The Battle for Christmas
By Stephen Nissenbaum
Chapter 1
New England’s War on Christmas
The puritan War on Misrule
In New England, for the first two centuries of white settlement most people did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, the holiday was systematically suppressed by Puritans during the colonial period and largely ignored by their descendants. It was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681 (the fine was five shillings). Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did Christmas gain legal recognition as an official public holiday in New England. Writing near the end of that century, one New Englander, born in 1822, recalled going to school as a boy on Christmas Day, adding that even as late as 1850, in Worcester, Massachusetts, “The courts were in session on that day, the markets were open, and I doubt if there had ever been a religious service on Christmas Day, unless it were Sunday, in that town.” As late as 1952, one writer recalled being told by his grandparents that New England mill workers risked losing their jobs if they arrived late at work on December 25, and that sometimes “factory owners would change the starting hours on Christmas Day to five o’clock or some equally early hour in order that workers who wanted to attend a church service would have to forego, or be dismissed for being late for work.”
“It was only in the fourth century that the Church officially decided to observe Christmas on December 25. And this date was chosen not for religious reasons but simply because it happened to mark the approximate arrival of the winter solstice, an event that was celebrated long before the advent of Christianity. The puritans were correct when they pointed out – and they pointed it out often – that Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston, for example, accurately observed in 1687 that the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so “thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because Heathens Saturnalia was that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].”2
>>>>The following except demonstrates how Christmas required political influence to over rule ecclesiastical preference in order to amalgamate it into popular culture.
Once, for a few strange years, the curtain of Puritan suppression was lifted, and not by choice. By 1680 it was becoming clear that the Restoration government in London would not continue to tolerate the Puritan political culture that had been established in New England. Knowing that its official charter of incorporation might be abrogated, in 1681 the Massachusetts General Court reluctantly revoked several of the colony’s laws that were most obnoxious to the English authorities. (One of the laws was thus revoked was the act banning the celebration of Christmas.) But this was not enough to save the charter. It was abrogated in 1684,. And during the three years from 1687 through 1689, Massachusetts was governed directly from London, as part of a short-lived entity known as the “Dominion of New England.”
What happened during these three years was deeply humiliating to the Puritans. The hated governor of the Dominion, Sir Edmund Andros, ruled most of New England (along with New York). From his headquarters in Boston, Governor Andros attempted to impose English Law and custom in the very seat of Puritan power. On Christmas Day, 1686, for example, two religious services were performed at the Boston Townhouse, and Andros attended both of them, with ‘a Red-Coat [soldier] going on his right hand and Capt., George on the left.”
But Governor Andros did not simply impose Anglican practices on a populace that was universally resistant to them. Once effect of his rule was to permit the public expression of a set of seasonal practices that were associated with the popular culture of seventeenth-century England. Those expressions of the popular culture could not have surfaced openly without the legal protection offered by the Andros regime. Under its protective mantle, during this brief period, it was possible for the first time in Massachusetts to act out heterodox rituals in public. A few Bostonians celebrated Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) by dancing in the streets,. And maypole ws erected in Charlsestown. Ppg. 18-19
