Library of Congress: Christmas hoax

I did some research at the Library of Congress to verify some information about Christmas. Here's what I found.

In his book "The Battle for Christmas," Stephen Nissembaum notes that at
first, before the U.S. had an established national government, Christmas
was opposed by many local governments, such as those in New England:

"In New England, for the first two centuries of white settlement most
people did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, the holiday was
systematically suppressed by the Puritans during the colonial period and largely ignored by their descendants. It was actually illegal to celebrate
Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681 (the fine was five
shillings). Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did Christmas gain
legal recognition as an official public holiday in New England" (3).

Nissembaum also notes that "most of the other states" did not "grant
legal recognition to Christmas until the middle of the nineteenth
century" (3).

Nissembaum then explains why there was such opposition to celebrating
Christmas at the time:

"Why? What accounts for this strange hostility? The Puritans themselves had a plain reason for what they tried to do, and it happened to be
a perfectly good one: There is no biblical or historical reason to
place the birth of Jesus on December 25" (4).

Nissembaum writes that the Puritans were quick to point out a related
reason for objecting to Christmas celebrations:

"Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian
veneer. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston, for example, accurately
observed in 1687 that the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so 'thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones]'" (4).

It does appear, then, that part of the reason Christmas was not always
celebrated by certain religious groups such as the Puritans until the
19th century was because of what many people deemed its underlying pagan roots. The opposition to Christmas was not universal, however. In his book "The American Christmas: A Study in National Culture," James H.
Barnett notes:

"Few American are aware that large groups of colonists objected to
Christmas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many loathed it
as an 'abomination' even though others observed the occasion as a
religious feast. In general, Puritans, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Quakers
strongly opposed the religious observance of Christmas, but members of
the Church of England, the Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic
churches, as well as the German sects, carefully followed their
traditional celebrations. Religious, ethnic, and national ties were
intermixed in defining attitudes toward the festival" (2).

If you would like to explore in more depth to what extent the celebration of Christmas has been opposed in American history, and how much of this opposition was due to what people perceived as the "paganism" of
Christmas, we suggest you review the first three books in our Works Cited
list at the end of this response. You can check for the books at your
local library, and if they aren't available there, a librarian should be able to request them for you through interlibrary loan.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Christmas became more accepted in the
United States. Stephen Nissembaum writes that "by 1865, twenty-seven out
of thirty-six stated (along with four territories) had set December 25 apart as a day when certain kinds of ordinary business could not legally be transacted" (308). In addition, "of the twenty-four states that joined the United States no later than 1820 . . . by 1865 all but five had made December 25 a legal holiday" (308).

As for the order of legal recognition of Christmas, Nissembaum writes:

"The slave South seems to have been the laggard in this matter. Not
New England, surely--all six states in that supposedly Puritan region on
the country had recognized Christmas between 1846 and 1861. . . . To
be sure, the pattern was not universal. The first three states to legalize Christmas all permitted slavery" (308).

When did the federal government first declared Christmas a federal holiday?

Restad writes that in June 1870:

"For the first time in its history, the United States Congress declared
Christmas a federal holiday. Although the act's stated purpose was the
regulation of fiscal matters on several holidays, the law nonetheless
formally endorsed the importance of a holiday that had been developing
in the homes and sensibilities of the nation's citizenry for half a
century" (104).

Also, a 1999 Congressional Research Service Report, "Federal Holidays:
Evolution and Application," notes on page one that this act was passed
on June 28, 1870. You can find this report online in PDF format on the
U.S. Senate website at:

www.senate.gov/reference/...olidays.pdf >

You can view full text of the act online through the Library's American
Memory collection "A Century of Lawmaking" at:

memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage

The official title of the act is "An Act Making the first Day of January, the twenty-fifth Day of December, the fourth Day of July, and Thanksgiving Day, Holidays, with the District of Columbia."

Enjoy the Holidays!

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