Full title includes: "that may have been considerably better than the modern holiday, medieval historian says".

It beat getting back to the office on Dec 27.

Damn I’d love to have a 6-week break to do whatever.

Something I read somewhere years ago was that after the fall harvest there was generally a glut of food, all the stuff they did not have room to store for the winter, the crops which they did not have a way to preserve, the crops which kept growing after the harvest, and an excess of livestock because during the summer grazing months when food was free for the livestock so no worry about the livestock making more livestock as livestock will. On top of that they would eat anything left over from the previous season so everything stored this season would be fresh and less likely to spoil. So they ate it all because selling the excess on the global market was not a thing and even selling it to someone 100 miles away was a lot of work.