AH, Christmas: a time of celebration, good food, and epic family rows. As any fan of EastEnders knows, nothing makes the festive season more special than a really bitter argument. Over the years, 25 December has brought murder, suicide, assault and battery, and a whole host of other gifts to Albert Square.

The worst of it all is that, however exaggerated it may seem, the soap opera’s bleak vision of mid-winter turns out not to be so far away from the truth. Divorce rates soar after Christmas, as couples rush to confirm a split that developed over the break.

What is true for families is also true for churches. Indeed, the quar­rels that often occur at Christmas can make the petty disputes of the rest of the year seem inconsequential. Freighted as it is with all manner of emotional significance, the most minor changes to a special service or an ostensibly long-standing tradition threaten to spark the ecclesiastical equivalent of a civil war: rival factions each contend for control of the Christingle, or insist on their version of the nine lessons and carols.

If this is the case when it comes to apparently trivial issues, then it does not require too great a leap of imagination to see what trouble a more significant upheaval might cause. And, of course, we do not just have to imagine what this might be like. In the decade between 1549 and 1559, the Church suddenly, radically, and controversially changed its liturgy four times, and, in so doing, made the celebration of Christmas a particularly significant focus for discontent.

CHRISTMAS was not always im­portant. In the Early Church, it was the Epiphany that mattered most in winter — and presumably caused the majority of fights. But, in the Middle Ages, Christ’s mass came to assume an almost overwhelming importance, as it accreted innumerable customs of its own.

By about 1500, almost every parish in England would have experienced a similar December: fasting through Advent, followed by a celebration. On Christmas Eve, churches and houses alike were decorated with evergreen plants. On Christmas Day, the Sarum Use prescribed three masses, the first starting before dawn and lit by candles specially bought for the occasion.

The solemnity of the Latin service, the brightly lit and brightly coloured church, the songs, the processions, the invocations of the saints, and the reading of the genealogy of Christ from the rood loft: all these marked the birth of Jesus and the start of a huge party.

Outside the church, people broke their fast with a banquet — the first of many, in a festival that might last for the Octave or for the 12 days of Christmas, and which could continue right up to Candlemas at the start of February.

Inevitably, not everyone felt that all was well with this combination of religion and high spirits. The pious were shocked at the drunken antics that invariably accompanied these celebrations. The civil authorities regularly had to deal with problems of public order.

There were petty squabbles aplenty, as individuals and groups competed to take centre-stage. But it is hard not to feel that Christmas was one of the moments when sacred and secular time actually came together, and the community celebrated as much in church as out of it.

ALL of this changed with the Reformation, or, more precisely, with the imposition of the 1549 Prayer Book. This rupture did not emerge out of nothing. The break with Rome in the early 1530s and the creation of a vernacular liturgy in the mid-1540s each reflected a serious attack on traditional religion. None the less, the accession of Edward VI in 1547 increased the pace and scale of reform exponentially.

That year, a series of injunctions outlawed many of the commonplace practices of parish life. Images were to be removed from church and de­stroyed. The use of candles was reduced. Processions were pro­hibited, and bells were not to be rung. A new liturgy was to be created — one that was not open to the sorts of super­stition that the reformers believed had characterised popular belief for so long.

That new liturgy was promulgated in 1549 as the Book of Common Prayer. It finally fully replaced the old rites with a new one. What is more, the old services were not simply to be discontinued: the old service books were actually to be burnt by Christmas Day.

Royal proclamations, ecclesiastical visitations, Acts of Parliament, and the whole force of the Tudor state were deployed to ensure uniformity. Not surprisingly, there was resistance. In June 1549, there was a rebellion in the West Country, led by people unable to accept these innovations.

The new liturgy, they said, “was but lyke a Christmas game”. In other words, the defenders of tradition believed that the reforms were actually secularising worship, in­appropriately bringing the celeb­rations that should be kept outside the church into the service itself. In particular, they objected to the practice of having men and women approach the altar on separate sides of the church, seeing this as comically close to the sorts of country dances that marked the yuletide season.

Neither argument nor rebellion could halt the reforms, however. Even in Morebath, a little Devon village near the heart of the West Country revolt, the decision was taken to sell the altar cloths to buy a copy of the new Prayer Book.

Christmas 1549 was consequently unlike any that had gone before it. In almost every parish, the evergreens were absent, the images were white­washed or destroyed, candles were removed, and the processions were ended.

The church was quieter than it had been before. Bells were silenced, and, as Eamon Duffy points out in The Stripping of the Altars (Yale, 1992), the switch from Latin to English rendered the musical repertoire of the Church obsolete. Choirs now had nothing to sing. Outside, the festivities con­tinued, but shorn of its Octave and much of its solemnity, Christmas inside the church must have seemed, a pale shadow for many congrega­tions.

AS A result, the traditional Christmas went underground. Some parishes, many families, and a number of Oxford and Cambridge colleges celebrated secret masses. Others reinterpreted the Prayer Book, treating it as though it were just the mass in English.

So the Government hit back: not just by punishing offenders, but by producing a still more severe liturgy that was simply not open to any such interpretation. The revised Prayer Book was published at the end of October 1552, and for most parishes, Christmas would have the first significant event to have been marked with this new form of worship.

The priest now stood at the north end of a wooden table, instead of facing eastwards towards a stone altar. He no longer wore vestments, but was robed in a simple surplice. There was only one communion service — and any bread and wine left over was to be taken home by the officiant and consumed as though it had not been consecrated. This was about as far away from the old idea of Christ’s mass as could possibly be imagined.

Yet this new service did not last long. The death of Edward VI and the accession of the Catholic Mary I in 1553 ensured that there was only ever one Christmas celebrated according to the rites of the previous year’s new Prayer Book.

Mary was determined to roll back the Reformation — and so the festivities of 1553 were all meant to be in Latin, a revival of the old Sarum liturgy. The evidence suggests that this was a popular move. Indeed, many congregations went even fur­ther than the Queen intended, restor­ing things such as the Christmas tradition of decorating the church with evergreens, something even the Catholic hierarchy now looked on with suspicion.

It was not possible to eradicate reform completely. In many parishes, there was continuing battle between priest and congregation, Protestant and Catholic. Bishops even de­manded to know whether any good singer, “since the setting forth and renewing of the old service in the Latin tongue, absent and withdraw himself from the choir”.

When the Catholic controversialist and Chancellor of Wells, Roger Edgeworth, came to preach in Bristol, in the midst of all this change, he showed that he was all too well aware of the problems. “Here among you in this city some will hear mass, some will hear none . . . some will be shriven, some will not . . . some will pray for the dead, some will not.

I hear of much dissension among you.”

ALTHOUGH most congregations probably welcomed the return to tradition, many individuals did not — and some did all they could to frustrate this Catholic revival. Mary was thus able to compel conformity, but never succeeded in enforcing uniformity.

Worse was to follow. Although Queen Elizabeth I initially retained the Latin rite on her accession in 1558, the new Book of Common Prayer of 1559 brought about another change in religious practice. Back came the vernacular, out went the altar. But this was a more conservative version of reform than the 1552 Prayer Book, not least in its insistence that the priest should be robed in appropriate vestments.

The Christmas communion ser­vice of 1559 must thus have felt rather as though the congregation had been transported back a decade, and that the reforms of 1552 and 1553 had never happened.

The truth was, though, that time could not be turned back, and that this attempt at compromise did not satisfy anyone — not even the Queen who had insisted on it. She was a far more conservative figure: one who claimed that she “differed very little” from Roman Catholics, and who insisted on keeping a crucifix and silver candles on her private altar.

For her Protestant advisers, in contrast, the new Prayer Book did not go far enough, and another wave of iconoclasm swept across the country as a result. Other “godly” reformers went further still, increasingly doubtful of the veracity of any written liturgy, much less formal prayers.

Catholics could never accept any­thing less than the Latin mass. Ten years later, another rebellion — this time in the north — revealed just how strong these traditionalists still were, as the old ways and old church furnishings made a brief but telling comeback.

EVENTUALLY, as Judith Maltby has shown in her Prayer Book and People (Cambridge, 1998), the 1559 service was accepted by a majority as the right and proper way to worship God. Within a generation, indeed, it be­came the tradition — one that parishes sought to perpetuate entirely unchanged from one year to the next.

Yet the controversies of the 1540s and 1550s did not go away. In making one change, further changes became possible, with only unanimity an impossibility thereafter. Increasingly, this meant that Christmas itself be­came a matter of debate.

For the Laudians of the early 17th century, it was vital to rediscover the older spirit of Christmas, the one that had been lost in the Reformation. Not for nothing did Laud’s own college — St John’s in Oxford — stage a celebration of Christmas in 1607 which lasted from All Souls’ Day until the start of Lent. Complete with a play, ribald songs, and the election of a “Christmas Prince”, it was a little glimpse of the olden times.

For the Puritans, by contrast, it was precisely this sort of behaviour which made the whole season itself seem dubious: the relic of a superstitious, papistical past. Little wonder that Christmas was banned by the Puritan Parliament in 1647, and covertly celebrated by High Anglicans until the Restoration of 1660.

IN 1662, yet another new Prayer Book produced what was meant to be yet another final settlement. It actually drove thousands out of the Church, as many Protestants refused to accept the set prayers and formal liturgies it imposed.

For the Puritans, by contrast, it was precisely this sort of behaviour which made the whole season itself seem dubious: the relic of a superstitious, papistical past. Little wonder that Christmas was banned by the Puritan Parliament in 1647, and covertly celebrated by High Anglicans until the Restoration of 1660.

IN 1662, yet another new Prayer Book produced what was meant to be yet another final settlement. It actually drove thousands out of the Church, as many Protestants refused to accept the set prayers and formal liturgies it imposed.

Christmas, again, was a point of dissension. The Prayer Book set aside a special service for the day, but Puritans refused to accept such a dangerously Catholic practice. As late as the mid-18th century, indeed, Quakers condemned the Christmas pudding as “an invention of the scarlet Whore of Babylon, an hodge podge of superstition, Popery, the Devil and all his works”. If this was true of a sweetmeat, then one can easily imagine what was thought of a Christmas Day communion service.

Two hundred years later, in 1928, a further attempt at resolution was made in a disputed revision: passed by the Church, but rejected by Parliament. In 1966, there were more reforms, and in 1980 the Alternative Service Book was published, only to be replaced by Common Worship in 2000.

More importantly still, individual churches have continued to do exactly what they did in the 16th century: pick and choose among the texts to find something that seems to suit. Then, as now, this irritates the authorities. Then, as now, it leads to rows — and never more than at Christmas.

But that, in a way, is what Christ­mas is for: to make us focus on what matters — and what does not. And for the Church of England, what does not matter is uniformity. We have never had it, and we never will.

Or, leastways, we will not have it so long as we remain alive. It means crossness and difficulties, and it will doubtless result in people’s not speaking to one another because of quarrels over the festive season. But that is a small price to pay for freedom. Happy Christmas.

The Revd Dr William Whyte is a Tutorial Fellow in Modern History at St John’s College, Oxford, and Assistant Curate of Kidlington.