Background
Like other Massachusetts Puritans, Increase Mather considered Christmas a “profane and superstitious custom.” The Boston minister wrote in 1687 that December 25th was observed as the birth date of Christ not because “Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at the time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].” He was correct.
The English men and women who came to New England in the 1600s were familiar with Christmas as it was celebrated in Britain. The Christmas season began in late November and continued well into the New Year, coinciding with a natural break in the agricultural cycle. It was a time of feasting, excessive alcohol consumption, merry-making, and “misrule,” the turning of social conventions upside down. Landlords were expected to open their homes and furnish the poor with food and drink.
Massachusetts Puritans sought to put an end to the celebration of Christmas with all of its excesses. Almanacs published in the Bay colony did not mark December 25th as Christmas Day.
While the Puritans succeeded in suppressing most holiday revelry, they could not quell it completely. The authorities considered fishermen and other residents of the region’s coastal villages to be irreligious and to behave in unacceptable ways â from heavy drinking to “keeping Christmas.”
One Christmas conflict occurred in Salem in 1679. On the night of December 25th, four men entered the home of farmer John Rowden, who helped themselves to seats by the fire, began to sing, and then demanded cups of the Rowdens’ pear wine. After being repeatedly refused, they pretended to leave the house, only to return and beg for money. They were turned out again and continued their harassment, throwing “stones, bones, and other things” at the house and stealing several pecks of apples, according to Rowden’s court testimony. The English tradition of exchanging hospitality for goodwill was not observed in Salem that night.
The British government’s objections to the Massachusetts law against Christmas festivities resulted in it being repealed in 1681. The holiday was widely, and sometimes wildly, celebrated from 1687 to 1689, the period after Massachusetts Bay lost its charter and was governed by an English official, Sir Edmund Andros. He ruled most of New England and New York from his seat in Boston. When the colony regained its charter in 1689, public expressions of Christmas cheer ended, at least for the time being.
The observance of Christmas did not disappear altogether, and soon a movement was afoot to purify and temper the observance rather than stamp it out altogether. By the 1750s the most common New England hymnal, the Bay Psalm Book, included Christmas hymns, and by 1760 most almanacs named December 25th Christmas Day. Christmas music by New England composers appeared in song books published in the second half of the eighteenth century; the Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony, published by Isaiah Thomas in 1786, even included Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”
By the 1840s many states began to make Christmas a legal holiday. An 1856 Massachusetts law recognized Christmas along with July 4th and Washington’s Birthday. The success of this measure was due to the growing number of workers and Irish Catholics in the electorate. Provision was made for state workers to have a day off the following Monday if the holiday fell on a Sunday. Public offices were also to be closed on these days, and it was expected that other businesses would follow suit.
Sources
The Battle for Christmas, by Stephen Nissenbaum (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
Testimony against Several Profane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by Some in New-England, by Increase Mather (687).
david says
in that the blue laws also date from the 1600s to enforce the Puritan version of the Sabbath. I wonder if the change to extend the blue laws to Christmas occurred simultaneously with the recognition of Christmas as a “legal holiday”?
andy says
I always wonder how Christmas has changed over the years to become the shopping craze it is. I can sort of see some of the gift giving requirements date back to the 1650’s, at least according to the guys in Salem! Thank you!
charley-on-the-mta says
Good stuff, Bob. Thanks!