Christmas with the Pilgrims, America’s earliest Christians
Pilgrims Going to Church (1867), by George Henry Boughton
The Pilgrims considered Christmas an abomination
The Pilgrims — the people we celebrate each Thanksgiving, who came to America on the Mayflower, signed the Mayflower Compact and founded Plymouth Colony — were Protestant Christians called Puritans.
The Puritans considered Christmas to be idolatry. They felt very strongly that Christmas was a hijacked pagan Roman festival, and they called it “Foolstide.” The Puritans contended that the actual calendar date of Jesus’s birth can never be determined, and that God meant it to stay unknown.
Puritan minister Increase Mather insisted that Christ must be taken out of Christmas. Rev. Mather wrote that “The very name of Christmass savours of superstition.” As a Protestant opposed to Roman Catholic ways, he asked:
Why should Protestants own any thing which has the name of Mass in it? How unsuitable is it to join Christ and Mass together? i.e., Christ and Antichrist.
The Puritans purged Christmas from their almanacs. Rather than take the day off as a holiday, they worked like it was any other day, and built their first structure in the New World on Christmas Day.
The Puritans even passed laws making Christmas celebrations illegal, and punishable by stiff fines.
More about Pilgrims, Puritans, and Christmas
- Wikipedia: Christmas in Puritan New England
- The (Atlantic) Wire, December 11, 2013: The Puritan War on Christmas Was the Best War on Christmas, by Abby Ohlheiser
- History of Christmas in America: ‘The Battle for Christmas’ — my review of Stephen Nissenbaum’s excellent book
- Chapter III of A Testimony Against several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, by Increase Mather (1687)
Note: From the Preface of Rev. Mather’s essay, it seems clear that he also would not have enjoyed Broadway.
The puritans rejected the pope and all connected with the papacy. They thus correctly rejected pagan festivals that were spiritually damning (if you understand the spirit realm) of christmas and easter. Ironically they clung on to the sunday “day of rest,” the trinity doctrine and infant baptism – all from pagan roman catholicism…
Their worship of dead doctrines over a personal relationship with the Lord was also from roman catholicism. Under them you had the “founding fathers” like benjamin franklin – a high degree mason design the dollar bill with its blatant and overtly demonic symbols, that in the most pagan countries would be rejected by those who truly worship the Lord God of Israel. You also had thomas jeffereson, who cut out the miracles of Jesus to use the bible as a political tool…
The Lord is long in Mercy but the day is coming when the hold of evil over the US will be removed and destroyed from the root, taking with it the evil that blindly thought it won…