Frontispiece from Josiah King’s 1658 The Examination and Tryall of Old Father Christmas. The image depicts a bearded man in fur-lined cap and robe seated in a chair with elements of a feast set on the floor in front of him. At the door is a mob of men with sticks. The caption reads, “Behold the maiestie and grace / of loueing, cheerfull, Christmas face; / Whome many thousands with one breath: / Cry out let him be put to death. / Who indeede can neuer die: / So long as man hath memory.” The image is actually from a later, 1687 edition, which I have used because it is a higher quality scan. The 1658 image is identical, but a mirror-image.
16 December 2021
Father Christmas is a British personification of Christmas. In centuries prior, there were other personifications of the holiday, but Father Christmas’s name and iconic image arose during the period of the English Civil War (1642–51), when the Puritan-controlled Parliament discouraged the celebration of the holiday. Father Christmas himself began appearing in various anti-Puritan political tracts lamenting the loss of the holiday.
This origin is obvious in the title of the tract in which the name Father Christmas first appears: the anonymous, 1646 Arraignment, Conviction, and Imprisoning, of Christmas:
Honest Crier, I know thou knewest old Father [C]hristmas; I am sent to thee from an honest schollar of Oxford (that hath given me many a hug and kisst in Christmas time when we have been merry) to cry Christmas, for they hear that he is gone from hence, and that we have lost the poor old man; you know what marks he hath, and how to cry him.
The image shown here is from another such tract, Josiah King’s 1658 The Examination and Tryall of Old Father Christmas. You can begin to see a pattern in the titles.
Nowadays, with Christmas firmly entrenched in our culture and going nowhere, Father Christmas has become conflated with Santa Claus, and the latter has taken elements, such as the fur-lined cap and coat, from the former.
Sources:
The Arraignment, Conviction, and Imprisoning, of Christmas. London: Simon Minc’d Pye for Cissely Plum-Porridge, 1646, 2. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2016, modified September 2021, s.v. father, n.
Image credit: Anonymous artist, 1658. King, Josiah, The Examination and Tryall of Old Father Christmas, London: Charles Brome: 1685. Folger Shakespeare Library. Public domain image.