[Reposted from Dec. 24, 2020]

AS WE FACE the Ebenezer Scrooges of Christmas, 2020, with their tyrannical and paranoid condemnation of joy and festive traditions, it’s worth remembering that all this is not without precedent in America.

The early Puritans were not lovers of Christmas celebrations, which they considered sinful, wasteful, sacrilegious and a wicked product of the Catholic Church. They explicitly banned them.

“On the first Dec. 25 the settlers spent in Plymouth Colony, they worked in the fields as they would on any other day. The next year, a group of non-Puritan workmen caught celebrating Christmas with a game of ‘stoole-ball’ — an early precursor of baseball — were punished by Gov. William Bradford. ‘My conscience cannot let you play while everybody else is out working,’ he told them.” Source

This had already been done by their co-religionists in England.

In medieval times and up until the mid-17th century, Christmas, preceded by the penitential season of Advent, was celebrated in England with majestic liturgies, overflowing feasts and twelve days of sports, music, dancing, theatrics and general fun. The common man was the beneficiary of many days of leisure, prayer and feasting with roast beef, goose and mincemeat pies in rooms festooned with holly and ivy.

In the 1600s, after the ascent to power of Oliver Cromwell in 1645, the English Puritans in government abolished Christmas in the parts of the country under their control. This campaign against observance of the holy day was a top-down revolution, like the Protestant Revolution itself. It did not emanate from a popular rejection of religious customs, which inspired widespread devotion, but from a determined oligarchy pursuing the assets, influence and power of the Church. The people in some places rioted against the government’s decrees against Christmas. (Sound familiar?)

Christmas, you see, is an inherent threat to despotism. Government cannot easily control a joyful and God-centered people. Tyrants have nothing to gain from piety, hopes of eternity and simple pleasures — and much to lose from them.

The Puritans in early America followed suit with bans on Christmas celebrations. How close they seem now from here in Pennsylvania, where all restaurants and bars have been ordered closed by the government, and from all across America, where many observances have been cut off as a result of government scolding or decree. Mark Stoyle, writing in the BBC History Magazine has details:

During early 1646, Charles I’s remaining field forces melted away almost as fast as the winter snow and by April the game was clearly up for the king. In the closing verse of a contemporary ballad, a gloomy royalist writer suggested that the collapse of the king’s cause had sealed the fate of Christmas itself, remarking: “To conclude, I’ll tell you news that’s right, Christmas was killed at Naseby fight.”

“Yet matters were not so simple, for, even though the king’s armies had been beaten out of the field and he himself had fallen into the hands of his enemies, most Englishmen and women continued to cling to their traditional Christmas customs. So strong was the popular attachment to the old festivities, indeed, that during the postwar period a number of pro-Christmas riots occurred. In December 1646, for example, a group of young men at Bury St Edmunds threatened local tradesmen who had dared to open their shops on Christmas Day, and were only dispersed by the town magistrates after a bloody scuffle.

“Pro-Christmas riots

“Worse was to follow in 1647 – despite the fact that, on 10 June that year, parliament has passed an ordinance which declared the celebration of Christmas to be a punishable offence. On 25 December 1647, there was further trouble at Bury, while pro-Christmas riots also took place at Norwich and Ipswich. During the course of the Ipswich riot, a protestor named ‘Christmas’ was reported to have been slain – a fatality which could be regarded as richly symbolic, of course, of the way that parliament had ‘killed’ Christmas itself.

“In London, a crowd of apprentices assembled at Cornhill on Christmas Day, and there “in despite of authority, they set up Holly and Ivy” on the pinnacles of the public water conduit. When the lord mayor despatched some officers “to pull down these gawds,” the apprentices resisted them, forcing the mayor to rush to the scene with a party of soldiers and to break up the demonstration by force.

“The worst disturbances of all took place at Canterbury, where a crowd of protestors first smashed up the shops which had been opened on Christmas Day and then went on to seize control of the entire city. This riot helped to pave the way for a major insurrection in Kent in 1648 that itself formed part of the ‘Second Civil War’ – a scattered series of risings against the parliament and in favour of the king, which Fairfax and Cromwell only managed to suppress with great difficulty.”

Today, Christmas celebrations are sinful because they are (supposedly) hotbeds of contagion. The scolding and wagging of fingers at those who refuse to comply with institutionalized paranoia is all too reminiscent of the scolding and wagging of the Puritans. It’s worth also recalling that the people of England before the Puritans were accustomed to devastating plagues of sickness but did not cancel Christmas because of them.

Let’s defy the New Puritans. If you cannot riot in the streets, fill your heart with joy. That is one important step toward freedom.  Rejoice, Our Savior is born.

Please follow and like us: