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within. The treatise ended by presenting “a Black List of some Evil Customes which begin to appear among us.” Along with Christmas—and gambling with cards and dice—Mather’s “black list” included partying on Sunday evenings (and even during the intermission between the two Sabbath-day sermons); running horse races on such solemn occasions as funerals, training days, and public lectures; turning weddings into drunken “revels;” and holding cornhuskings that were little more than excuses for “riot.” 34
    There was a pattern here: All these practices involved young people who were appropriating serious social occasions as opportunities for bouts of drinking and sex. (In his section on cornhuskings, Mather warned young people: “Let the Night of your Pleasure be turned into Fear.”) It was in just such a context—positioned between the drinking of toasts and riots at cornhuskings—that Mather placed the subject of Christmas. “Christmas-Revels begin to be taken up,” he reported, “among some vainer Young People here and there in some of our Towns.” 35 It was bad enough, Mather argued, that Christmas was not divinely ordained, but what was “offensive” about it “most of all” was that it was being abused just as the weddings and the cornhuskings were abused—an occasion on which, as Mather put it, “Abominable Things” were done. Clearly, those abominations had mostly to do with sex.
    Mather’s charges are confirmed by demographic data. Social historians have discovered that the rate of premarital pregnancies in New England began to climb early in the eighteenth century, and that by mid-century it had skyrocketed. (In some New England towns almost half the first children were born less than seven months after their parents’ marriage.) What makes the demographic data especially interesting is that this sexual activity had a seasonal pattern to it: There was a “bulge” in the number of births in the months of September and October—meaning that sexual activity peaked during the Christmas season. 36
Misrule in New England Almanacs
    Mather’s charges are also buttressed by—once again—the evidence of almanacs. Almanac makers sometimes included monthly verses along with aphorisms (in prose or verse) that were interlineated at particular dates, along with the astronomical and astrological data, and the tides and weather observations. The December page sometimes included implicit references (occasionally explicit ones) to the Christmas season, and much of this material dealt with food and drink. In his notorious 1688 almanac John Tully wrote that in December “Money and Rum will be in great request.” But even as early as 1682, a Boston almanac written by the thoroughly orthodox William Brattle contained a verse for the Decemberpage that referred to all the drinking that went on during that month (“sack” refers to sherry, and “tubs” to kegs):
    This month, ’twill rain such store of sack (each night)
That any man that tubs doth empty quite,
And leave abroad [i.e. outdoors], and then the next day view,
He’ll find them full of pure good sack: It’s true. 37
    (In other words, if people drink up all their sherry each day and leave the cask outside overnight, the next morning it will be magically full.) Brattle’s verse may have referred to a popular belief about magical rebirth and renewal at the time of both the solstice and Christmas, but what matters more is that he seems to have assumed that December was indeed a month of heavy drinking. The same double allusion to intoxication and solstice can be found in an almanac printed in Boston in 1714, placed by the dates December 28–31: “By strong Liquor and Play / They turn night into day.” And here, from that same almanac, is the verse that heads the month of December:
    Strong-Beer Stout Syder and a good fire
Are things this season doth require.
Now some with feasts do crown the day,
Whilst others loose their coyn in play….