The one thing that we can be absolutely sure of when we look at the history of the celebration of Christmas by the first settlers of British North America was that there was no First Christmas, unlike the first Thanksgiving. Protestantism, regardless of which version you looked at, was certain that nobody knew when Jesus had been born, so when they looked at what Roman Catholicism was celebrating they saw Saturnalia and the lords of misrule, so absolutely, positively not.
Yet we celebrate Christmas (in a way that nods toward the Saturnalia without invoking the lords of misrule, who we've transferred to Hallowe'en), and Clement Moore's poem A Visit from St. Nicholas was published for the first time in 1823, so our observance isn't ENTIRELY because of anything Queen Victoria did. Plus, almost all of this was done either by Liberal religious groups or people working in the secular world.
Follow me below the strangely undecorated orange Christmas wreath for more.
Yes, the first war on Christmas in American history was one in which people did what they could to get the holiday observed. When the Puritans who settled New England arrived in the 1620s and 1630s, they came with a tradition in which December 25 was just another business day, just like December 18 and December 11. The date on which to observe the birth of Jesus had not been set by the Church until the fourth century, and it was chosen because it marked the winter solstice; the Puritans (properly) saw this as a simple papering-over of a pagan festival. As Increase Mather wrote in 1687:
[They did so] because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].
They also suppressed it because the method of celebrating the birth of Christ in England involved carnivalesque behavior. December was the month that coincided with the end of the harvest and slaughter season, and freshly-slaughtered meat had to be consumed quickly in the days before refrigeration. As Steven Nissenbaum puts it in a terrific book called
The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday (1997),
this was a time for the common people to let off steam, and the way they did that was often both disorderly and disrespectful of authority.
Disrespectful of authority. Something the New England Puritans just would NOT tolerate. So no Christmas. Fines for people who took the day off from work. In England, Parliament made a point of meeting on December 25 from 1644-1658, the years in which Oliver Cromwell was in power; the policy was reversed in England in 1660, but not in New England. Almanacs printed in Massachusetts didn't mention it either.
Still, the celebrations weren't suppressed completely. Increase Mather's son Cotton wrote a treatise called Advice from the Watch-Tower in 1713. In it, he warned about practices that allowed young people to appropriate some social occasions for "abominable behavior," some of which had to do with illicit sex, and Christmas was at the top of his list. Cotton Mather himself may have begun the movement toward a temperate Christmas in a 1712 sermon in which he said
Good men may love one another, and may treat each other with a most Candid Charity, while he that Regardeth a Day, regardeth it unto the Lord, and he that Regardeth not the Day, also shows his Regard to the Lord, in his Not Regarding of it.
Mirth and moderation, please. No drunkenness. In 1730, most almanacs published in Massachusetts, notably the one published by James Franklin, Benjamin's older brother, listed Christmas, and by 1760 almost all almanacs did. New hymnals also included some hymns that referred to the birth of Christ. Still (here's Nissenbaum again)
Nowhere would we have found Christmas trees, no reindeer, no Santa Claus. Christmas in late-eighteenth-century New England--or anywhere else--was not centered around the family or on children or giving presents. It was nether a domestic holiday nor a commercial one.
So what changed? Interestingly, it was liberal Protestants who began to observe it publicly. The Universalists, so named because they rejected the Calvinist belief in predestination, favoring the idea that anyone could be saved, held a Christmas day service in Boston in 1789. The Unitarians, who I refer to in my lectures about this period as the liberal wing of the Puritan church (talk about a punchline there), began to call for the public observance of Christmas in the early 1800s
They did so in full knowledge that it was not a Biblically sanctioned holiday, and that December 25 was probably not the day on which Jesus was born. They wished to celebrate the holiday not because God had ordered them to do so but because they themselves wished to. In 1817, an effort to close down businesses in Boston and hold religious services on Christmas Day began. While the religious services sputtered, the closing of businesses didn't.
As for A Visit from St. Nicholas, we move to New York, and it turns out that this was NOT an Americanized Dutch tradition, as it was promoted as at the time of its publication. It is rather an invented tradition, the work of some antiquarian-minded new Yorkers at the beginning of the 19th century, whose number included Washington Irving, who decided to invent a Dutch fantasy past for New York that could combat its rapid commercialization. Clement Clark Moore, the developer of the Chelsea district of Manhattan, was allied with this group, and from Washington Irving's writings he knew that St. Nicholas was the (mythic) patron saint of Nieuw Amsterdam. AND, the CATHOLIC community of the Netherlands celebrated on his feast day, December 6.
(
The Feast of St Nicholas, Jan Havicksz. Steen, 1665 - 1668.
The feast of St Nicholas takes place in December. In the Netherlands, it has been celebrated in the same way for centuries. Good children receive gifts from the saint. The little girl in the foreground, for instance, has a bucket full of treats. Naughty children, like the wailing boy at the left, get only a switch (a bundle of twigs) in their shoe. Jan Steen was a born storyteller. He succeeded in incorporating all of the elements of the popular feast in this picture. The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
So from that, we know where "He knows if you've been bad or good so be good for goodness sake" comes from. But CATHOLICS in the Netherlands. Not the Dutch Reform Church. So what we have in A Visit from St. Nicholas is a defrocked St. Nicholas who might have come to visit a wealthy New Yorker on Christmas Eve. The result of this poem? An image of Santa Claus (the corruption of the Dutch Sinterklaas) drawn by the great cartoonist Thomas Nast.
The tree? I didn't get that far, but it's fairly clear that the celebration of Christmas in this country did not develop in the way in which the celebration of Easter did. Happy Christmas Eve, and Merry Christmas tomorrow (if you're celebrating).