-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
It’s that time of year again. That time when many Christians imagine themselves persecuted by a secular “War on Christmas.” Interestingly, the “War on Christmas” has Christian roots. Pilgrims, who were strict Puritans, believed that “[t]hey for whom all days are holy can have no holiday.” Those holidays also included Christmas and Easter. Thanksgiving to the Pilgrims would have not been a holy day.
The Puritans saw Christmas as a pagan holiday, co-opted by the Roman Catholic Church, from the birthday of the sun god Mithra, which occurred on the winter solstice on December 21. Apples were added to Christmas trees, later to become ornaments, to represent the Garden of Eden. Pagan wreaths of holly were said to represent of the crown of thorns worn by Jesus at his crucifixion.
In 1645, Puritans in the English Parliament got Christmas eliminated as a national holiday. When Puritans came to Massachusetts, they continued their boycott of the Christmas holiday for decades. The boycott applied to non-Puritans as well. When a group of non-Puritan workers were found playing sports in celebration of Christmas, Gov. William Bradford took away their sporting implements and told them “there should be no gaming, or revelling in the streets.”
In 1710, Cotton Mather, a politically influential Puritan minister, now best known from the Salem witch trials, told his flock: “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty…by mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!”
While the Pilgrims’ independence and work ethic is represented as an ideal of America, the religious tolerance present in today’s America and enshrined in the First Amendment, would have been unthinkable to the Pilgrims.
The contradistinction between the top four, of the Ten Commandments, and the freedom of religious expression guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, gives lie to the claim that this country was founded on Christian principles.
H/T: The Week, Jon Ponder, Unreasonable Faith.
Christmas in Europe is great. Just left Brugges. It was small but magical.
As to the current war on Chritmas and Christians generally in the US it is bunk and the people who scream about it know so but the want to rev their shrinking congregations up about something to keep them coming back. As a result, we have priests telling parishioners that you cannot vote for a candidate that supports a woman’s right to an abortion or birth control and that Obama is taking away their Constitutinal right of free exercise by giving people health care. The real war on Christ is coming from the pulpit. The do not appreciate his teachings. They have been tainted by their desire for power and money. Christ and Christmas are just tools.
By the way thanks for the history of X. It will be very helpful the next time one of mt friend loses their mind when they see XMAS.
Merry Xmas to all!
Darren Smith
1, November 24, 2012 at 1:08 pm
For me If I could I would prefer celebrating Christmas in Europe
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No argument from me atall!
I would love to spend Christmas in France…Germany…or Norway w/the Nisse…damn I miss snow……
Nal wrote:
See, there is a war on Christmas.
Thank you, Nal and also Elaine’s post @ 10:15am.
As a child growing up in a Congregational Church/Scot descent household, the celebration of Christmas only went into full gear after the Vets from WW II came home, according to my mother, father, aunts, uncles, older cousins etc. Up until 1946, my entire family treated Christmas as just another day as had their ancestors going back to 1595 which was the year the first one landed on these shores.
Our big party time was New Years Eve/Day. No religious significance was attached to it but lots of food, drink and presents. My aunts used to gossip about all the foreigners who celebrated Christmas failing to understand it just wasn’t done in the States.
When Christmas started being celebrated in my family, the aunts would bemoan the insult to the ancestors and the “Popification” of the Reformation.
For me If I could I would prefer celebrating Christmas in Europe, namely I have been to France, The Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. If you want to experience a true Christmas in my view the Weihnachtsmärkte (Christmas Markets) in Basel, Switzerland was one of the best Christmases of my adulthood, Frankfurt was good also.
http://www.basel.com/en/christmas-basel-%E2%80%93-winter-fairy-tale
If only I could be there right now, sipping a warm cup of glühwein and being in joy. Its not just the shops, the atmosphere there is fundamentally better than what we have to settle for here. If you have been there you would know what I mean.
Capt – “X” was the Greek letter that early Xians used to represent Christ. They did this mostly in Rome to avoid persecution. “Xmas” was almost a point of pride to some Xians in the 50’s & 60’s (thats as far back as I can attest to) because it represented overcoming repression. This is just another example of people not knowing their own history & then looking for an excuse to be ‘injured’.
Abbreviation.
Where did the abbreciation “Xmas” come from?
Nal,
It wasn’t til after the civil war that Christmas became pretty much accepted or forced upon us…..
Great link Elaine!
The ‘War on Christmas’ is waged for show and ratings
BY JOEL CONNELLY, SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF
December 20, 2011
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/connelly/article/The-War-on-Christmas-is-waged-for-show-and-2415936.php
Excerpt:
The Fox News Channel is unlikely to draw a bead on the National Rifle Association as one of its targets in the phony “War on Christmas.”
Fox would rather do an ambush interview with Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee for the sin of erecting a “holiday tree.” Still, big as life on the NRA’s website, is a “Happy Holidays” greeting coupled with a come-on for donations to fight President Obama’s re-election.
We’ve grown used to the phony war waged by those who would milk the Feast of the Nativity for ratings and riches. We are witnessing, as New York Times scribe Alessandra Stanley recently wrote, a “cherished Fox News holiday tradition of mixing persecution and poinsettia.”
What’s offensive, to this believer, is the hijacking of a feast’s meaning by those whose business is to make noise and generate fear.
A joyous St. James Cathedral concert of children’s choirs last Sunday featured readings of scripture unmistakable in message. They described a vulnerable baby, born to a couple who could not find room at the inn, threatened by a secular king who committed infanticide in hopes of eliminating the Christ child.
As editor-evangelical Jim Wallis wrote this week in Sojourners:
“That Jesus was born poor, later announces his mission at Nazareth as ‘bringing good news to the poor,’ and finally tells us that how we treat ‘the least of these’ is his measure of how we treat him and how he will judge us as the Son of God, radically defines the social context and meaning of the Incarnation of God in Christ. And it clearly reveals the real meaning of Christmas.”
The generals of our “War on Christmas,” by contrast, are symbols and advocates of wealth and privilege.
Bill O’Reilly at Fox News, the self-described “watchdog” of Christmas, reportedly takes home $14 million a year. The network’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, put down $45 million for a Rockefeller “townhouse” a few Christmases ago.
The gospel readings Sunday at St. James spoke of the birth of a “prince of peace.” As the concert drew to a close, the cathedral darkened, candles were lit and the congregation sang “Silent Night” with its familiar refrain: “Sleep in heavenly peace.”
On the right-wing airwaves, however, there is no peace. Its staples are the bearing of false witness and dark intimations.
The hypocrisy can be jaw-dropping. “Fox & Friends” took out after Tulsa, Okla., last year for changing the name of its “Christmas Parade of Lights” to the “Holiday Parade of Lights.”
Yet, there on my screen were pictures of the hosts making merry at the “Fox & Friends Holiday Party.”
News from a place where we think that theocracy is embedded. Predictions that theocracy in Iran is not sitting well and will be replaced by a new revolution soon. The mullahs are regarded as rich parasites.
And young women wear tights topped with micro-skirts in public, waist-length hair with the obligatory shawl on the shoulders. What is Iran coming to? Puritanism? Hardly.
Great subject David. Bill O”Reilly will be spitting up his porridge reading this article.
what is wrong with Christmas? You buy presents for people you love. Who could be against that?
“Massachusetts gave us Mitt Romeny and that should tell you something about the legacy of the Pilgrams in Mass. Or after Mass.”~CaptRatty
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Dood,
IAMFROM Massachusettes.
Romney was a moro……eh, mormon. Willard Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, at Harper Hospital in Detroit, Michigan,
:p
“While the Pilgrims’ independence and work ethic is represented as an ideal of America, the religious tolerance present in today’s America and enshrined in the First Amendment, would have been unthinkable to the Pilgrims.”
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“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.” Thomas Jefferson
…and the breaches by our Statesmen into that DMZ between action and thought are ever increasing these days….I hope enlightenment catches up with them before the breach becomes irreparable and we lose that freedom of religion because we were not strong enough to protect our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and civil rights…
Nal,
Some people invent their own history–history as they would like it to be.
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Father Christmas, Get Thee Hence!
Why We Have No Christmas at Plimoth Plantation
http://www.plimoth.org/learn/MRL/read/articles-and-writings/christmas
Each Thanksgiving, national attention turns to the Pilgrims and Plimoth Plantation basks in the warm glow of celebrity. However, the moment must be caught quickly, for scarcely has the Thanksgiving dinner been cleared away before the Christmas season roars in, sweeping away all thoughts of the Pilgrim festival—and the Plantation.
We are sometimes asked if Plimoth Plantation could latch onto the Christmas holiday magic as well. Christmas provides a popular—and lucrative—opportunity for many museums. Michigan’s Greenfield Village has an enormous indoor Christmas tree, sleigh rides and other Christmas observations. Colonial Williamsburg spruces itself up with “colonial” decorations, parades, and other events for what is one of the most profitable seasons of the museum’s year.
The insurmountable objection to Christmas at Plimoth Plantation—or for that matter, at any museum of early New England life—is that Christmas simply wasn’t a part of the New England history. At Plymouth in December, 1620, a rainy Christmas day was spent building the new houses. Aboard the Mayflower, Master Jones passed around a special ration of beer, but for those ashore, there was no observation of the day. The most famous Christmas in Plymouth Colony occurred in 1621. When the colonists were called to work as usual, the new immigrants who had arrived aboard the Fortune two weeks earlier objected to working on the holiday. The Mayflower men went to work in the woods and fields as usual, but when they returned at dinner time, they found the new comers playing at stool-ball, pitching the bar and so forth. Governor Bradford took away their toys and told them that they should not revel in the streets while others worked, and noted that “since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.”
This set the tone for Christmas in New England. The Separatists and Puritans, finding no warrant for Christmas in the Bible, simply rejected the day as one of the nefarious human interventions of which they sought to rid the church. The holiday was made illegal between 1659 and 1681, following English Puritan precedent. When the Restoration of 1660 led to the revival of Christmas in England, New England remained unimpressed and Christmas-less. Christmas was simply another workday for most people in New England until well into the 19th century. Some Episcopalian families and a few others observed the holiday but the majority continued in the New England tradition.
DEAR EDITOR:
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no war on Christmas. Papa says, ‘If you see it on FAUX News it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a War on Christmas?
VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.
No war on Christmas?
VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by rationality in an irrational age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not provable by rational observation. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, can be little. The reaction to this great universe of ours can be for man to be a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a war on Christmas. It exists as certainly as hate and stinginess and demagoguery exist, and you know that they abound and give to their life its highest ugly and lowest meaning. Alas! How merry might be the world if there were a war on Christmas. It might be as merry as if there were no teabagers. There would be no inchoate hate then, no petty sniping, no panic to make less tolerable this existence. We should have enjoyment, except in insensate cruelty and slights. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be increased.
Not believe in the war on Christmas! You might as well not believe in T-bone eating Bucks! You might get your papa to hire men to watch all of FAUX News to catch the war dispatches, but even if they did not witness BillO frothing at the mouth, what would that prove? Nobody sees the war on Christmas, but that is a sign that there is a real war on Christmas. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see (according to FAUX News). Did you ever see welfare queens driving Cadillacs on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the evils there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
No war on Christmas!? Thank God! it lives, and it lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, it will continue to make mad the ‘brains’ of morans.
Copyright NutMEG Light Industries, 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvmlmcmLPQI
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvmlmcmLPQI&w=420&h=315%5D
Thank Dog that the Founders of the Republic, the soldiers at Valley Forge and Framers of the Constitution were not a bunch of damn pilgrams. If you take the Tea Baggers who spout off today about the glory of the Boston Tea Party episode, and then look at the politics of these Tea Baggers, then you know that they would have been sitting cuddly in Philiadelphia with King George’s troops rather than eating grass out at Valley Forge with George Washington. The Tea Baggers get their Georges mixed up. It is a shame that those friggin Pilgrams had to come over here and camp on Plymouth Rock. But, their diatribe did not last all that long and has turned itto platitude and BS. Massachusetts gave us Mitt Romeny and that should tell you something about the legacy of the Pilgrams in Mass. Or after Mass.
Now, to my important question to fellow bloggers. Was not Christ really born in July and did not the Church move his BD up into the pagan holiday season to co-opt the revelers? Is that not the origin of the word Coptic? I heard that story when I was in Jerusalem from a rather abashed holy roller who was over there on some learning quest. Let me know what you know. Inquring minds want to know.