The Battle for Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page A

a Maypole; no group celebrated Christmas or St. Valentine’s Day, or staged a pre-Lenten carnival! 21
    T AKE THE EXAMPLE of almanacs. Almanacs had become popular in England by the seventeenth century, and they remained popular in New England as well. English almanacs generally listed Christmas, along with the bevy of saints’ days that showed the commitment of the Church of England to the old, seasonally based calendar. (These saints’ days were known as “red-letter days,” because in English almanacs and church calendars they were printed in red ink.) But in seventeenth-century New England, almanacs were “purified” of all these old associations. (Indeed, for a time even the common names for the days of the week were purged from the almanacs on account of their pagan origins—after all,
Thursday
meant “Thor’s day,” and
Saturday
was “Saturn’s day.”) The Puritans knew that the power to
name
time was also the power to
control
it.
    So it should come as no surprise that seventeenth-century Massachusetts almanacs did not refer to December 25 as Christmas Day. Instead, the date December 25 would be left without comment, or it would contain a notice that one of the county courts was due to sit that day—an implicit reminder that in New England, December 25 was just another workday.
    ? HE SUCCESS of the New England Puritans was impressive and long-lasting. Christmas was kept on the margins of early New England society. Still, it was never suppressed completely. Take, for example, two instances that are sometimes cited to show that the Puritan authorities succeeded in abolishing Christmas. We have already encountered the first of these in the entry for Christmas Day, 1621, in the journal of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony. Bradford encountered a group of people who were taking the day off from work, and he promptly sent them back to work. Here, in the first full year of the Pilgrims’ life in the New World, were a group of Christmas-keepers. Nor did this group observe Christmas in a devout fashion or even by simply staying in their houses—Bradford indicated that he would have allowed them that. What bothered the governor was that these Christmas-keepers were, in his own words, out “gaming [and] reveling in the streets.” 22
    The second instance is the 1659 law passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the law that levied a five-shilling fine on anyone who was “found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.”
    Such laws are not made, of course, unless there are people who are engaging in the forbidden activity. And the Massachusetts Bay law of 1659, like Governor Bradford’s earlier report, suggests that there were indeed people in Massachusetts who were observing Christmas in the late 1650s. The law was clear on this point: It was designed “for preventing disorders arising in several places within this jurisdiction, by reason of some still observing such Festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries.” The wording of the law also implied that the authorities were chiefly concerned (as Governor Bradford had been) not with private devotion but with what the law termed “disorders.” That point was reinforced by a provision in the law that threatened to impose a second five-shilling fine for gambling “with cards or dice,” a practice, the court noted, that was “frequent in many places … at such times [as Christmas].”
    This is not to argue that Christmas was widely “kept” in seventeenth-centuryMassachusetts. (For example, I have found no records of prosecutions under the 1659 law, which remained in force until 1681, when it was repealed under pressure from London.) What it does argue is that a festival with such old and deep roots in English culture could not simply be erased by fiat, and that it always hovered just beneath the surface of New England culture, emerging occasionally into plain sight. 23