The Ban On Christmas In The 17th Century

Christmas wasn’t always the popular holiday it is today. In fact, the well known puritans, in the 1600s actually banned it out of disgust and anger. Christmas nowadays is heralded, by most, as a joyous holiday. Those who don’t celebrate Christmas, but celebrate a different holiday around this time are still consumed by the beauty of the wintery season. However, some Americans do not celebrate Christmas- or any holidays for that matter and in fact look down on them as useless and frivolous in a Scrooge-like manner. It is perhaps from the puritans that this intolerance of holidays stems, just as the joy from Christmas comes from The Christmas Carol, by Dickens and religion. The Ban on Christmas in 17th century Puritan New England shaped the attitudes towards the
In order to fully understand the ban, you need to understand who and what Puritanism was. Puritanism was a religious reform movement that arose in England in the mid to late 16th century. In the 1530’s, a call for reform in the Catholic church was answered by King Henry VIII. The people of England called for reform because they believed that the church was promoting immorality in the clergy. The priests and bishops were often employed by more then just one congregation, and their travels back and forth would make it difficult to reach them. Many priests at that point were also illiterate, which, as you can imagine, is difficult since they have to read from the bible. On top of these problems that were very obviously big issues, priests were immune to the law. Andrew Delbanco tells us that “Employment by more than one parish was common, and the resulting itinerancy of priests, along with their [the priests] immunity to certain penalties of the civil law, fed anticlerical hostility and contributed to their isolation from the spiritual