Christmas in the 1600s was hardly a silent night, let alone a holy one. “Men dishonor Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides,” wrote 16th-century clergyman Hugh Latimer. The pagan-like way in which Christmas was celebrated troubled the Puritans even more than the underlying theology. The holiday had everything to do with the time of year, the solstice and Saturnalia and nothing to do with Christianity.” ” According to Nissenbaum, “Puritans believed Christmas was basically just a pagan custom that the Catholics took over without any biblical basis for it. The noted Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote that Christmas occurred on December 25 not because “Christ was born in that month, but because the heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those pagan holidays metamorphosed into Christian.
did the church in Rome ordain the celebration of the Nativity on December 25, and that was done by co-opting existing pagan celebrations such as Saturnalia, an ancient Roman holiday of lights marked with drinking and feasting that coincided with the winter solstice. The Puritans noted that the scriptures did not mention a season, let alone a single day, that marked the birth of Jesus.Įven worse for the Puritans were the pagan roots of Christmas. “The Puritans tried to run a society in which legislation would not violate anything that the Bible said, and nowhere in the Bible is there a mention of celebrating the Nativity,” Nissenbaum says. In their strict interpretation of the Bible, the Puritans noted that there was no scriptural basis for commemorating Christmas. Why did the Puritans loathe Christmas? Stephen Nissenbaum, the author of The Battle for Christmas, says it was partly because of theology and partly because of the rowdy celebrations that marked the holiday in the 1600s. The Puritans of New England eventually followed the lead of those in old England, and in 1659 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony made it a criminal offense to publicly celebrate the holiday and declared that “whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way” was subject to a 5-shilling fine. Parliament decreed that December 25 should instead be a day of “fasting and humiliation” for Englishmen to account for their sins. A Puritan rebukes children for picking holly.Īfter the Puritans in England overthrew King Charles I in 1649, among their first items of business after chopping off the monarch’s head was to ban Christmas.
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