"Must we not be merry?" Did early modern Christmas performative rhetoric have a clear religious victor?

Religious divides between Roman Catholics and Protestants were never more obvious than in their celebration of Christmas. Catholics enjoyed opulent festivities while Puritans shunned the practice of celebrating at all. Using Hutton's history of Christmas and combining it with Bell's framework for analysing rituals through cultural dynamics, this essay will argue that Christmas was weaponised as a performative rhetorical battleground to debate these religious tensions. It will do this by narrowing the debate to three key texts on Christmas. The first, Anatomie of the Abuses by Phillip Stubbes, establishes the Puritan adherence to Christmas. The second, Jonson's Christmas, His Masque, deliberately defames Puritan Christmas in front of King James I. The third, Christmas is my name, is a ballad that enacts commonplace opinion of Christmas's ultimate virtue as a time of gluttonous celebration. Ultimately, it is Roman-Catholic and monarchist sentiments that triumph, with the performativity of their opulent celebrations overshadowing the Puritan's counter-repressionism of Christmas.