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.
Hey… bring on the Mad Mirth.
“You should stop drinking water only and have a little wine”–1Timothy 5:23. My favorite Scripture verse.
Steve Kellmeyer had a very good two part post on how it was Christians who stole Christmas.
http://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-christians-stole-christmas.html
http://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2005/12/how-christians-stole-christmas-part-ii.html
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.)
Incidentally, it is still in the Mass. General Code that you can’t blashpheme Jesus or criticise the Christian faith.
I guess the Puritan’s aversion to Christmas is their Catholic heritage smacks them right in the face when they say the word! Christmas = the Mass of Christ.
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.
And they’re still trying:
Grinched! Outrage as school disses holiday
The Crown didn’t -retake- Massachusetts, it conquered it. The Crown had not previously been in charge of the pilgrim and puritan colony.
The opposition to Christmas is a strange thing. The early Puritans were no teetotalers, nor were they opposed to parties. They were in fact, a college movement of young Calvinists. Massachusetts was an attempt to demonstrate that Biblical principals provided for a better life, to Europe.
1680 seems awfully early for them to be turning into the later Puritans – who, contrary to the teaching of the early Puritans, believed that well-being in life was a sign of God’s election – much as the disciples did, before Jesus corrected them. That led to children not following Christ, and the parents pressuring pastors to baptize the grandbabies – which led to all sorts of theological controversy. In the end, the focus on election rather than the Cross led to a moralistic and materialistic society that eventually even rejected the Blessed Trinity.
But the early Puritans were nothing like that. Think Protestant early Jesuits if you can wrap your brain around the image.
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