The Real War on Christmas: When Merriment Was Illegal in America
This time of year, you can’t swing a dead messiah around a Rite Aid, the extended family dinner table or Facebook without hitting a Boomer ranting about cashiers wishing customers a “happy holiday” rather than a “merry Christmas.” This insistence on including people who don’t celebrate Christmas in the winter festivities, no doubt due to woke law, is tantamount to Christian oppression and a “war on Christmas.” That’s not true — Christians have never been less oppressed in the United States, proven by the fact that you know all the words to “All I Want for Christmas Is You” whether you like it or not. But there was, at one point, a war on Christmas — waged by Christians.
Specifically, 17th-century Puritans. Back then, the holiday season wasn’t even anything close to the sensory frenzy it is today; when they called Dickens “the man who invented Christmas,” they weren’t kidding. More likely, you might have a big meal in honor of the Lord or go wassailing, a form of door-to-door caroling with the expectation of receiving gifts in the spirit of Christian charity. Even this was considered excessively indulgent by the Puritans, a people for whom the land of tea and crumpets was too freewheeling. They managed to get it banned in the homeland in the 1640s when they controlled Parliament, but it was quickly overturned, which was probably why they left England in disgust.
In the New World, banning Christmas celebrations was apparently just behind “don’t die of just myriad causes” on the list of Puritan priorities. Anybody caught eating a little too much or not working enough was fined five shillings, or about 50 bucks in today’s money. The law, enacted in 1659, was repealed 20 years later under pressure from England, but the Puritans made their resentment known. By 1686, anti-Christmas sentiment was still so strong that when the royal governor of Massachusetts wanted to hold a Christmas service, he did so guarded by a squad of British soldiers. When we have to call in the National Guard to protect “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” singalongs, that’s when we’ll accept the existence of a Christmas conflict.
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The situation in the States only began to relax around the mid-19th century, when most modern Christmas “traditions” began and, more importantly, it was declared a federal holiday. Still, the most devout railed against the holly-jolliness well into the 1950s. Their reasoning for frowning upon the festivities was pretty much the opposite of what you see on Fox News today: There’s nothing in the Bible about getting ripped on eggnog and committing lust beneath dangling parasitic plants, and the materialism of a Black Friday doorbuster would almost certainly not get Jesus’s stamp of approval.
In fact, in a 1954 satirical story written by C.S. Lewis, who was a huge simp for Jesus when he wasn’t chronicling Narnia, he names two opposing fictional celebrations — one a pious church service and one an orgy of consumerism — “Chrissmas” and “Exmas.” That means that, according to one of the Lord’s biggest earthly hype men, the name derided by the war’s foot soldiers for “taking the Christ out of Christmas” is exactly the one we should be using for the way we celebrate.
Just a fun fact to tell your weird uncle this year. It’ll probably go over super well.
