How the UUs Un-stole Christmas

“Merry Christmas…” No…sorry, right, “Happy Holidays?” These days, the traditional questions about what to buy your friends and family are mixed in with the deeper question about whether we, as a culture are mostly celebrating “the holidays” or “a holiday. It is interesting territory for us UU’s.

After all, our religious ancestors who not too long after walking off the Mayflower and started the first churches in what would become America worked to have Christmas banned. A couple hundred years later, we helped bring the Christmas tree to the US. We've got range and are always evolving.

The debate about Christmas and the holiday season, obviously involves the natural tension between the desire to be inclusive, and the idea that we should return Christmas to a more original pure form. This is particularly interesting drive given that Christmas was born as a religious holiday in part driven by the very mission of adopting and taming the revelries of existing native solstice traditions.

I don’t say that to be judgmental. I know enough to know that there are no easy answers to how, when, and how much religions borrow or steal from each other. Every religion, whether admitting it or not, adapts the existing traditions that surround it for its own purposes. As I said repeatedly in my Halloween sermon, in the world of religion, there really is only one tradition. That of theft and/or borrowing described by the word syncretism.

Today, we UU’s who are fuzzy about Jesus' cosmic status and divinely ordained birth are frequently thought to be listed among the backsliders who corrupt the integrity of Christ’s birthday. Fine! In a way it’s true. We UU’s do not focus Christmas in on the proposed immaculate conception of a baby. However, we are not alone in celebrating the pagan side of Christmas. The broader truth is, Christmas is - as it always was - is a little controversial, a little mixed in its motives. Long before the word “multicultural” or “appropriating” was in our mouths, Christmas was messy and in flux.

As most of us know, but try not to think to much about, Christmas nearly always has been a mix of pagan solstice rituals and Christian traditions; always has been a mix of charitable acts and indulgent consumption; always has been a mash up medley of family, faith, and festive frolicking. Say that three times fast.

Anyone who bemoans the decline of the unique celebration of Christmas should know that they are not only defending the real “reason for the season” they are participants in a long, long history of bemoaning change. Christmas has mostly always been in large part a day of revelry others think others are disrespectful and un-Christian.

We all know that holly and ivy and Christmas trees and mistletoe are earthy European pre-Christian traditions. What we may not know is that it has been the Christians themselves that have been more a source of resistance to the day that honors Jesus birth than anyone else. In the 1600s, both Oliver Cromwell of England and John Calvin in Switzerland banned Christmas celebrations. They called them off because of their extremely close association with gluttony and drunkenness.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about all of this is that the same was true here in early America.

In 1659 Massachusetts, our nation’s European forbearers “the Puritans” pushed the state court to make Christmas illegal. In fact, between 1659 and 1681, any overt observance of Christmas that was not part of a church service, or act of fasting and repentance, was a punishable offense. During this era, and at various points closer to today, our own religious Scrooge-y Puritan ancestors ordered shops on the 25th to stay open and even banned the making of holiday cakes. It was at times even illegal in Massachusetts to hang a wreath. As UU Rev. Nathan Detering proposes, I think comically, but I am hardly sure, such bans are not part of the reason Santa began entering the house via the chimney!”

However, that all said, I think you would and should be proud to know that Universalists and Unitarians were also leading voices in changing early America’s scrooge-like spirit. When people complain about us, or ask you if UU’s celebrate Christmas, remember that we more than anyone else saved and created the Christmas we celebrate today.

For early Universalists and Unitarians there always was a primitive affinity for the simple story of the baby Jesus and the inherent goodness of the infant child. In fact, it was an influential community of Boston Universalists who in 1789 bravely held the first Christmas Day service the city had seen in decades. Please remember that to share with others would you. Over the next few years, the Unitarians, and soon to be Unitarian churches joined in on the fun. Both saw it as an opportunity to strengthen families and employed the nativity scene as a natural metaphor for the not sinfulness, but blessedness, of new life. Pretty cool, right.

Celebrating Christmas became an excellent excuse to close the shops, close the bars, and have another day of family bonding. In time, it was Unitarians and Universalists that helped make the holiday celebrating the innocent baby (Christmas), more culturally important than the one that celebrates the uniqueness of the rolled away stone (Easter).

All of this ‘sorta’ worked. With the aid of our rational religious ancestors, largely right here in Eastern Mass, Christmas made a cultural comeback.

A big part of that transition was the encouragement of the use of the Christmas tree which was brought in to provide a symbol of traditions at home. To the Unitarians of the mid 1800’s the Christmas tree represented the simplicity of a simple home ritual and holiday. Charles Follen, a Unitarian minister in Lexington and German scholar, largely brought the tradition of a family Christmas tree to America. It was not unintentional. He premiered his tree so that his friend and fellow Unitarian, Harriet Martineau, might write about the event. She did the very thing, and because of her account it was not long before Christmas trees were an integral part of the American holiday.

Around the same time Christmas trees started frequenting American parlors, Unitarian James Pierpont wrote the earthy Jingle Bells in Medford MA; and Unitarian Charles Dickens reset some of the standard ideas about kindness and charity we connect to Christmas today by writing A Christmas Carol. The classic he wrote in part out of the inspiration he found visiting with the Unitarian clergy in Boston just a few months before.

Here is the takeaway line you can share with our critics this holiday season. Ready? Here goes… “It is funny that you think of us as the enemy of Christmas given that it really was the re-invention of Christmas by the likes of Unitarians Charles Dickens, Charles Follen, James Pierpont, and little Louisa May Alcott that created nearly all the holiday traditions that we religious pluralists are accused of betraying.”

Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas

Rev. Steve