The Battle for Christmas Read Online Free PDF

When that happened, it was in ways that confirmed the Puritan nightmares of excess, disorder, and misrule.
    Who were the people who practiced Christmas misrule in seventeenth-century New England? Not surprisingly, the evidence suggests that they were mostly on the margins of official New England culture (or altogether outside it). It is difficult to know for sure. There is no Christmas episode so notorious as the 1627–28 confrontation in which the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony forcibly destroyed the maypole that had been defiantly set up on nearby Mount Wollaston by Thomas Morton and his merry men. (May Day, like Christmas, marked a seasonal celebration that resonated deeply in English popular culture.) But that is only because Thomas Morton was practically the sole New England representative of popular culture who was literate, and even literary; he actually published a satirical account of the maypole episode. The rest of New England’s early Christmas-keepers were at most barely literate, and they left no records.
    It was fishermen and mariners who had the reputation of being the most incorrigible sinners in New England, the region’s least “reformed” inhabitants. Maritime communities such as Nantucket, the Isles of Shoals, and (especially) the town of Marblehead, were notorious for irreligion, heavy drinking, and loose sexual activity; they were also repositories of enduring English folk practices—places that ignored or resisted orthodox New England culture. It is no coincidence that Marblehead was also a site of ongoing Christmas-keeping. 24
    In 1662, for example, a fisherman named William Hoar, a 33-year-old resident of Beverly, Massachusetts, “was presented for suffering tippling [i.e., drinking] in his house by those who came to keep Christmas there.” 25 That is all we know about this event, but the Hoar family itself is another story. Hoar’s wife and children became notorious for their brazen defiance of Puritan authority. They carried on a long-term vendetta against the local minister, the Reverend John Hale, even to the point of regularly invading his house while he was away, in order to consume his food and loot his goods. Hoar’s wife, Dorcas, was a fortune-teller (she specialized in palmistry), and she cultivated the rumor that she was also apracticing witch. Indeed, Dorcas Hoar’s reputation finally brought her down. In the dark year of 1692, she was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to hang on Gallows Hill, a victim of the Salem witchcraft outbreak. 26
The Miser and the Sots: A Salem Village Wassail
    The single incident of Christmas-keeping in seventeenth-century Massachusetts that can be described in any detail took place in 1679, and it is wonderfully revealing of the persistence of English seasonal folkways on the margins of Puritan New England.
    At about 9 p.m. on Christmas night, 1679, four young men from Salem Village invaded the house of 72-year-old John Rowden, who lived with his wife, Mary, and their apprentice—and adopted son—Daniel Poole. (John Rowden was a farmer who owned an orchard that apparently included pear trees, from the fruit of which he and his wife had prepared a stock of pear wine, commonly known as perry.) In the testimony he gave three months later, old John Rowden provided a detailed account of what happened that night. First, the four men entered his house and sat down by the fire, and two of them “began to sing.” When they had completed two songs, one of the men asked John Rowden, “‘How do you like this, father? Is this not worth a cup of perry?’” Rowden answered them, “‘I do not like it so well, pray be gone.’” But the men would not leave, telling Rowden “it was Christmas Day at night and they came to be merry and to drink perry, which was not to be had anywhere else but here, and perry they would have before they went.”
    Rowden again refused to offer them perry, and “told them they should have none there.” The four visitors still