Christmas Wars Episode I: The Puritan Menace

Slate has an interesting piece on the history of Christmas and the war conducted against it by Puritans et al. in of all places (are you ready?) Massachusetts.

EXCERPT:

Between 1659 and 1681, Christmas celebrations were outlawed in the colony, and the law declared that anyone caught "observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting or any other way any such days as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offense five shillings." Finding no biblical authority for celebrating Jesus’ birth on Dec. 25, the theocrats who ran Massachusetts regarded the holiday as a mere human invention, a remnant of a heathen past. They also disapproved of the rowdy celebrations that went along with it. "How few there are comparatively that spend those holidays … after an holy manner," the Rev. Increase Mather lamented in 1687. "But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in Mad Mirth."

After the English Restoration government reclaimed control of Massachusetts from the Puritans in the 1680s, one of the first acts of the newly appointed royal governor of the colony was to sponsor and attend Christmas religious services. Perhaps fearing a militant Puritan backlash, for the 1686 services he was flanked by redcoats. The Puritan disdain for the holiday endured: As late as 1869, public-school kids in Boston could be expelled for skipping class on Christmas Day.

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Dennis_Mahon

And they're still trying:
Grinched! Outrage as school disses holiday

Fr. Robert J. Carr

The people who outlawed Christmas, also founded Harvard University. Those puritans later split into two religions: The Congregationalists and the more worldly Unitarian Universalists. The former group is now for the most part connected to the United Church of Christ. As it was in the 1600's so it is now, the groups as organizations, not necessarily on a personal level, have an intense anti-Catholic element to them.
Go back into the archives of the Boston Globe and see who are the most pro-gay, anti-Catholic organizations working against the Catholics in 2002. The United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalists. Once known collectively as Puritans.
Same as it ever was.

Jeb Protestant

Incidentally, it is still in the Mass. General Code that you can't blashpheme Jesus or criticise the Christian faith.

Mary

A Protestant told me that it was wrong to worship otherwise than we were directed in the Bible, and she saw no reason to single out a day to celebrate the birth.
I pointed out that we are not directed in the Bible to worship on Sundays.
But -- OTOH, let us not overstate the Puritan aversion to Christmas. Some, no doubt, opposed the holiday itself. Others opposed the drunkenness, misrule, and other sins that accompanied it. Milton, after all, was able to publish a poem specificially on Christmas during the Commonwealth. (In England, to be sure, but there were Puritans over there, too.)