It's just impossible not to comment on this. TPM reports today that To Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) is attacking Harry Reid for proposing to call the Senate to order a week after Christmas. Reid's proposal, he clamors, is "disrespecting one of the two holiest of holidays for Christians and the families of all of the Senate, not just the senators themselves but all of the staff."
Okay, so Christmas is whatever we make it, but the Christian right's understanding of its history is, well, absent. Christmas is a contrived "holiday" (holy day) that has no Biblical precedent. The Puritans--not to mention other old-time American Protestants--rejected Christmas entirely.
History lesson below the fold.
The archetypal ancestors of Euro-Americans, the Pilgrims, hated Christmas. When a few colonists tried to celebrate Christmas in 1621, William Bradford ordered them back to work. The Puritans similarly banned Christmas celebrations—-or even mentions of it in published almanacs. If you were caught celebrating Christmas, you were fined five shillings. You might recall the Prohibition era of the 1920s. Drinking was illegal but people drank anyway. Similarly, Puritans continued to celebrate Christmas; they just did so in secret.
What the authorities despised about Christmas was (a) the Bible doesn’t say when Christ was born; and (b) Christmas was a continuation of Roman Saturnalia, i.e., "giving liberty to carnall and sensual delights." Christmas celebrations included mumming, which involved going from house to house in disguise, often dressed in the clothing of the opposite sex, as well as caroling, "generally done in the midst of Rioting and ... Wantonness [fornication]." One 16th-century Anglican bishop noted that "men dishonour Christ more in the twelve days of Christmas, than in all the twelve months besides." Puritan cleric Cotton Mather agreed, finding Christmas celebrants to be "consumed in Compotations, ... in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in mad Mirth."
Another popular Christmas activity was "wassailing," a term signifying both a popular alcoholic drink and the custom wherein the poor came to the doors of the wealthy and demanded that drink. If they were refused, they might respond with taunts, snarls, and stone-throwing (like the Halloween custom of "trick or treat," but more aptly phrased "treat or trick").
Alas not even Puritans could stop Christmas. By the 1730s, Christmas had reappeared in almanacs and in public practice. Still, celebrants had no Christmas tree, no Santa, no reindeer, no presents. Those came in the early 19th century, when New York litterateurs, hopeful merchants, and an emergent middle class prescribed gift-giving for children rather than for the poor. The new metropolitan police of New York were now required to arrest wassailers, or "Callithumpians," as they were known.
Christmas posed a challenge to a social system that was increasingly divided into the prosperous (the new middle class, along with an older upper class) and the poor (the new working class). The poor included gangs of street toughs; volunteer fireman who battled one another rather than battling fires; Irish pugilists who despised prissy Yankees; and labor radicals. These were not people you wanted to find at your doorstep demanding liquor.
Things were out of kilter, as New York’s elite saw it. Hence they launched a temperance movement (it did the world much good, though "tee totaling" became a way for prosperous folks to define themselves as superior to the rabble). They also privatized Christmas, transforming St. Nick into the patron saint of old New Amsterdam (which he was not) and then into Santa Claus (borrowing and altering German and Dutch customs, not English).
Now we have the spectacle of right-wing fundamentalist Christians furious about attacks on their "holiest" of holidays.
They need a history lesson. Christmas never was a Biblical holiday. It was Saturnalia in disguise. Then it got co-opted by a rising middle-class and made into an exercise in consumerism.
If the right wants to crusade for the sanctity of the greeting "Merry Christmas," I propose that they think about what "merry" meant in the history of Christmas.
Sure, let's return to the "merry" customs of our early modern ancestors. Forget about family dinners and gift exchanges. Let's drink heavily, dress in our spouse’s clothes, and canvass our neighborhoods, demanding wassail from prosperous sorts. If they don’t give it, we must yell and hoot and send a rock through their window.