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CHAPTER 6 EARLY RESISTANCE
As we will see in these brief sources, some pockets of resistance to Christmas remained up till the 17th century. Eventually, toward the dawn of the 20th century the Christmas season made massive strides across Europe and America. Still many today shun the Christmas season as an ancient pagan festival with Christian names attached to it. Here we will see evidence of the Christian resistance from compromising pagan mythology with Christianity. In the United States and Canada, many elements of modern Christmas celebrations did not emerge until the 19th century. Before then Christmas had been an ordinary workday in many communities, particularly in New England, where early Puritan objections to Christmas celebrations remained highly influential. Among some groups, Christmas was an especially boisterous event, characterized by huge feasts, drunkenness, and raucous public revelry. In an English tradition that survived in some parts of North America, Christmas revelers would dress in costume and progress from door to door to receive gifts of food and drink. Most holiday gifts were limited to small amounts of money and modest presents passed from the wealthy to the poor and from masters to their servants. Families almost never exchanged Christmas gifts among themselves. Microsoft Encyclopedia Encarta 2000 Christmas has not always been remembered with gaiety and good cheer. Excessive frivolity had always been frowned upon by some, and Christmas was not celebrated by the Puritans or Calvinists. When the Puritans came to power in England under Oliver Cromwell in 1642, Christmas celebrations were banned as evidence of antireligious, Royalist sentiment. Penalties were exacted for celebrating Christmas, and for staying home from work on Christmas Day. The Puritan Christmas did not become a legal holiday until 1856. Never the less, in other areas of the United States, the festive season was celebrated with joyousness by immigrants, who brought their holiday traditions from their homelands. It is this tradition of “joy to the world” that today marks the spirit of Christmas nearly everywhere in the world. Encyclopedia Americana 1994, book #6, P. 667 During the Reformation of the 16th century, Protestants challenged the authority of the Catholic Church, including its toleration of surviving pagan traditions during Christmas festivities. For a brief time during the 17th century, Puritans banned Christmas in England and in some English colonies in North America because they felt it had become a season best known for gambling, flamboyant public behavior, and overindulgence in food and drink. Microsoft Encyclopedia Encarta 2000 During the Sixteenth century, the Protestant dislike of keeping feast days extended particularly to Christmas. The Christian Calendar, P. 22 Mithraism had enough adherents in the first centuries after Jesus death to provide some degree of competition for the fledgling Christian faith. Its popularity prompted some early Christian leaders to preach against it. They denounced Mithraic ceremonies as misleading parodies of Christian rituals. Encyclopedia of Christmas, by Gulevich, P. 52 For hundreds of years, Christian officials waged a campaign against the old pagan European practices. Tertullian, a third-century Christian writer, admonished those followers of the new religion, Christianity, who practiced these old customs. He thundered: “Let those who have no Light burn their (pagan) lamps daily. Let those who face the fire of hell affix laurels to their door-posts…You are a light of the world, a tree ever green; if you have renounced the pagan temple, make not your home such a temple!” Encyclopedia of Christmas, by Gulevich, P. 263 In early Christian times, the Church resisted the pagan European custom of making seasonal decorations out of winter greenery. The sixth-century second Council of Braga forbade Christians the use of green boughs in home decorations. Encyclopedia of Christmas, by Gulevich, P. 277
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