Miserable Moneymongers & Mammonists; Intemperate Prodigals: More of Christmas' Complaint.

Engraving from the ballad A Looking-Glass
 for Lascivious Young Men: or, the Prodigal Son SIFTED, which 
covers similar themes as The Complaint of Christmas

After gaining some English understanding of foreign seventeenth century holiday food from The Complaint of Christmas, and the Teares of Twelfetyde by John Taylor, it would be amiss to not consider the main complaint of the holiday. In other words, what the personified Christmas has to feel aggrieved about. It is actually not that different in many ways from legitimate complaints about Christmas activities we might hear today. There is a worry about and condemnation of economic, what we would call commercial, aspects of the celebrations. These are opposite the true hospitality that is especially vital at the Yuletide season and, in the period, religious and political positions were linked to this ideal. Of course, we will try to look at those ideas manifest in the descriptions of food or lack thereof.

There is a position, slightly more nuanced than - hospitality is good - taken by the Christmas character in this piece. There is a balance to be struck and this is outlined clearly with the three mock dedications that the author gives in Christmas’ voice and uses to preface his work. I mentioned the one yesterday which praised the broadly defined good readers: the rare, and becoming even more rare, practitioners of holiday hospitality. These are again: “the most Right and truly honorable, ...the Rightly approved and deservingly beloved [and the] right Worshipful” to whom Christmas signs off with “Yours in the best friendship.”

He also writes: “To the most mighty, much unworthy honored, and to the Right Rich-worshipped disworshipped, & to the all-too much powerful and respected; the miserable Moneymongers & Mammonists.” In a food context he says to them: “What a shame it is...that all the meat you eat in your own houses is the accursed spawns of oppression, extortion, bribery, and insatiate covetousness.” There is this warning to such people from a present-bringing Christmas: “let me not find it so the next year; for if I do, I will send you such guests as shall never forsake you; as the Dropsy, Gout, collic, the Stone, & the like kind tokens of my just anger, which you shall receive as most worthy & deserved New-years-gifts.”

The final group he addresses are called “the Pro­fuse Sardana­pallitanians, the most famous Infamous Heliogabalonians, the complete company of Cockbrain'd whimsy-pated Gul-Gallants, the intemperate prodigals.” In his attempt to get creative with his insults, Taylor got a bit Dr. Suessian and has seemingly invented some words, making some indecipherable to me, so far. “Heliogabalonians” are followers of Heliogabalus, also called Elagabalus, who was a short-lived Roman emperor known for his excess and lack of traditional piety. “Gul-galants” seem to be silly, stupid or fake gallants but the overall message is relatively simply captured in the last phrase – “intemperate prodigals.” To be prodigal, most famously as the son from the Biblical parable, means to spend freely and wildly. The voice of the season is speaking to those “who entertain old Christmas with Gluttony and E­briety, with the ill gotten expenses of thievery, cheating, unthrifty borrow­ing, unmeasurable exhausting, unmerciful op­pressing, or any unlawful obtai­ning.” The farewell to this group reads: 

"No way your friend, till you mend your manners, 

Christmas."

While food and drink are vital, there is a feast too far, there is also a right way to pay for your holidays and, as we shall see tomorrow, who you entertain is also important to the idea of hospitality. With the table set as such, we will return again to look at some more great insults directed at bad holiday celebrators, strung out like so much holly and ivy by John Taylor’s complaining Christmas.