I did some research. You are quite correct. I quote an entry on
Calvinism from the
Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World......
"Another distinctive feature of Reformed Protestantism was its remarkably small number of official holidays. Calvin himself saw no need and no scriptural basis for any holiday other than Sunday, and Reformed Protestants usually celebrated extremely few of them.
Their most austere churches, Geneva and Scotland (or seventeenth-century New England), observed none at all—not until Geneva’s magistrates overruled their pastors and finally declared Christmas an official holiday in 1694. Such situations were, however, exceptional. The mainstream of established Calvinism, the Reformed churches of Zurich, Bern, France, the Netherlands, and the Palatinate, celebrated four holidays besides Sundays: Christmas, Easter, Ascension Day, and Pentecost; the Dutch and the Palatinate also added New Year’s Day. Keeping only a handful of holy days marked an enormous departure from Catholic practices, which in most places celebrated anywhere from forty to sixty holidays each year. Other mainstream Protestants were far less radical than Calvinists: Lutherans kept a large number of holy days, while the Church of England became a target for Puritan scorn by observing a total of twenty-seven holidays. Early Massachusetts went further and took the most extreme Calvinist position about the Christian calendar: not only did the colony ban all holidays, but its General Court briefly reformed the “pagan” names of the months as well, dating by “first month,” “second month,” and so forth.
Many Calvinists compensated for this paucity or absence of other holidays with a strict observance of Sunday, almost in an exact correlation. Scotland became Europe’s most notorious example in 1579, when serious punishments were first threatened for Sabbath-breakers; by 1649, they had forbidden such practices as fishing on Sunday.
Scotland’s extremely rigid taboos about Sabbath observance lasted far into modern times; it has been suggested that “Thou Shalt Not” made the best title for a history of Scotland, with its longest chapter called “Never on Sunday.”
Another specifically Calvinist ritual was the special day of community fasting, proposed by pastors and decreed by secular authorities, usually intended to divert God’s wrath at times of extraordinary danger. We find fast days observed as early as the 1560s by the beleaguered churches of the Low Countries or France, and later in seventeenth-century New England; they remained a feature of Genevan life until the nineteenth century."
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Dec. 25 became a federal holiday in 1870 in the Americas.
