Long before the Grinch stole Christmas or “Bah! Humbug!” captured Scrooge’s bitterness, the Puritans sought to put a permanent end to Yuletide merriment.
For them, the acts of toasting (especially with alcohol), gift giving, and even neighborly caroling had no place in honoring the birth of Jesus Christ.
Why were the Puritans so opposed to these celebrations? In short, it came down to scripture and a Protestant desire to scrub Christian life of Catholic influence. If it wasn’t referenced in the Bible, it shouldn’t be observed. And because many of the 17th-century Christmas traditions in question had ties to both Roman Catholicism and to an older pagan winter solstice festival, the Puritans said they had to go.
Christmas celebrations in England ended up being outlawed in England for 13 years, and across the Atlantic, similar practices were deemed illegal for more than two decades in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, marking America’s very first “War on Christmas.”
Charles Ludington, a visiting associate professor at New York University, is a food and cultural historian specializing in British and Irish history in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Here, he offers insight into the evolution of the modern holiday and how two authors played an outsized role in both sentimentalizing and monetizing the “Christmas spirit” we’ve come to know:
The post The Puritans waged the first ‘War on Christmas’ appeared first on Futurity.
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