An interesting research article from http://www.gnmagazine.org/ about Christmas and a Patriotic take on it! If you want to order a free book about this topic click here and for more interesting stories like this click here to follow this blog.
Christmas: a banned celebration
In England "the Protestants found their own quieter ways of celebrating, in calm and meditation," while "the strict Puritans refused to celebrate at all ...The Pilgrims in Massachusetts made a point of working on Christmas as on any other day. On June 3, 1647, Parliament established punishments for observing Christmas and certain other holidays. This policy was reaffirmed in 1652" (Gerard and Patricia Del Re, The Christmas Almanac, 1979, p. 20).
Even colonial America considered Christmas more of a raucous revelry than a religious occasion: "So tarnished, in fact, was its reputation in colonial America that celebrating Christmas was banned in Puritan New England, where the noted minister Cotton Mather described yuletide merrymaking as ‘an affront unto the grace of God'" (Jeffery Sheler, "In Search of Christmas," U.S. News and World Report, Dec. 23, 1996, p. 56).
The reason Christmas has survived and grown into such a popular holiday—being observed by 96 percent of Americans and almost all nations, even atheistic ones (Sheler, p. 56)—is because of economic factors (see "How Christmas Grew").
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