While most Americans today probably can’t imagine the Christmas season without Santa Claus, Christmas trees, hanging stockings, and gifts, most of these traditions did not begin until the 19th century. century. During the pre-Revolutionary War era, residents of the original 13 colonies disagreed fiercely over how to celebrate Christmas – and even whether to celebrate it.
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Roots of the colonial Christmas debate
English settlers who traveled to the New World brought the debate with them to Christmas. In the late 16th century, a group of Protestant reformers known as the Puritans sought to purify the Church of England and purge it of Roman Catholic traditions they considered excessive.
This included Christmas, which had its roots in the pagan Roman winter festival of Saturnalia, as well as the Nordic festival of Yule. At the time, Christmas celebrations in England lasted almost two weeks – from the day Jesus Christ was born, December 25, to the twelfth day, January 6 – and consisted of rowdy celebrations including feasts, games of chance, drinking parties and masked balls.
READ MORE: Saturnalia
Christmas in Jamestown and Plymouth
Massachusetts Puritan settlers armed with shotguns to protect their families from Native Americans, Christmas 1620.
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Like those they left behind in England, settlers to the New World were divided over whether and how to celebrate Christmas.
For the settlers who arrived in Virginia in 1607, Christmas was an important holiday. Although the celebrations may have been limited, given the harsh realities of life in the struggling new settlement of Jamestown, they have preserved it as a sacred occasion and a day of rest. In the 1620s and 1930s, Christmas was established as a benchmark in the legislative calendar for the Colony of Virginia, according to Nancy Egloff, historian of Jamestown Settlement. The Book Laws of 1631, for example, declared that churches were to be built in areas that needed it before the “feast of the birth of our Savior Christ.”
In contrast, the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims belonged to a Puritan sect known as the Separatists. They treated their first Christmas in the New World like another day of work. Governor William Bradford noted in his diary that the settlers began building the first house in the colony on December 25, 1620.
The following year, when a group of newly arrived settlers refused to work on Christmas Day, Bradford let them get away with it until they could become “better informed.” But he drew a firm line after finding them playing games while everyone else was working.
“If they kept it [Christmas] a matter of devotion, let them keep their homes, ”Bradford wrote. “But there shouldn’t be any games or festivities on the streets.”
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In Massachusetts, the Puritans made Christmas illegal
A Puritan berating children for picking holly during the holiday season.
Hulton Archives / Getty Images
The bitter differences between Puritans and Anglicans would eventually lead to the First English Civil War (1642-46), after which the Puritans came to power and banned the celebration of Christmas, Easter, and the various days of the Saints. In their strict view of the Bible, only the Sabbath was sacred. Christmas, with its pagan roots, was particularly unacceptable.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630 by a group of Puritan refugees from England, followed this example. According to a law passed in 1659, “whoever found himself observing a day such as Christmas or the like, either by abstaining from work, by feasting or in any other way” would be punished with a fine of five shillings. .
In 1681, after the end of the English Civil Wars and the reestablishment of the monarchy, Massachusetts yielded to increasing pressure and repealed some of its more restrictive laws, including the Christmas ban. However, Puritan opposition to Christmas remained strong throughout the colonial period: most businesses often remained open on December 25, and Massachusetts did not officially recognize the holiday until the mid-19th century.
READ MORE: When Massachusetts banned Christmas
Colonists imported English traditions
Despite Puritan efforts, many New England settlers celebrated Christmas, importing English customs such as drinking, feasting, mumbling, and crying. Mumming, or “masking,” involved people disguising themselves in costume and going from house to house to perform plays and perform in other ways. Wassailers also traveled between houses, drinking and singing as they passed around bowls filled with spicy beer or mulled wine.
In the central and southern colonies, where there was more religious diversity, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Moravians, and other groups brought their own Christmas traditions to the New World, both religious and secular.
Far from the occasion for children that it is today, the Christmas season was filled with adult activities such as parties, parties, hunts, balls and, of course, church services. People have decorated homes and churches with evergreen plants such as holly, ivy, mountain laurel and mistletoe, a favorite of couples looking for a holiday kiss.
In addition to mumbling and moaning, revelers from southern colonies like Virginia loved to sing Christmas carols, singing popular English songs such as “The First Noel”, “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen” and “The Holly and the Ivy ”.
Although Christmas became a relatively common celebration in the mid-18th century, it was still not officially recognized as a public holiday during the War of Independence. In 1789, Congress went so far as to hold its first session on Christmas Day.
It took almost a century for Congress to declare Christmas a national holiday, which it finally did in 1870. By this time, traditions such as the Christmas tree, Santa Claus and gifts had caught on. into the American mainstream, helping to turn December 25 into the family vacation we know and love today.
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