Yule Vacance -- a.k.a., Christmas Holiday

 The following is  swiped from Robb Quint's always informative daily email, mostly about Scottish Country Dance happenings in southern California, but also with a fair bit of history, stories, folklore, and what-have-you about Scotland in general.  This is from the Christmas mail:

Christmas in Dundee...and elsewhere in Scotland...

is about the same as anywhere else in the West, some

folks celebrating it religiously, others as a secular and

seasonal holiday only, and some not at all, but a bank

holiday for all. It was not always like that.  Scotland's

iteration of the Protestant Reformation made religion a

serious business and not to be mixed with any celebratory

frivolity.  The following is part of the 1640 "Estates"

(Parliament) Yule Vacance (holiday) Act.  It is in Middle

Scots but still easy enough to read and understand:

 

The kirke within this kingdome is now purged of all superstitious

observatione of dayes...thairfor the saidis estatis have dischairged and

simply dischairges the foirsaid Yule vacance and all observation thairof in

tymecomeing, and rescindis and annullis all acts, statutis and warrandis and

ordinances whatsoevir granted at any tyme heirtofoir for keiping of the said

Yule vacance, with all custome of observatione thairof, and findis and declaires

the samene to be extinct, voyd and of no force nor effect in tymecomeing.

 

This act was rescinded for Scotland by the Parliament

of Great Britain in 1712, five years after the union of

England and Scotland as a single nation, but it still took

until just about 1½ centuries ago for Christmas Day to

be reïnstated in Scotland as a "bank holiday" in 1871.

(Ideally, I'd cite you to his webpage, but this came from an email list and I don't have a webpage address to cite you to. )

And it wasn't only the Scots.  Some of our colonial forefathers weren't all that pleased with Christmas joy either.

Witness: