Mark's Notebook


	Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. - Isaiah 1:18

Puritans disdained holiday

The Exeter News-Letter

Monday 20 December 2004, 1:09 pm
Keywords: Christian Topics , News Articles

By Barbara Rimkunas

In the 1870s, Exeter native Elizabeth Dow Leonard wrote her memories of a childhood in Exeter. Born in 1806, she has a great deal to tell us about Exeter in the decades after the American Revolution. Of Christmas she had this comment:

"Christmas was ignored as savoring too much of Popery, and when I was a little girl, only one family celebrated it even by a better dinner than usual. Our schools were kept open, and we lost all the sweet and holy influences ... the blessed season will bring to our children. Thanksgiving and the 4th of July were our only legitimate holidays."

The founders of Exeter, it seems, were strict Puritans who believed, quite rightly, that the birth date of Jesus was unknown and the Christmas date of Dec. 25 was derived from pagan celebrations surrounding the winter solstice and the Roman god, Mithra. In England, the holiday had become a riotous drunken festival very secular in nature.

The Anglican Church still observed the holiday, having inherited it from the Catholic Church. Exeter’s Puritan founders, however, were highly suspicious of anything connected to the Catholic Church, and as there were few Anglicans and fewer Catholics in the town, the holiday produced the same level of discomfort one might experience today when an uncle tells racist jokes at Thanksgiving. A true Christian wouldn’t think of celebrating a debauched holiday like Christmas.

http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/exeter/12172004/news/54421.htm