‘War on Christmas’ dates back as far as the 17th century
Culture war in U.S. cranks up whenever social change and upheaval take place
A town crier walks through the streets on Christmas Eve, yelling “No Christmas! No Christmas!”
Traditional Christmas foods are banned — no mince pies, and definitely no pudding. Stores are forced to stay open all day on Dec. 25, and children are required to go to school. Any violations of the ban on Christmas are a criminal offence.
This is what December looked like in 1647, when the Puritans banned Christmas in Boston because it was seen as nothing more than an unholy pagan ritual. Even the day, Dec. 25, was likely pegged to the Roman, mid-winter festival of Saturnalia, according to biblical scholars who can’t quite agree on the day, month or even year that Christ was born. So what place did it have in the New World?
How’s that for a War on Christmas?
The alleged war predates Fox News and Trump’s “Merry Christmas” campaign promises. When the president lit the National Christmas Tree on Thursday, he was part of a holiday struggle as old as the colonies.
It began with Christians, yes. And the Puritan ethos held strong in New England for nearly 200 years when it came to Christmas. It wasn’t until 1870 that Christmas was even recognized as an official, federal holiday in America.
Christmas has been dividing the United States along predictable lines since before the Civil War. Pious Northerners preferred Thanksgiving over Christmas as their big holiday. Southerners, meanwhile, saw Christmas as one of the peak days of the social season.
And Santa was frequently deployed as a prop in both Union and Confederate propaganda during the Civil War. Harper’s Weekly ran a cartoon showing St. Nick handing a puppet with a rope around its neck to Jefferson Davis. Meanwhile, the Richmond Examiner called Santa a “Dutch toy monger” and New York “scrub” who had nothing to do with a traditional Virginia Christmas.
And you thought Christmas dinner at Grandma’s was a battleground.
That 1870 making Christmas an official holiday was President Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt at unification. The peace didn’t last long.
The culture war over Christmas cranks up whenever the country experiences social change and upheaval.
In the 1920s, it was led by automaker and rabid anti- Semite Henry Ford. He published a newsweekly called the “The International Jew” and described the war on Christmas this way: “Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth.”
The Great Depression and Second World War gave the nation other things to worry about. But the obsession with an endangered Christmas came roaring back in the 1950s when the John Birch Society decided that the glamorization and commercialization of Christmas was one big communist plot.
“One of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to take Christ out of Christmas — to denude the event of its religious meaning,” wrote Hubert Kregeloh in a Birch society pamphlet.
Kregeloh warned that holiday and winter decorations in stores that didn’t evoke Christ were “part of a much broader plan, not only to promote the UN, but to destroy all religious beliefs and customs.” And he urged all Americans to boycott department stores without proper, religious decor.
Sound anything like the effort a couple of years ago to boycott Starbucks because they decided on minimalist, all-red cups for the Christmas season? That’s right, the Reds are coming back.
Christmas is not in danger. In fact, 92 per cent of Americans asked by the Pew Research Center in a 2013 study said they celebrate Christmas. Even 87 per cent of non-Christians said they celebrate the holiday.
The Puritans would be appalled.