Christmas can be whatever we make it

Christmas is what we make it. And in the United States of America, circa 2023, Christmas can be stressful. There’s the pressure to find the “perfect” gift, usually one with a hefty price tag. Forget those Charlie Brown trees, somewhat bereft until the decorations are piled on. No, the trees have to be artificial, tall and glittering. Food is sumptuous, with plates overflowing. Cakes, cookies, candy — all the desserts, seemingly nonstop from Thanksgiving until Christmas. No scales until after the new year, please.

A holiday that celebrates the birth of a baby has become weighted down with expectations — one of which is to keep the economy running. The National Retail Federation projected holiday spending to range from $957.3 billion to $966.6 billion this holiday season. Then there’s the manipulation of Christmas to further divide residents of our nation. In past years, there were fights over whether people should say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays,” a fight that continues to this day.

But wars over Christmas are nothing today as compared to years past.

In the early United States, Puritans didn’t just frown upon the celebration of Christmas. It was outlawed in the Massachusetts colony, a nod to their English heritage. After the people overthrew King Charles

I in 1649 and chopped his head off, Parliament decreed that instead of a celebration, Dec. 25 would become a day of “fasting and humiliations” so that English men and women could account for their sins.

Following that lead, in 1659 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony made it a criminal offense to celebrate the holiday in public. Anyone found to be “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way” faced a five-shilling fine. Puritans did not believe there was a scriptural basis for Christmas and disdained its pagan roots.

It wasn’t until the fourth century, after all, that the Roman Catholic Church ordained the celebration of the Nativity on Dec. 25 — and incorporated in the holiday were such earlier celebrations as Saturnalia, the ancient Roman holiday of lights at winter solstice. There was drinking and feasting, all the activities Puritans loathed.

Preacher Increase Mather wrote in 1687 that, “In the pure Apostolical times there was no Christ-mass day observed in the Church of God. We ought to keep the primitive Pattern. That Book of Scripture which is called The Acts of Apostles saith nothing of their keeping Christ’s Nativity as an Holy-day. … Why should Protestants own any thing which has the name of Mass in it? How unsuitable is it to join Christ and Mass together? … It can never be proved that Christ’s nativity was on 25 of December … who first of all observed the Feast of Christ’s Nativity in the latter end of December, did it not as 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.”

Absorbing local customs, of course, has been a feature of the Roman Catholic Church throughout its history. Our Lady of Guadalupe, beloved in the Americas, is believed by many to have incorporated the Aztec goddess, Tonantzin. In New Mexico this Christmas season, Native people will be marking the winter solstice with dances and lighting bonfires for the Christ child. The Puritans frowned upon such intertwining of faith practices.

The Massachusetts law against Christmas was repealed in 1681, but Puritan leaders still frowned upon the holiday, as Mather’s words show. But across the larger United States, Christmas was being embraced, and in the 1800s, it was reborn as a holiday of peace and goodwill. Oh, and shopping, with the updating of the legend of St. Nicholas into the red-robed Santa Claus, giver of presents.

In frontier New Mexico, Christmas remained a religious, simple holiday. There were bonfires, farolitos, Midnight Mass, plenty of food — tamales, red chile, posole, biscochitos, all still part of current festivities. Even through the 1940s, most children received nuts, candy and, if they were blessed, an orange in their stockings. The holiday centered around faith, family and food. That’s a tradition we can continue today, whatever our beliefs. Christmas, after all, is what we make it.