Christmas: a celebration banned by the Puritans!!!!!

An interesting article from www.ucg.org about the Puritan's approach to Christmas. This follows this post about the U.S. Thanksgiving. This follows this post about the Super Committee's failure. For a free magazine subscription or to get this book for free click HERE! or call 1-888-886-8632.

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" (Del Re, 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).