Why Christmas Was Once Illegal in Boston

Few places in America carry as much festive expectation as New England in December. The image practically sells itself: snow on cobblestones, candlelit windows, church bells echoing off old brick. So it comes as a genuine surprise to learn that Boston, now fully at ease with tinsel and holiday markets, once made celebrating Christmas a punishable crime. This isn’t a rumor or a myth. It’s written law, and the story behind it reveals a great deal about who the Puritans were, what they feared, and how deeply their legacy ran through American culture for centuries.

The Law That Banned Christmas

On May 11, 1659, a law was passed by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony requiring a five-shilling fine from anyone caught “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.” That covered practically everything: no feasting, no staying home from work, no singing, and no gathering.

This decree was passed more than a generation after the landing of the Pilgrims, but it was merely a legal expression of the attitude they brought with them on the Mayflower. The law had a name, too. Puritans were forbidden from celebrating the holiday by a law called “Penalty for Keeping Christmas.”

Who Were the Puritans, and Why Did They Hate Christmas?

The pious Puritans who sailed from England in 1620 to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought with them something that might seem surprising for a group of devout Christians: contempt for Christmas. Their objections were rooted not in hostility to Christ, but in a strict reading of scripture.

The Puritans’ primary objection to Christmas was that it wasn’t biblical. There was no mention of celebrating Christ’s birthday in the Bible; therefore, it should not be celebrated. Further, there was no date given for Christ’s birth.

Christmas was a target of Puritan ire on all of those fronts: pagan, Catholic, non-scriptural, and socially problematic. In their view, the holiday had accumulated layers of tradition that had nothing to do with genuine devotion.

Christmas Was Seen as a Pagan Corruption

The noted Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote that Christmas occurred on December 25 not because “Christ was born in that month, but because the heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those pagan holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.” That argument carried real weight in Puritan theology.

Although Christmas was widely celebrated in Europe as a Christian holiday marking the birth of Jesus Christ, the Puritans saw it as a false holiday with stronger ties to paganism than Christianity. Puritans were right about some things: December 25th was an unverified date for the advent; pagan influences had seeped into the modes of observance; and riotous revelries were incongruous with claims of devotion.

Drunkenness, Riots, and “Foolstide”: The Holiday’s Ugly Reputation

The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony “despised Christmas.” They associated it with debauchery: heavy drinking, gluttony, riots, and “rowdiness and sinful behavior.” Their concerns weren’t entirely unfounded, either.

For many years, Christmas celebrations in Europe had been associated with heavy drinking, gambling, sexual license, public disorder, and the deliberate overturning of social norms. Some wassailers in the 1600s became belligerent and demanded spiced ale, rich foods, or money. If they didn’t get what they asked for, they threatened a trick, mischief, or violence.

Seen in that context, the Puritan reaction becomes more understandable, even if the solution they chose was extreme. The Puritans were committed to sobriety, discipline, and moral order. Christmas had become a season not of devotion, but of excess.

England Set the Precedent First

In 1647, the Puritan-led English Parliament banned the celebration of Christmas, replacing it with a day of fasting and considering it “a popish festival with no biblical justification,” and a time of wasteful and immoral behaviour. Boston’s law followed that same logic.

Parliament was able to pass an ordinance banning Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun feasts. Many Englishmen, however, were not ready to do away with Christmas, and riots broke out throughout England on Christmas Day 1647. The resistance in England was fierce, but the colonists in Massachusetts were largely of one mind.

Businesses Stayed Open, Churches Stayed Shut

All shops and schools had to remain open during that season. Any public display of holiday activity was banned and fined five shillings. The logic was simple: a normal working day left no room for sin or excess.

Celebrating Christmas was a punishable offense. Churches were closed on December 25, as Christians were not allowed to even pray in church during the twelve days of Christmas. It was not just public revelry that was targeted, it was any public acknowledgment of the day whatsoever.

However, private traditions in the homes seemed to be overlooked by the law. Although outlawed in public, the celebration of Christmas endured in private homes, particularly in the fishing towns further afield from the center of Puritan power in Boston.

The Five-Shilling Fine and Its Enforcement

Christmas observance was outlawed in Boston in 1659, with a fine of five shillings. Five shillings was a meaningful sum at the time, roughly equivalent to a day’s wages for a skilled laborer, enough to sting but not to destroy a household.

Interestingly, the law appears to have been used more as a deterrent than a tool of mass prosecution. In his research, historian Stephen Nissenbaum found no records of any prosecutions under the 1659 law. The cultural pressure, it seems, did the enforcement work on its own.

In the journals of famous Boston judge Samuel Sewall, one of the great opponents of Christmas, he writes about running around on Christmas day, getting people to stop observing it in one way or another. Sewall was essentially a one-man holiday patrol.

Governor Edmund Andros and the Beginning of the End

The ban by the Puritans was revoked in 1681 by an English-appointed governor, Edmund Andros. The repeal, however, was not driven by any change of heart in Boston. The cheerless law of 1659 remained on the books for twenty-two years. When it was repealed in 1681, it was less a victory for the spirit of Christmas than for the king of England: Charles II and his royal commissioners were determined to make the colony’s laws conform with England’s.

In 1686, the newly appointed royalist governor of the Dominion of New England, Edmund Andros, closed shops on Christmas Day and sponsored a holiday service, though local protests made it necessary that he be accompanied there by troops. That image, a governor escorted by soldiers just to attend a Christmas service, says everything about how deep the resistance ran.

The Shadow That Lasted for Two Centuries

The Puritans had done such a good job of making a scandal of Christmas that it remained uncelebrated in parts of Massachusetts for a long time. In many Massachusetts communities, schools and businesses remained open on Christmas, and churches closed, until well into the 19th century.

The matter became controversial again at the time of the American Revolution, when colonials in Boston saw Christmas as a royalist celebration. The Massachusetts senate gathered for work on Christmas Day in 1797. In New England, school was held on Christmas Day until the 1850s.

The road from outlawing the celebration of Christmas to Christmas as we know it was a long one: 207 years from 1659 to 1856. That’s a remarkable span of cultural stubbornness by any measure.

Immigration and the Return of Christmas

It was not until the early 19th century, when waves of Irish and other immigrant communities settled in Boston, that Christmas regained its popularity and the city’s celebrations embraced a more diverse and festive spirit. New communities brought new customs, and those customs were hard to suppress.

How did Christmas in Massachusetts go from Puritan to a partridge in a pear tree? The transformation developed largely through the 1800s, and it had some notable nudges along the way. First and foremost was that eternal driver of change in America: immigration.

Christmas Finally Becomes Legal, Then Official

Not until 1856 did Christmas, along with Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July, finally become a public holiday in Massachusetts. It had taken nearly two centuries after the original ban for the state to formally welcome the holiday back.

In 1856, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “We are in a transition state about Christmas here in New England. The old Puritan feeling prevents it from being a cheerful, hearty holiday; though every year makes it so.” Later that year, the Massachusetts Legislature made Christmas an official holiday in the state.

The national picture took slightly longer. Puritan resistance to Christmas finally gave way nationally in 1870, when it was declared a federal holiday. By then, the holiday had already begun its transformation into the commercialized, family-centered celebration most people recognize today.

The Takeaway

The story of Boston’s Christmas ban is easy to dismiss as a quirky colonial footnote, but it’s more than that. It reflects how thoroughly a religious worldview can reshape public life, and how long the echoes of that worldview can linger even after the laws have changed.

The ban on Christmas in Boston left a lasting legacy on the city’s cultural traditions. Even after the ban was lifted, the Puritan influence continued to shape the way Christmas was celebrated in Boston for many years.

What’s striking, in the end, is not that Christmas was banned, but that it stayed culturally suppressed for so long after the law was gone. Rules can be repealed in an afternoon. The habits of mind they create tend to take much longer to fade.

AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.