Abstract: Early American campaigns against Christmas illustrate both the irrepressibility of the impulse to celebrate Christ and what is lost when we reject the good that comes from suspect sources. Both lessons point us toward the Savior’s gracious acceptance of our own imperfect offerings.

Christmas in rural New England is a mood. Snow falls softly on colonial-era farmhouses. Candles sit in the gabled windows that line little village streets. Townsfolk gather on the common to trim and light a tree. As the song suggests, it is nearly “like a picture print by Currier and Ives” — a land of pumpkin pies and Longfellow poems and Alcott’s literary visions of the March girls taking their Christmas feast to the needy.1 When we suggested to our college-student children that, instead of bringing them home, we might travel to them for the holidays this year, there was near rebellion. New England, we were told, is Christmas.

Now, I enjoy all this yuletide sentimentality and its carefully curated aesthetic as much as anyone. I am a sucker for the spice-scented ambiance that settles upon our communities as Christmas approaches. It is indeed lovely. But I am also a historian who knows something about the religious values of New England’s past, and I cannot help but be somewhat amused by the fact that this effusion of holiday nostalgia would make the region’s Puritan progenitors sick. Maybe furious. Definitely disappointed. They had actually done their darndest to kill Christmas.

As early modern Britons, Puritans knew Christmas to be an annual excuse for too much drinking, too much ribaldry, too much irreverence and unrest. Worse still, as radical Protestants, they saw Christmas as [Page 190]a reflection of Catholicism’s paganizing influence in Christendom. Just as they rejected the Catholic mass as a jumble of sensory rituals that benumbed the soul with alluring sights, smells, and sounds, they suppressed “Christ mass” as a celebration unfit for their Savior. The observance of Christmas was not something that — by their reading — the scriptures sanctioned, and its extravagant imposition could only lead the gullible away from the spiritual demands of discipleship.2

They were serious about this. Boston made celebration of the holiday a finable offense for decades. Even after the lifting of such official punishments, stalwart Puritans sought to suppress the practice. In a December 25th diary entry, the prominent Boston judge Samuel Sewall exulted in the fact that most of the town’s inhabitants still refused to acknowledge the day, going about their business as usual. Sewall spent a typical morning reading Psalms with his family and then took occasion “to ‘dehort [them] from Christmas-keeping, and charged them to forbear.’”3 Puritans like Sewall carefully observed their community to make sure it did not observe the holiday.

The story of how New England went from a region radically dedicated to the eradication of Christmas to a region identified by its iconic observance of the holiday is long and complicated. It has to do with demographic change, and economic development,