Politics, Religion, Society

The Pilgrims’ “War On Christmas”

-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.

56 thoughts on “The Pilgrims’ “War On Christmas””

  1. Jan Briggs is correct, basically, regarding the Pilgrims and the Puritans. The article Nal linked @ 10:26p is also correct.

    The biggest difference was the view on ecclesiastical hierarchy, on the difference between a civil rite and a religious one, and on the theory of predestination.

    If one understands Robert Browne’s influence (note I did not say leadership) then one can grasp the difference.

  2. junctionshamus,

    “… kartoffelsalat, rouladen, späzle, sauerbraten, wursts, kuchen!”

    now I’M hungry. It’s been a long time but I can still read a menu!

  4. CaptRatty:

    “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?”
    ======================================================
    There’s no way to tell what year, much less what month, this Jesus person was born. There’s no historical record of his existence, beyond religious texts. Saying that is an invitation to a fight.

    Yes, his birthday is celebrated close to the Winter Solstice, which was a pagan holiday. It was co-opted.

  5. Jan Briggs:

    Pilgrims and Puritans were two different groups.

    Both groups followed the Reformed Doctrine of John Calvin which includes, among other dogma, Calvin’s dislike of holidays.

  6. We in the states tend to think we know history when we really only know an outline of it. Both the article and comments made here (with the exception of Elaine) make the same mistake.

    Pilgrims and Puritans were two different groups. The Puritans retained membership in the Church of England trying to purify it of “popery” from within. The Puritans founded Massachusetts Bay Colony after the coming of the Pilgrims.

    The Pilgrims were separatists from the C of E and it is they who came in the Mayflower and founded Plymouth Colony. The Puritans wore those tall black hats, but the Pilgrims wore a kind of floppy hat whose brim could be turned up or down. Some of the people on the Mayflower and on the Fortune were not Pilgrims. In order to pacify them the Mayflower Compact was drawn up and signed.

    Of course, the mythology is much more powerful than the truth.

  7. I don’t mind snow as long as there isn’t ten feet of it. I kind of miss the prettiness of it. Having a nice cup of coffee or a warm brandy and looking out over unblemished snow under moonlight is a meditative treat. Ice, on the other hand, just sucks.

  8. Woosty,
    I do not want to see snow like that this year! We had it like that a couple of years ago up in in northern Illinois.

  10. Malisha:

    Wow, that boss, what a poor businessman. Free advertising and a seal of approval and he instead lost control and guaranteed never getting that congregation again, not to mention a bad reputation among all their friends, relatives and neighbors.

    If a customer is a good customer, that is buys stuff and causes no drama or damage, I wouldn’t care who or what they were. They could be “fascist anarchists” as Ferris Buehler would say and they would still help pay the bills.

  12. Sie sind ein grausamer Mann, junctionshamus. 😀

    And I mean that in the nicest way possible.

  13. Sounds like a contradiction in terms.
    “Decent German restaurant.”

    Now if you’d said “Decent Swedish restaurant”, I would have said that it was an impossibility.

    However I could say that we have a decent imitation of a Hungarian restaurant.

  14. Knock it of youse guys. The nearest decent German restaurant is 500 miles from me and you’re making me hungry. 😀

    1. Ja wohl, nicht mere uber kartoffelsalat, rouladen, späzle, sauerbraten, wursts, kuchen, sprechen!

  17. Malisha,

    What jewish channel was that show on? Too good to be true.

    In respect to Xmas, I thought that all had seen the film portraying early Christians, when meeting in Rome and being forbidden, would make the sign of a fish (pisces) in the sand with their staffs. And if understood the replier would strike off the head of the fish, leaving the X left.

    However Ratty’s Macy story has perhaps more merit, but not cinemamaticly.

  18. A friend of my sons was working in a retail shop several years back and at Christmas time, a woman came into the shop, looked around, did not choose anything, and just before leaving, turned and said to him, “Merry Christmas.” He answered, “Merry Christmas to you too,” and she then beamed, wrote something down on a clipboard and told him cheerfully that his business had been added to the list of stores that her church was telling people to frequent for their holiday shopping. She informed him confidentially that those who responded to the greeting with “Season’s Greetings” or “Happy Holidays” or a similar neutral greeting were “denying the Lord” and would be stricken from the list and boycotted by the groups that organized the research shoppers’ tours. The store clerk, surprised, said nothing. He is Jewish. His boss, who is not Jewish, was within hearing range. He emerged from the back of the shop and stopped the woman who was about to leave. “Hey you got my name on that list of stores?” he asked. “We certainly do!” came the answer. “Well get my name the F**K OFF YOUR GO**AMN LIST RIGHT NOW,” he boomed, “Because I don’t want your stupid bigots in my shop this season or ever and tell them I said so!”

    My son’s friend turned to him after she left and said, “Boss, you ruined Christmas!”

  19. Woosty, Today is the first snow day. You’re quite welcome to it. Please take it. Please…..

  20. Thank you commenter Frankly for the explanation above of the derivation of the “Xmas” word. I had thought all these years that it was some invention of Macy’s to cram the word into a smaller advertisement. I knew nothing about the Xians and really to this day know nuthin about birthin babies so the way in which Christ was conceived without sex and without fuel injection is beyond me. But those who oppose Christmas would do well to think about their stock portfolios before they do themselves some harm by mouthing off about the true meaning of the event, or the Day, or the time of year.

Comments are closed.