During the Reformation, many
Protestant churches saw Christmas as an intrinsically Catholic holiday
and deemphasized its importance. English Puritans and Scottish
Presbyterians in particular voiced their disapproval of the Christmas
holiday. The most vociferous opponents of Christmas were the English and
American Puritans, but Calvinists and Presbyterians also were offended
by the Catholic-tainted pageantry of the Christmas holiday.1 In 1644, the English Parliament, seeing too much frivolity and irreligion associated with Christmas festivities, declared by law that it should be a day of penance rather than a feast day. By 1652, Christmas observance in England was banned both in and out of church.2
The New Englanders who gave America the traditions of Thanksgiving Day, Thanksgiving Day proclamations, the Mayflower Compact, John Winthrop's "City on a Hill," and election-day sermons criminalized the celebration of Christmas.
In 1659,
in an atmosphere of tension over Anglicanism, other heresies, new trade,
and general disarray, the Massachusetts Bay General Court banned the
keeping of Christmas by 'forebearing of labour, feasting, or any other
way.' The law aimed to prevent the recurrence of further, unspecified
'disorders' which had apparently arisen in 'seurerall places…by reason
of some still observing such Festiualls,' and provided that 'whosoeuer
shall be found observing any such day as Xmas or the like…' would be
fined.3
The Massachusetts and English Puritans ultimately retracted their total ban on Christmas celebrations.4
A century later, by the last quarter of the 18th century, some Protestant denominations, including Baptists, slowly began to incorporate Christmas into their religious services. While it was not an official holiday, and while government institutions continued to take no note of it, it became an increasingly popular annual event, albeit for a minority of Americans.5
Many prominent figures, including the man who was perhaps the 19th century's most famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, continued to keep the holiday at arm's length.6
Thus, in the hundred years after the Revolution, Americans had still not integrated Christmas celebrations into their lives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Samuel Goodrich, both New Englanders, recalled the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and "training day" as the only "great festivals" of their childhood in the early 19th century. "An 80-year-old New Yorker wrote that in 1818 his boarding school allowed only two week-long vacations, plus the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, during the entire year. Christmas and New Year's Day were ignored."7 "
The Youth's Friend, an American Sunday School Union magazine for children, did not mention Christmas as anything more than a date until 1846."8
For the History Channel's take on seventeenth-century efforts by the Puritans to ban Christmas.
Learn More
>> Christmas' Origins
>> Christmas Law
>> Santa Claus
>> Christmas Evergreens
>> A Weighin' the Mangers
>> The Origin of Crèches
>> Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"
>> Puritans & Christmas
>> Celebrating Christmas in America
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1 Bruce David Forbes, "Christmas Was Not Always Like This: A Brief History," Word and World vol. 27 (2007), 402.
2 Ibid., 403.
3 Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 225-26.
4 George E. Ellis, The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1685 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888), 122.
5 Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639-1723 (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 203.
6
"Finally in 1681, Massachusetts issued a repeal…. Still, in 1686,
Puritan militants barred newly appointed English Governor Andros from
holding his Christmas services in their meeting house and forced him to
move to the Boston Town Hall." Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 14.
7 Ibid., 17.
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