Page 3 - HSLChristmasAnthology

HSL Christmas Anthology Page 3

The Unitarian and Universalist Invention of

Christmas

Part One: In which the Universalists Deem Christmas Religious

One of the very first social divisions in American society was
between the Christmas keepers and their opponents. In the early
days of the Plymouth Plantation, the Pilgrims did all they could to

discourage the celebration of Christmas, and they frowned heavily
on the attempts of the “Strangers”—their more secular fellow
immigrants—to make merry on December 25. For parts of the 17
th
century, it was illegal to observe Christmas in colonial America, at
least in Puritan Boston. Pious New England Protestants had deep
and well-earned suspicions of Christmas. They knew that there
was no biblical precedent for celebrating Jesus’ birth at any time of
year, least of all late December. They saw Christmas as an
unfortunate conflation of the pagan and papist sins of the church: a
fourth century mass for the nativity of Jesus, expediently piggy
backed onto the date of the much more popular winter solstice. Nor
were they fond of the contemporary observations of Christmas back
home in rural England. There it was a folk holiday of inversion and
misrule. Social roles were turned on their heads. Drunken young
men roamed the streets freely demanding food and drink from the
wealthier homes. The religious of New England strove to do better.

And yet by the turn into the 19 century, things had changed
th
dramatically. In 1818, the Rev. Aaron Bancroft, the openly
unitarian minister of the Congregational Church in Wooster
Massachusetts, was advocating Christmas as in keeping with the
values of good New England Protestants. He was not so concerned
about the absence of biblical precedent, so long as both the holiday
and the date were agreeable and convenient to people. In a sermon
given in the church on Christmas day, said:

The New Testament has not appointed anniversary services in
commemoration of the birth of our Savior. If we celebrate this event,
we should consider it as a privilege with which we are indulged, not
as a duty divinely enjoined….and should any object to the time of