FOR those who support a zero-Covid strategy to deal with the ongoing pandemic, the decision of all four UK governments to ease restrictions on social interaction for a few days over the Christmas period looks like a concerning one.

Infections are likely to rise as a result, with all the problems and difficulties that can bring.

At the same time, way beyond Boris Johnson’s dreams of herd immunity, there is perhaps an understanding that Christmas genuinely is a time like no other.

In 2020 Christmas mostly refers to a time for profits to be made, but down the centuries ordinary people have had a rather different perspective.

There was a festival at the end of December long before the Christian church muscled in.

It is a time of year with little daylight, poor weather and often restricted opportunities for many kinds of work as a result.

Those basic realities have meant that attempts to ban or restrict Christmas have largely failed.

The supposed Cromwellian ban on Christmas, which officially lasted from 1644 until 1660, didn’t in fact fully work, like so many other pieces of parliamentary legislation over the centuries.

Parliament did meet on Christmas Day 1656, but not many MPs were present.

One MP complained that Christmas festivities had kept him awake the previous night, while the member for Maldon, Colonel Joachim Matthews, introduced a “short Bill” to underline that Christmas was indeed illegal.

It was challenged on technical grounds and in the end MPs decided there were more important things to discuss.

Christmas was not celebrated on anything like the modern scale in the early decades of the 19th century, but Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol published in December 1843 set the tone for a revived festival.

Scrooge, who ran a small financial services firm in the City of London, was a firm believer in classical liberal politics and economics.

Asked to give money to the poor at Christmas by charity collectors, he declined.

His view was that he paid his taxes and that was sufficient.

If the less well-off could not support themselves, then there were always workhouses.

This utilitarian approach to life extended to Scrooge’s employee, Bob Cratchit, to whom he only reluctantly gave time off on Christmas Day.

Dickens uses a series of ghostly appearances to make Scrooge realise that this was not the image of capitalism that the mid-19th-century British state was promoting.

He changes his position and helps the Cratchit family to celebrate Christmas with a giant turkey.

In the 20th century the Bolsheviks, after 1917 in Russia, took a more realistic approach to Christmas.

They certainly did not ban it but strongly discouraged the religious element of the festival.

A ban was briefly implemented from 1929, but this didn’t work and by the mid-1930s the Soviet Christmas was being remodelled with the image of the tree central to it.

Lords of Misrule who were appointed at the beginning of November each year by religious authority were especially active at Christmas.

They were meant to be simply a release for discontent.

In fact the Christmas period, both the start of the 12 days of Christmas and the eve of Epiphany at its end, were sometimes marked with street parades and riots about discontents.

In Norwich on January 6 1443 a King of Christmas figure led a revolt against an abbot who was trying to close two of the city’s mills.

In short, while Christmas 2020 rightly has a focus on official pandemic-related restrictions, it is also a time when historically authorities have worried about revolts from below — with little they can do about them.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.