At Christmas play and make good cheer, For Christmas comes but once a year.

Thomas Tusser (c. 1524–1580) was an English poet best known for didactic verse on farming and household management. The couplet is associated with his popular compendium of seasonal husbandry advice, which mixes practical instruction with moral counsel and notes on customary festivities through the year. In the section treating winter and Christmas observances, Tusser briefly licenses holiday recreation—“play” and “good cheer”—as a socially accepted pause from labor. The line reflects Tudor-era attitudes that balanced work discipline with sanctioned communal celebration at major feast days, especially Christmas, when households traditionally offered hospitality, food, and drink to neighbors and dependents.

The couplet urges readers to embrace festivity while it is available: Christmas is fleeting, so one should enjoy its pleasures without undue scruple. “Play” suggests games, music, and merrymaking; “good cheer” implies both convivial mood and generous hospitality at table. In Tusser’s broader moral economy, the advice is not hedonistic but seasonal and measured—a brief, culturally approved interval of joy within a year otherwise governed by work and thrift. The aphorism also captures a perennial theme in holiday writing: the value of shared celebration as a counterweight to routine and hardship, precisely because it is rare and time-bound.

1) “At Christmas play and make good cheer, / For Christmas comes but once a year.”
2) “At Christmas play and make good cheere, / For Christmas comes but once a yeere.”