When Was Christmas Banned In The United States
It may seem like christmas has always been celebrated in the united states but that s not the case.
When was christmas banned in the united states. Today christmas seems as american as apple pie but the country s original settlers detested the holiday. Like many history facts based memes the claim christmas was illegal in the united states had a tiny grain of truth to it but it muddled quite a bit of the truth and painted a misleading picture of the history of the holiday in america. The general court banned the celebration of christmas and other such holidays at the same time it banned gambling and other lawless behavior grouping all such behaviors together. At one time in both american and english history christmas was indeed regarded as a pagan holiday but it s not true to say that the festival was banned in the united states until 1836.
Like in the united states in the united kingdom it has become common for some of the country s media to publish exaggerated or even completely false christmas banned stories between late november and new year s one of the most well known of these being the temporary promotion of the phrase winterval for a whole season of events including. Christmas was certainly not banned in the united kingdom which only came into existence in its earliest form in 1707. In 1644 parliament passed a law requiring th. In fact the joyous religious holiday was actually banned in america for several decades by.
The more pressure the english king exerted on the colonists the more they resisted. Religious pilgrims who arrived in north america in the early 17th century demanded that. In england parliament banned christmas for 12 years from 1647 under cromwell. The state of massachusetts followed the southern states lead in 1856 making christmas a public holiday.
Ebenezer scrooge and the grinch had nothing on the 17th century puritans who actually banned the public celebration of christmas in the massachusetts bay colony for an entire generation.