into the barrel \u2014 beer,\u201d said Adam English, chair of Christian studies at Campbell University and author of \u201cThe Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra.\u201d<\/p>\n
Accordingly, Samichlaus beer, which packs an alcohol content of 14 percent, is traditionally brewed on Dec. 6, St. Nicholas Day, though English pronounced it \u201cnot very drinkable in my opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n
English pointed to a direct reason for pairing drinking and Christmas: \u201cBarrels of new beer finally became ready to drink in December,\u201d he said. Fueled by suds, raucous Christmas revelers celebrated the holiday well into the 19th century by caroling door to door for money, meat and liquor. \u201cThe domestic, familial, sentimental, quiet Christmas is a fairly recent innovation,\u201d said English.<\/p>\n
It makes sense that these more celebratory aspects of Christmas attract more than Christians. Some 90 percent of adult Americans, including more than 80 percent of non-Christians, celebrate Christmas, according to the Pew Research Center, even as most believe the holiday\u2019s religious aspects are increasingly de-emphasized. (On the other hand, just 16 percent go caroling as adults.)<\/p>\n
Just counting Christians, approval for Christmas boozing varies from evangelical Christian leaders, who are evenly split on whether a drinker can be a good Christian, to 19 percent of all Protestants who find imbibing sinful, while Catholics are less likely (12 percent) to consider drinking sinful than the general public (15 percent).<\/p>\n
In 2006, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution stating in part that \u201cno one be elected to serve as a trustee or member of any entity or committee of the Southern Baptist Convention that is a user of alcoholic beverages.\u201d<\/p>\n
In recent years, some mainline Protestant leaders have expressed concern about the ubiquity of alcohol in church culture, captured in the old saw, playing on the Scripture verse Matthew 18:20, that says, \u201cWhere two or three are gathered, there\u2019s a fifth.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2015, the Episcopal Church\u2019s General Convention passed a resolution acknowledging the church\u2019s \u201clong-standing tolerance for the use of alcohol\u201d and urged congregations not to hold events, such as cocktail parties and wine tastings, where alcohol is the primary attraction. After a newly elected Episcopal bishop killed a bicyclist in Maryland while driving under the influence, this summer\u2019s convention in Austin, Texas, followed up with recommendations to take action on \u201cleadership impairment due to alcohol and substance misuse and behavioral addictions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Given the symbiotic relationship between drinking and singing, however, it\u2019s likely that cocktails and carols is here to stay. Ronald Clancy, who publishes Christmas music collections, sees little problem with churches bringing people in with bibulous musical events. \u201cI can see that as not being a bad idea, if they put a stress more on the sacred than they do on the secular,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He suggested starting with \u201cChestnuts Roasting\u201d and other secular songs before moving to \u201cSilent Night,\u201d \u201cAdeste Fideles\u201d and \u201cO Come, O Come, Emmanuel.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the drinks keep coming, the crowd might not even notice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the last day of November, Holy Family Catholic Church in Brentwood, Tennessee, hosted a casual Christmas carol singalong and an ugly sweater competition, with cocktails. Five days later, Calvary Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Minn., hosted a lunchtime carols and cocktails, proving that even at high noon, it\u2019s 5 p.m. somewhere. The long marriage of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1254,654,258,1033,1034,1256,1255],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8033"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}