Long before "Happy holidays," there was a real war on Christmas 400 years ago

The War on Christmas appears to be over, depending on who you ask. Early in December, YouGov released a poll showing that 23% of American adults still believe that war is raging, with 31% undecided and 46% unconvinced. It's a significant drop from two years ago, when up to 39% of adults believed that Christmas was under attack, invariably from the direction of the left and spearheaded by those who sought to snuff out good holiday cheer in the name of supposedly woke pluralism.

"Parents have bravely pushed back against woke propaganda in the schools, elected better leaders, and have fought for their children’s education over woke indoctrination," crowed GOP education official Ryan Walters on the Daily Wire. But even in supposed victory, his gloating found few echoes; the so-called War on Christmas, rather than ending in climactic struggle and triumph, seemed to just fade away from the national discourse.

Its quiet disappearance, in a sense, is a suitable end to a war in which no violence was committed and no real threat to the holiday ever manifested, just as the raucous celebrations of its 1660 restoration in England marked a return to tradition after a Puritan government actually banned the celebration of Christmas and enforced the law with military force.

"Be it Ordained, by the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, That the said Feast of the Nativity of Christ, Easter and Whitsuntide, and all other Festival dayes, commonly called Holy-dayes, be no longer observed as Festivals or Holy-dayes," read the 1647 parliamentary legislation called "An Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals," which condemned those festivals as blasphemous "superstitions" with no biblical justification. For much of the next 12 years, soldiers and local watchmen patrolled the streets to ensure that shops remained open and penalize anyone they saw engaging in the usual festive excess. Instead of caroling and ringing church bells, the most prominent sounds on Christmastide were now town criers calling: "No Christmas! No Christmas!"

While there were 17th century laws against Christmas celebrations in England, the Puritan colonies in America and other places represented its foes at their apogee – with such condemnation drawing inspiration from the controversies surrounding its inception more than a thousand years before. Scripture does not record the birth date of Jesus Christ, and so early Christian scholars spent centuries wrangling over when to celebrate this most important apotheosis. By the fourth century, the two widely recognized dates were Dec. 25 — celebrated as Christmas in what was then the western half of the Roman Empire and now by most Christians worldwide — and Jan. 6, known by most Christians as Epiphany but celebrated as Christmas itself by some Eastern churches.

Contrary to popular belief, the designation of Dec. 25 and the subsequent 12 days for celebration was not simply an attempt to appropriate pagan fun from the Roman festivals of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus (the "Invincible Sun"). Rather than mentioning those supposed practical considerations, treatises from the early Christian centuries draw from biblical inferences, contemporary understanding of time and calendrical math to argue for its case. That Jesus' birth should roughly coincide with those two festivals defying the winter darkness, as opposed to the innumerable other Roman festivals scattered throughout the year, was considered to be proof of Jesus' incarnation as the pivot of the universe, an affirmation of the supreme miracle by which all peoples embrace the coming of hope and the true Light.

Many Roman festive practices did find sanctuary in the medieval liturgical calendar, in modified and Christianized form. The tradition of Roman patricians serving food and drink to their slaves during festival of Saturnalia evolved into two separate Christmastime commemorations: the mock ordination of a "boy bishop" on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec. 28) and the passing of local Church leadership to its sub-deacons on the Feast of the Circumcision (Jan. 1), better known as the "Feast of the Fools" as it became associated with public exuberance, including comic performances, fountains of wine and motley costumes.

The Bacchanalian disorders of the Feast of the Fools and mockery of traditional hierarchies provoked a wave of censure by Church and secular leaders. In 1431, the ecumenical Council of Basel ordered the deans and rectors of churches to expel "frivolities" and "profane abuses" from holy buildings, but implicitly allowed them to take place in the squares outside. Some rulers took the council's ruling as the basis to enact even stricter laws that banned such practices completely, but popular support for the festivals ensured that they were lightly imposed, ignored, or in many cases, repealed.

The reproach of those two Christmastime traditions presaged a much broader and more potent attack led by radical Protestant reformers in the 16th century, who denounced the celebration of Christmas, and the Catholic Church that sanctioned it, as tainted relics of pagan idolatry. Pointing out that scripture neither confirmed a date for Jesus' birth nor called upon the faithful to enjoy 12 days of rowdy merry-making, adherents to the regulative principle of worship — that anything without scriptural warrant is prohibited — warned that to mark the birth of Christ with intemperate revelry and "frivolous" ceremonies (e.g. the sign of the cross, kneeling before consecrated bread) was to replace the purity of God's message with puerile, human theatrics.

Some theologians also suggested that the early Church only chose Dec. 25 as the date of Nativity because they wanted to add a Christian veneer to Roman Saturnalia, justifying Protestant claims that the Catholics had turned the occasion of Jesus' birth into a happy excuse to drink, fornicate and gamble in excess. “Men dishonor Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides,” complained Hugh Latimer, an English Protestant clergyman and martyr.

In some cities where Protestants held power, authorities sought to excise most or all objectionable practices from Christmas, which was relegated to a single day of church service either on Dec.25 or on the nearest Sunday. Nevertheless, some reformers were annoyed that a much-purified Christmas still attracted masses of superstitious worshipers, who continued to hold it in greater reverence than any other day in the year.

“Now I see here today more people than I am accustomed to having at the sermon. Why is that? It is Christmas Day. And who told you this? You poor beasts. That is a fitting euphemism for all of you who have come here today to honor Noel," admonished the Genevan reformer John Calvin on Christmas Day in 1551. "When you elevate one day alone for the purpose of worshiping God, you have just turned it into an idol."

While Calvin, a self-described moderate, distanced himself from Geneva's decision to remove the special commemoration of feast days, his pointed words encapsulated Protestant anxieties over Christmas that came to a head in 1647, when the English Parliament issued a ban on all "superstitious" feast days, including Christmas. Parliament, then dominated by Puritans who sought purity of worship and doctrine, had just emerged victorious in a civil war against a king they deemed a reactionary autocrat and closet papist. The professional military force Parliament commanded — the New Model Army — was, if anything, even more fervent in its Puritan convictions and for the most part happy to enforce the new injunctions.

The term "Puritan," originally used as a pejorative, came to encompass intensely religious, largely middle-class English Protestants who practiced a simple worship of God, believed that the Church of England retained too much of its "Popish" character, and yearned to build a Holy Commonwealth governed by mutual covenant. Their detractors often used their opposition to excess as evidence of their hatred for all things merry, even though Puritans drank alcohol in moderation and hardly abstained from marital sex. Prior to the civil war, many Puritans had sailed to the American colonies to follow their exiled pastors and set up their own city on a hill; those who remained now found an opportunity to build one over the ruins of the old Church.

And so by force of law, shops and markets were made to stay open, churches were prohibited from holding Christmas services or providing free "Christmas ale," and citizens were instructed not to hold conspicuous festivities, which included caroling, displaying traditional evergreens, wassailing the homes of rich townsfolk in exchange for gifts, and enjoying overly sumptuous feasts. Anti-Puritan propaganda would later claim that soldiers broke into people's homes in search of contraband mince pies, but the only time the pies were even technically illegal was in 1644, when Christmas Day fell on a national fast that Parliament imposed on the last Wednesday of every month. Puritans also did not oppose commemorating the Nativity on principle, even if they objected to its practice at the time. In general, authorities focused on regulating public morals rather than intruding on private lives, but this "middle course," with or without a mince pie ban, still provoked resistance and fury that often turned to violence.

From the Scottish Marches to the heart of London, Christmas lovers closed their shops in defiance of Parliament and some that opened were attacked. The Lord Mayor of London, accompanied by army officers, personally ripped down festive decorations from the doors of homes and churches, only to be set upon by jeering crowds that caused his horse to bolt.

In Canterbury, the mayor swaggered around the public square pressuring townsfolk to open their businesses, drawing an angry crowd of onlookers. When he then threatened to clap a man in the stocks for refusing to obey, the crowd assaulted him and his escort, then spread out across the town, stringing up holly, looting shops that complied with the mayor and seizing control of the municipal buildings and gunpowder magazine. The disorder spread into the surrounding countryside of Kent before soldiers were sent to reassert control. While local authorities sought to make a summary example of the rioters, Parliament balked at further inflaming the region just as the defeated Royalists were plotting a comeback, and the grand jury set up to try the prisoners exonerated them all.

Riots also broke out in Ipswich, Bury St. Edmunds, Norwich and other towns, while pro-Christmas pamphlets such as "The Vindication of Christmas," which complained of Parliament's attack on “our high and mighty Christmas-Ale that formerly would knock down Hercules, & trip up the heels of a Giant," circulated among the population. Nine years after the Ordinance passed, Parliament and Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell had made little further headway, with MPs complaining on the Christmas morning of 1656 that their sleep had been disturbed by the noise of their neighbors’ "preparations for this foolish day’s solemnity," and that they saw "not a shop open, nor a creature stirring" in London.

Although Parliament passed the Ordinance six years before Cromwell assumed power, the man who would be king-in-all-but-name, like the mince pies, became a convenient shorthand used by Royalists to explain the broader assault on Christmas by dour, killjoy Puritans. In any case, Cromwell's death in 1658 doomed his increasingly unpopular Protectorate, and in 1660, Parliament consented to the restoration of both monarchy and Christmas, to scenes of widespread jubilation.

While Christmas was once again legal in the realms of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland now ruled by King Charles II, the far-fetched colonies continued to chart their own course. The inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose very purpose existed in opposition (but not outright rebellion) to the Anglican monarchy, continued to uphold the ban they implemented in 1659, when the General Court had declared that “whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way” was subject to a five-shilling fine.

The Rev. Increase Mather — the father of Salem witch trial participant Cotton Mather — spoke enthusiastically for the ban. Like his brethren in England, he believed the celebrations to a blasphemous excuse for people to get lost in an “in Revellings, excess of Wine, in mad Mirth.” He and other proponents encountered little protest in Boston and Plymouth, where the population was overwhelmingly Puritan.

Less successful were half-hearted efforts to introduce the ban in outlying fishing towns notorious for heavy drinking and loose morals. Furthermore, the Massachusetts colony stood alone among the English colonies as well as from the mother country, whose king threatened to withdraw his royal charter should the Puritans persist in their course. The ban, along with other laws regulating public morality, was finally lifted in 1681, to much grumbling from the colony's inhabitants. Businesses and schools often remained open, and churches closed, well into the 19th century until 1856, when Christmas was finally made a public holiday in the state.

Christmas has not faced any organized threat in the Anglosphere since, though traditions like wassailing and installing a boy bishop have largely faded away, to be replaced by newer practices like spilling eggnog on an ugly sweater and accumulating credit card debt. One wonders how a Puritan would react to this new kind of excess — or the companies that encourage it.