I may be a hockey fan but my son's really into basketball. The NBA lockout was a real hardship for him, but ultimately, of course, he got the best Christmas present ever:  the beginning of a brand new NBA season. My first reaction was incredulous. The season starts with a bunch of games on Christmas?  Those poor guys! Shouldn't they be home celebrating or relaxing with their families?  Not to mention the NFL guys who have to play on the holiday!  And all those college bowl games on New Year's Day!  Those guys don't even get paid!

But as part of my research for my next book, I was just reading a couple of articles that made me revisit and perhaps revise my outrage.  They are from a collection titled "Winter Sports in the West."  (The west of Canada, that is.)  

The first, "Sports and Leisure in the Nineteenth Century Fur Trade," by Greg Thomas, reminds us that holidays, and in particular, Christmas and New Years and the week in between, were perfect for games and sports, mainly because so many people (read: men) didn't have to work on those days.

On Hudson Bay Company fur trade posts in the 18th and 19th centuries, the game of choice was "football," which at the time was probably some combination of what we now know as rugby and  non-American (un-American?) football, i.e. soccer.  Thomas says that "mention is made of playing football as early as New Year's Day 1734 at a Prince of Wales Fort at Churchill, and the games remained a frequent part of the Christmas-New Year's holiday season at the Hudson Bay Company bayside posts throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries." From there the tradition spread to other HBC posts. Competition was keen, because the winners were often awarded with large quantities of liquor.  ("Here we go!")

A Christmas Day game at York Factory in 1823 was apparently "not kept up with much spirit probably from the severity of the weather [gee, at York Factory - on the balmy shores of Hudson Bay! - on December 25th?  ya think?] combined with a previous too free use of the bottle."

Thomas states that "the contests also may have acted as a useful safety-valve for social tensions" between the "gentlemen" who ran the posts and the company servants. In other words, the games, like other holiday traditions such as wassailing, were one of the only times when those of a lower station could gain the upper hand.