- There’s an excellent article by Chris Durston that details the history of ‘the Puritan war on Christmas’ in 16th-17th century England (Durston 1985; also good is Pimlott 1960).
- The 17th century version of the ‘Christmas is pagan’ seems to be an anti-Catholic polemic at first. It begins with the perception that Christmas was a time for wanton revelry. In 1583 Philip Stubbes complained in his pamphlet Anatomie of abuses,
- But specially in Christmas tyme there is nothing els vsed but cards, dice tables, masking, mumming, bowling & such like fooleries: And the reason is, they think they haue a commission and prerogatiue that time, to do what they lust, and to folow what vanitie they will. … But the true celebratiō of the Feast of christmas is, to meditat (and as it were to rumi∣nat) vppon the incarnation and byrthe of Iesus Christ …
- https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A13086.0001.001/1:22?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
- By this date there was already a ban on Christmas celebrations in Presbyterian Scotland. The sentiment was tied up with anti-Catholicism. Here’s a conversation between two Puritans of Amsterdam in Ben Jonson’s play The alchemist (1610), Act III Scene III:
- SUBTLE. And, then, the turning of this lawyer’s pewter To plate at Christmas — ANANIAS. Christ-tide, I pray you. SUBTLE. Yet, Ananias? ANANIAS. I have done. SUBTLE. Or changing His parcel-gilt to massy gold. …
- Ananias’ avoidance of the word ‘mass’, and the wordplay on ‘mass’ in the last line, are gibes about Puritan anti-Catholic sentiment. In the previous scene another Puritan, Tribulation, had asserted that if an evil person is against the Roman church, that makes them OK (‘This heat of his may turn into a zeal, / And stand up for the beauteous discipline / Against the menstruous cloth and rag of Rome’). Subsequent decades saw a progressive increase in Puritan complaints about Christmas. It’s in the 1630s that the anti-fun, anti-Catholic sentiment starts to get conflated with paganism — the notion that a Catholic festival is pagan. In William Prynne’s screed against the evils of the theatre, Histriomastix (1632), Christmas is spent in
- amorous, mixed, voluptuous, un-Christian, that I say not, pagan dancing … drinking, roaring, healthing, dicing, carding, masques and stage-plays … better become the sacrifices of Bacchus, than the resurrection, the incarnation of our most blessed Saviour.
- In the 1640s things came to a head, partly thanks to the February 1642 proclamation that the last Wednesday of each month should be a day of solemn fasting. In 1642, this meant that the Feast of Holy Innocents (28 December) should be a fast day, prompting the Anglican churchman and orator Thomas Fuller to state in a sermon that day that
- on this day a fast and feast do both justle together, and the question is which should take place in our affections.
- Two years later in 1644, Christmas itself fell on the last Wednesday of the month. The parliamentary ordinance proclaiming the fast on 19 December 1644 recommended that the fast be kept especially because it may call to remembrance our sins, and the sins of our forefathers who have turned this Feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights.
- This was essentially the beginning of the Puritan prohibition of Christmas.
- Joseph Hemming’s Certain queries touching the rise and observation of Christmas (1648) argued that
- the date of Christ’s birth was uncertain and has no scriptural basis (this is true)
- Christmas is a superstitious relic of popery
- Christmas is simultaneously a relic of the Roman Saturnalia
- Yule games and carols are relics of pagan rites
- Hemming equated Christmas with both popery and paganism, and popery and paganism with one another.
- For the Puritan side of things, Hemming was followed up by other pamphlets like Robert Skinner’s Christs birth misse-timed (1648) and Thomas Mockett’s Christmas, the Christians grand feast (1650), which made similar arguments. The charge of paganism is consistently just a side-dish to add weight to the charge of popery. Skinner, p. 7:
- [And thus all error cometh from Rome, that bitter Starre, Worme-wood, cast into the fountains of the Scriptures and Vniversities, to corrupt and bitter them, not to better them …
- [Mockett’s rant against Christmas is the most detailed. Pp. 6-7:
- [This change of Pagan idolatrous feasts into Christian, in honour of Christ, and the Saints, was made by some of the Ancients, when Christianity was spread among the Heathens, and many of them converted to the true faith, in hope, that by complying with them, in observing their festivall days but to Christian ends, they should the rather draw the Pagan Idolaters from Paganism to Christianity. Pope Telesphorus who began about the year of Christ 140 in the time of Antoninus the Emperours reign, was the first Authour we read of among the Romans, of the celebration of Christs Nativity, and on that day Saturns devil-feast was began, viz. December the 25 …
- https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A89194.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext
- Mockett carries on and makes the equation ‘popery = pagan’ clearer (pp. 19-20):
- And sure I am the observation of these Heathenish, Popish holy days, comes under some of these heads … The very name, with which the Pope and Papists have christened it Christ-mas, is enough to make all true Christians to abhorre the observation of it Christ-mas, because the Papists had on that day a peculiar Masse pretendly in honour of Christ, but to his great dishonour, it being a most detestable Masse of Idolatry, in divers perticulars, as these Protestant Divines writing against the Papists doctrines, do unanimously affirm …
- Prompted by 19th century investigations into the dates of Jesus’ life, in 1889 the philologist Hermann Usener published Das Weihnachtsfest, which argued that Christmas was a Christian substitution for a pagan sun cult, which already had the beginnings of monotheism built into it, and which was reflected in the Roman Natalis Invicti celebration on 25 December attested in the Philocalian calendar.
- Usener’s hypothesis paved the way for all manner of festivals and ‘birth’ celebrations to be spuriously fixed to 25 December. This tradition persisted through to Reinhold Merkelbach’s Isisfeste in griechisch-römischer Zeit (1963), which is a particularly egregious example of a scholar picking out all manner of festivals and claiming essentially out of thin air that they’re all 25 December festivals. The turnaround began in 1986 with Thomas Talley’s The origins of the liturgical year, which showed that 2nd century Quartodecimanism was the right context for looking at early Christian interest in Jesus’ dates, and dismissing all manner of wild speculations that had previously been treated as concrete fact. Talley wasn’t able to explain why, exactly, Christmas ended up on 25 December, but more recent scholars like C. P. E. Nothaft and Thomas Schmidt have dealt with that very satisfactorily. The history of the 19th-21st century debate is most fully dealt with by Nothaft and Roll.
Susan K. Roll documents 19th-20th century theories of the origins of Christmas in this 2000 book chapter. She doesn’t pick up on the naturalism theme, but she does highlight these books as key moments in the development of the ‘Christmas is pagan’ theory:- https://archive.org/details/betweenmemoryhop0000unse/page/272/mode/2up
- J. C. L. Gieseler, De origine festi nativitatis Christi (1844) Hermann Usener, Das Weihnachstfest (1889) Dom Bernard Botte, Les origines de la Noël et de l’Épiphanie (1932)
- Gieseler and Usener both argued that Christmas was derived from a supposed festival of ‘Sol Invictus’ in 4th century Rome; Botte argued that ‘a solstice festival’ influenced, but didn’t determine, the origin of Christmas.