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Christmas in the Crosshairs
Christmas
in the
Crosshairs
Two Thousand Years of Denouncing
and Defending the World’s Most
Celebrated Holiday
z
Gerry Bowler
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permittedby law, by license, or under terms agreed with
the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the
Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bowler, G. Q., 1948– author.
Title: Christmas in the crosshairs : two thousand years of denouncing and
defending the world’s most celebrated holiday / Gerry Bowler.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005102 (print) | LCCN 2016031263 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190499006 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190499013 (updf ) |
ISBN 9780190499020 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Christmas—History.
Classification: LCC BV45 .B684 2016 (print) | LCC BV45 (ebook) | DDC
263/.91509—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016005102
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgmentsvii
Introduction ix
I. The Inventors 3
II. The Revivers 43
III. The Tyrants 81
IV. The Godly and the Godless 104
V. The Appropriators 154
VI. The Discontented 183
VII. The Privatizers 199
A Brief Epilogue 243
Notes 247
Index 291
Acknowledgments
i would like to thank the staffs of the libraries of the University of

Manitoba and Duke Divinity School for their assistance in providing the
raw materials for this book. Thanks also to the students of my University
of Manitoba Social History of Christmas class for their lively feedback.
I am most grateful, however, for the wonderful teachers I have had in my
life. This book is humbly and happily dedicated to Mrs. V. Hogg, Miss C.
Kortes, Mr. W. Clark, Miss Robinson, Mr. K. Sauer, Mr. R. Rashley, and
Professors M. Hayden, J. Fry, R. Grogin, L. Kitzan, G. Porter, and H. G.
Koenigsberger. My gratitude comes too late on this mortal path for some of
these worthies, but I hope to thank them personally in the Great Library
beyond. Thanks also to Cynthia Read and Gina Chung, of Oxford University
Press for their encouragement and deft editing, and to Martha Ramsey
for her copyediting.
Introduction
is there a war on Christmas? Of course there is. Bill O’Reilly says so,
and John Gibson agrees. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
says so, and the American Family Association does too. It is a calculated
and pernicious attack not only on the holiday but on Christianity itself.
Is there a war on Christmas? Of course not. Michelle Goldberg at Salon
says it is a canard, and the New Yorker agrees. Jon Stewart mocks the notion,
and the Guardian calls it nonsense. To claim there is such a war is an
example of “Christonormativity,” a right-wing plot to bolster the ratings of
Fox News and disguise the drive for Christian theocracy.
Is there a war on Christmas? Yes, indeed. In fact, there is a history of
almost two thousand years of opposing, controlling, reforming, criticiz-
ing, suppressing, resurrecting, reshaping, appropriating, debating, replac-
ing, and abolishing the world’s most popular festival. It continues to this
very day, and that is what this book is about.
Christmas in the Crosshairs
I
The Inventors
In which the idea of celebrating Christmas is debated,
agreed upon, argued over, regulated, abolished, and then
restored in a diminished state
in the twent y-first century, Christmas is a worldwide phenome-

non observed in a million ways every year by billions of people. But it was
not always that way—it took centuries before Christians were convinced it
should be observed at all. Though its origins lie in marking the Nativity of
Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians honor as God come to our planet in
the form of a human baby in a Bethlehem manger, the early Church seems
to have had little interest in celebrating the events of this birth. The first
generations of believers concentrated on the death and resurrection of
Jesus and lived in profound expectation of his imminent return. What
need was there to make a fuss over his humble origins when he would
soon return again in glory to judge the living and the dead and to usher in
a new heaven and a new earth?
As the years went by and Christ seemed to be tarrying, the circum-
stances of his birth attracted more interest. Pagan critics of the new reli-
gion, such as Celsus, made mock of the claims of a virgin birth and asserted
that Jesus was the illegitimate product of an adulterous union. Rather than
bearing a child in a stable surrounded by hosts of angels, adoring shep-
herds, and wandering astrologers, Mary the mother of Jesus, he said, had
been turned out of doors by her husband and forced to live a disgraceful
life of itinerant poverty.1 Certain second-century Christians, influenced by
Greek Gnosticism, were skeptical of the idea of a god dwelling in human
flesh—this was a repellent notion to the philosophers; the very purpose of
the soul was not to become trapped in a body but to escape its earthly
prison of meat and bone. Such criticisms prompted the second-century
Church to emphasize the truth of the Nativity stories told in the Gospels of
Matthew and Luke and even to add to them in pious fictions, for example
4 christmas in the crosshairs
The Protoevangelium of James, which invented details about the youth of

Mary and introduced the character of Salome, a midwife, to the events in
Bethlehem.2
By the year 200, Christian writers had begun to speculate about when
the birth of Jesus had taken place. Clement of Alexandria noted that some
in his city had calculated that Jesus had been born in the twenty-eighth year
of the reign of Caesar Augustus, 3 b.c. by our calculation. As for the exact
date, there were said to be those who favored May 20 and others either April
19 or 20. January 6 was deemed to be the critical date by local Gnostics who,
despising the world of the flesh, were not interested in the date of Jesus’s
birth but rather the date of his baptism in the Jordan River, when God
announced that he had chosen him as his Son. In Carthage, Tertullian
placed the time of the year as either December 25 or January 6. The widely
traveled Julius Africanus stated that the conception of Jesus took place on
March 25, making a late December birth likely, and in his Commentary on
Daniel, Hippolytus, writing in Rome early in the 200s, pinpointed December
25. In 243 an anonymous document produced in North Africa, known as De
pascha computus, linked the birthday of Jesus to an analogous date in the
creation of the world. As God was thought to have begun Creation on March
25 (the first day of spring), the birth of Jesus corresponded to the appearance
of the sun and moon on the fourth day, thus making the Nativity March 28.
“O how admirable and divine is the providence of the Lord, that on that day
on which the sun was made on the same day was Christ born, the fifth of the
kalends of April, the fourth day of the week, and so rightly did the prophet
Malachi say to the people: ‘the sun of righteousness shall rise upon you,
with healing in his wings.’” (This would not be the last time solar imagery
would play a part in the calculation of the date.)3
This does not mean that Christians were seeking to know the date of
the birth of Jesus in order to celebrate it. The theologian Origen declared
that only pagan rulers had their birthdays trumpeted and, indeed, King
Herod Antipas had given birthdays a bad name in the Christian commun-
ity when he had used the occasion of his celebration to order the execution
of John the Baptist.4 Despite such a view, believers were growing fonder of
recounting the story of the birth of Jesus. In Rome, where Christians gath-
ered to worship in the funeral caves outside the city, they decorated a wall
with a picture of the Nativity scene. The catacomb of St. Priscilla, which
dates to about 250, bears an image of three Magi advancing toward the
seated Virgin and Child; a man standing beside her (probably meant to
represent an Old Testament prophet) points to the guiding star in the
The Inventors 5
heavens. Second- and third-century pseudo-Gospels such as The Revelation

of the Magi were particularly interested in the appearance of the Wise Men
who, guided by this miraculous star, became the first Gentiles to worship
the Christ Child.5
With the accession of the emperor Constantine in 312, Christianity
became a legal religion, free to marks its holy days publicly, and the celebra-
tion of the Nativity soon was celebrated joyfully. Maximus, bishop of Turin
at the beginning of the fifth century, contradicted Origen’s anticelebratory
attitude and proclaimed:
You well know what joy and what a gathering there is when the
birthday of the emperor of this world is to be celebrated; how his
generals and princes and soldiers, arrayed in silk garments and girt
with precious belts worked with shining gold, seek to enter the
king’s presence in more brilliant fashion than usual. . . . If, therefore,
brethren, those of this world celebrate the birthday of an earthly
king with such an outlay for the sake of the glory of the present
honor, with what solicitude ought we to celebrate the birthday of
our eternal king Jesus Christ. Who in return for our devotion will
bestow on us not temporal but eternal glory!6
The exact moment when the birth of Jesus became a feast in the Christian
calendar remains a subject of some uncertainty. The earliest reference to
it being settled on December 25 comes from an odd document known as
the Philocalian Chronograph, a sort of almanac produced in 354, which
contained lists of martyrs and bishops, birthdays of emperors, illustrations
of capital cities, and a method to calculate the dating of Easter. It makes
reference twice to the birth of Christ. In a list of Roman consuls it states
“I p Chr. Caesare et Paulo sat. XIII Hoc. Cons. Dns. His. Xpc. Natus est
VIII Kal. Ian de ven. Luna XV”: “Christ is born during the consulate of
C. Caesar Augustus and L. Aemelianus Paulus on the 8th of the Kalends
of January [December 25], a Friday, the 15th day of the new moon.” And in
the list of martyrs it says “VIII Kal. Ian natus Christus in Betleem Iudae”:
“Christ is born on the eighth of the Kalends of January in Bethlehem of
Judea.”7 Since the Chronograph refers to events in 336 it can be assumed
that by that year the Nativity was celebrated in Rome on December 25.
There is some evidence, however, that the hard-line sectarians known as
the Donatists had marked the event earlier (beginning sometime between
the years 243 and 311) in North Africa.8
Why was the December 25 date chosen by the Church in Rome?9 Some
historians have sought the answer to that question in the proliferation of
Roman holidays in late December. The popular feast known as Saturnalia,
a time of merry-making and social inversion, began on December 17 and
lasted until December 23. This was traditionally followed by Brumalia,
dedicated to Saturn and Bacchus, on December 25, and by the Kalends of
January, the Roman New Year, with its gift-giving, dancing in the streets,
and taking of omens. Was it not likely, many thought, that the Church chose
December 25 either to appropriate the date from pagan influence or to
capitalize on the winter solstice and its theme of the conquest of darkness
and renewal of the light—highly appropriate to the birth of a god? This
argument seemed particularly strong when considering that in 273 the
emperor Aurelian had instituted a new holiday on December 25, Dies Solis
Invicti, the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, in an attempt to unite citi-
zens in a cult that linked the supremacy of the sun god with imperial rule
and military success. Many pointed to December 25 as the birthday of the
Iranian deity Mithra, also associated with the sun and with the Roman mil-
itary class. Moreover, it was noted that Constantine, the early-fourth-century
emperor who was the first to allow the public observance of Christianity
and who later became an adherent of the new religion, had always been a
devotee of the sun god, placing the image of Sol Invictus on his coinage
and making Sun Day a day of rest, decreeing “All judges, townsfolk, and
shops of all crafts are to rest on the venerable Day of the Sun.”10
It was also suggested that Christians, by choosing a time when their
neighbors were engaged in celebration, might hold their own festivities
unremarked by hostile authorities, an important consideration around the
year 300, when their religion was under intense government persecution.
There is no contemporary evidence to support this, and the earliest asser-
tion of this argument comes from a Syriac manuscript dating from the
twelfth century:
The Lord was born in the month of January, on the day on which we
celebrate the Epiphany [January 6]; for the ancients observed the
Nativity and the Epiphany on the same day, because he was born
and baptized on the same day. Also still today the Armenians cele-
brate the two feasts on the same day. To this must be added the
Doctors who speak at the same time of the one and the other feast.
The reason for which the Fathers transferred the said solemnity
from the sixth of January to the 25th of December is, it is said, the
The Inventors 7
following: it was the custom of the pagans to celebrate on this same

day of the 25th of December the birth of the sun. To adorn the
solemnity, they had the custom of lighting fires and they even
invited Christians to take part in these rites. When, therefore, the
Doctors noted that the Christians were won over to this custom,
they decided to celebrate the feast of the true birth on this same day;
the 6th of January they made to celebrate the Epiphany. They have
kept this custom until today with the rite of the lighted fire.11
On the surface this explanation seems quite reasonable, but there are a
number of difficulties with it, and the current trend in historical research
now looks elsewhere for the origins of the celebration of Christmas on
December 25. Historians of the reign of Aurelian and his solar cult are
now skeptical about its influence on the dating of the Nativity, and some
go so far as to suggest that it may not have preceded the Christian observ-
ance at all; in fact, they say, the pagan celebrations may have begun as a
reaction to the Christian claims on December 25.12 The long-held associa-
tion of December 25 as the birthday of Mithra (often said to be a virgin
birth in the presence of shepherds) has now been contradicted by recent
research that claims that there is no evidence that the date in question had
any Mithraic significance and was certainly not celebrated as the god’s
birthday.13
Another objection is that the association of a Christian festival as impor-
tant as that of the Nativity with paganism would have been completely anti-
thetical to the mindset of believers at the time. Countless sermons and
books by preachers and leaders of the young Church stressed the need to
avoid any association with the world of idols and state cults.14 Their desire
to abstain from attendance at the games and the sacrifices that were so
much a part of Roman life was noted by their fellow citizens and gained the
new religion an unsavory reputation for atheism. It seems unlikely, then,
that the Church would have countenanced deliberately associating a
Christian festival with pagan celebrations. It is also noteworthy that no con-
temporary explanation for the dating of Christmas uses the Roman holiday
setting as a reason. Rather, people of the time explained the decision with
a set of arguments that might seem strange to modern ears.
Take, for example, the notion current in the ancient world that great
men invariably lived lives of complete years: that they were born and died
on the same date. Since Jesus was deemed to have been crucified in late
March, he might have been expected to have been born at that time—as
some had earlier suggested. But perhaps it was more appropriate to con-
sider his conception rather than his birth as the starting point in calcula-
tions: therefore, his earthly birth would have been in late December. A
fourth-century tract, On the Solstice and Equinox Conception and Nativity,
stated: “Therefore our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of
April in the month of March [March 25], which is the day of the passion of
the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the
same he suffered.”15 Consider also the idea that the first day of our planet’s
existence saw the world born in springtime and since Jesus’s conception
was an analogue to the creation of the universe, the angel’s appearance to
Mary to herald her pregnancy must have taken place on March 25 and the
birth of her child the usual nine months later. These theories of calculation
were bolstered by reference to the first chapter of Luke, which describes
the earlier miraculous conception of Elizabeth that would result in the
birth of John the Baptist. This conception took place when her husband
Zechariah’s tribe was serving its period in the Temple, and by examining
the tribal duty roster many concluded that John’s birth was on June 25, as
close to the summer solstice as was Jesus’s to the winter solstice. Since
Mary had visited Elizabeth in the sixth month of the older woman’s preg-
nancy, the date December 25 again fits the time chosen as the date of the
Nativity. Finally, John’s remark about Jesus that “he must increase but
I must decrease” was interpreted as a reference to the waxing and waning
of the daylight that followed the solstices.16
For whatever reason the Roman Church chose December 25 as the
date on which to celebrate the Nativity, it was a momentous decision that
would cause centuries of controversy and conflict. The first problem was
that other Christian churches in the empire had settled on another date on
which to mark Christmas—January 6, or “Epiphany.” The term means
“manifestation,” and the January 6 date celebrated not only the birth of
Jesus as his first earthly appearance but also the arrival of the Magi, the
manifestation to the Gentile world, his first miracle at the wedding in
Cana, and his baptism as an adult in the Jordan River, when his divinity
was publicly proclaimed from on high. It was true that this date was orig-
inally chosen by radically dissident Christian groups such as the Basilideans
and the Marcionites—clearly people not to be listened to—but the official
church of the great cities in the East, including Constantinople, Jerusalem,
and Antioch, also had established a January tradition, based, it seems, on
the calculation of a different date for Easter.17 From then on, the battle was
to persuade Easterners that December 25 was the correct date. This was
The Inventors 9
not a quick process. In the mid-fourth century, January 6 was still the date
in the eastern end of the Mediterranean of the joint celebrations of the
various manifestations. John Chrysostom, the greatest preacher of his
day, gave a sermon in 386 in Antioch pleading the case of the churches
in the West and arguing for a separation of Epiphany and Christmas.
“A feast is approaching which is the most solemn and awe-inspiring of all
feasts. . . . What is it? The birth of Christ according to the flesh. In this feast
namely Epiphany, holy Easter, Ascension and Pentecost have their begin-
ning and their purpose. For if Christ hadn’t been born according to the
flesh, he wouldn’t have been baptised, which is Epiphany. He wouldn’t
have been crucified, which is Easter. He wouldn’t have sent the Spirit,
which is Pentecost. So from this event, as from some spring, different riv-
ers flow—these feasts of ours are born.”18 December 25, he said, was cho-
sen in Rome because it was believed to be the authentic date of the Nativity;
indeed Christians from Spain to Greece had been keeping that day for
some considerable length of time—“a day of great antiquity and long con-
tinuance,” he called it—and he himself had been trying to win over the
Antiochene church for a decade. It was, moreover, verifiable by calculating
the date of the service of Zechariah in the Temple. Finally, as his trump
card, he asserted that the Roman census records that testified to the appear-
ance of Joseph of Nazareth and his wife Mary in Bethlehem on December
25 were still preserved in the imperial archives. Though Chrysostom was
successful in persuading the churches in Antioch and Constantinople,
notable holdouts resisted changing from January 6 and mocked propo-
nents of the December date as being unduly influenced by sun worship.19
It was not until 431 that Alexandria abandoned January for December 25;
Jerusalem held on until the sixth century; and the Armenian church never
yielded—to this day that country celebrates Christmas on January 6.
From the 300s on, the observances surrounding the celebration of
the Nativity became more laden with ritual, art, and music, until it grew
into the second holiest day on the Christian calendar. Christmas liturgies
expanded; Christmas hymns were written; pilgrimages were made to the
sites connected to the holy birth. In Bethlehem, Helena, the mother of
Emperor Constantine, built a basilica over the cave that had been identified
as the birthplace of Christ. Churches sought out relics from the Holy Land
that were connected to the Nativity—the church of Santa Maria Maggiore
in Rome, for example, claimed to possess wooden slats from the cradle in
which the Baby Jesus had lain, and a church in Milan said it held the
bones of the Magi. In 529 the emperor Justinian made December 25 a
national holiday, and over the next few centuries the period from December
25 to January 6 became known as the Twelve Days of Christmas. Since the
most solemn date on the calendar, Easter, had a preparatory fast, Christmas
was given one as well, and so developed the season known as Advent.
But while Christmas was growing in stature, its setting during the tra-
ditional pagan festive season would cause trouble that lasted for centuries.
Because the Nativity was celebrated during a time traditionally marked by
popular festivities such as feasting, gift-giving, and decorating homes with
greenery, those activities would inevitably affect Christians and their new
holiday. Gregory Nazianzen, the archbishop of Constantinople, sounded a
warning note in a sermon of 380. He praised what he called “the feast of
the Theophany,” when God appeared to humans in the form of a baby in
order for us to “journey toward God.” This was worthy of celebration—but
in a godly way, not like a pagan festival. He begged his listeners to avoid
imitating their worldly neighbors.
Let us not put wreaths on our front doors, or assemble troupes of

dancers, or decorate the streets. Let us not feast the eyes, or mes-
merize the sense of hearing, or make effeminate the sense of smell,
or prostitute the sense of taste, or gratify the sense of touch. These
are ready paths to evil, and entrances of sin. . . . Let us not assess the
bouquets of wines, the concoctions of chefs, the great cost of per-
fumes. Let earth and sea not bring us as gifts the valued dung, for
this is how I know to evaluate luxury. Let us not strive to conquer
each other in dissoluteness. For to me all that is superfluous and
beyond need is dissoluteness, particularly when others are hungry
and in want, who are of the same clay and composition as ourselves.
But let us leave these things to the Greeks and to Greek pomp and
festivals.20
Gregory left the offensive heathen holiday unnamed, but other Christian
critics were not afraid to tackle the festivities surrounding the Kalends of
January, the Roman New Year, head on. John Chrysostom compared the
revels of the season to an invasion, not of barbarians but “of demons
leading a procession in the forum. For the diabolical night-festivities that
occur today, the jests, the abuse, and the nocturnal dances, and this comedy,
absurd and worse than every enemy, took our city captive.”21 Asterius of
Amasea criticized the pagan holiday in ways that will seem very familiar to
those who view with a jaundiced eye Christmas in the twenty-first century.
The Inventors 11
In his Christmas sermon of the year 400, Asterius bewailed the expense
and the hypocrisy that went hand in hand during this season: “All stalk
about open-mouthed, hoping to receive something from one another . . . the
mouth indeed is kissed but it is the coin that is loved.” Money is demanded
for gifts to one’s superiors and to annoying vagrants and buskers on the
street. Even children are corrupted by the practice: “This festival teaches
even the little children, artless and simple, to be greedy, and accustoms
them to go from house to house and to offer novel gifts, fruits covered
with silver tinsel. For these they receive in return gifts double their value,
and thus the tender minds of the young begin to be impressed with that
which is commercial and sordid.” Honest folk end up in debt while the
unworthy and tawdry grow rich. It is not the poor who benefit from this
largesse, complained Asterius; it is the mob of hangers-on, entertainers,
and dishonest officials—and all for vanity and the hope of gain. Rather
than indulge in this sleazy social bargaining, Asterius urged his listeners
to spend their money on Christian charity:
Give to the crippled beggar, and not to the dissolute musician. Give
to the widow instead of the harlot; instead of to the woman of the
street, to her who is piously secluded. Lavish your gifts upon the
holy virgins singing psalms unto God, and hold the shameless
psaltery in abhorrence, which by its music catches the licentious
before it is seen. Satisfy the orphan, pay the poor man’s debt, and
you shall have a glory that is eternal. You empty a multitude of purses
for shameful pastime, and ribald laughter, not knowing how many
poor men’s tears you are giving, from whom your wealth has been
gathered; how many have been imprisoned, how many beaten, how
many have come near death by the halter, to furnish what dancers
to-day receive.22
These warnings continued through the centuries. In North Africa in 404

Saint Augustine preached a three-hour sermon against the revels of the
New Year and their connections to paganism. He pleaded with his listen-
ers: “When [the pagans] give gifts; do you give alms. They are called away
by songs of license; you, by the discourses of the Scriptures. They run to
the theatre; you, to the church. They become intoxicated; do you fast.”23
The bishop of Ravenna, Petrus Chrysologus, complained in the 440s that
the leading citizens of that imperial capital paraded during the Kalends
through the city’s hippodrome, dressed as Roman planetary gods.24 In 575
Bishop Martin of Bracae warned his more humble flock against the dan-
gers of the Kalends, among which he numbered decorating the home with
greenery.25 The Council in Trullo of 692, a gathering of the top two hun-
dred churchmen of the Byzantine Empire, which met in Constantinople
to bring canon law up to date, condemned those who participated in the
festivities of the Kalends. They were particularly anxious that women
not fall prey to unseemly public entertainments involving dancing and
crossdressing.26
The so-called Calends, and what are called Bota and Brumalia, and
the full assembly which takes place on the first of March, we wish
to be abolished from the life of the faithful. And also the public
dances of women, which may do much harm and mischief. Moreover
we drive away from the life of Christians the dances given in the
names of those falsely called gods by the Greeks whether of men
or women, and which are performed after an ancient and un-
Christian fashion; decreeing that no man from this time forth shall
be dressed as a woman, nor any woman in the garb suitable to men.
Nor shall he assume comic, satyric, or tragic masks; nor may men
invoke the name of the execrable Bacchus when they squeeze out
the wine in the presses; nor when pouring out wine into jars [to
cause a laugh], practising in ignorance and vanity the things which
proceed from the deceit of insanity. Therefore those who in the
future attempt any of these things which are written, having obtained
a knowledge of them, if they be clerics we order them to be deposed,
and if laymen to be cut off.27
The Council of Trullo also took time to denounce another custom

associated with the Nativity. On the day after Christmas, Byzantine women
were following the secular tradition of making a certain kind of cereal in
celebration of a safe delivery and offering this to the Virgin Mary. The
Council condemned this because the Blessed Virgin was not any ordinary
mother and had given birth in a miraculously pain-free fashion.28
These constant condemnations of pagan practice had to continue
because of the obstinate attachment of people to traditional practices. In
the mid-seventh century, near Paris in the kingdom of the scarcely civi-
lized Franks, a bishop who had castigated pagan festivities was answered
by his flock: “No matter how often you rebuke us, Romans, you will never
succeed in tearing out our customs. We will rather perform our rites as
The Inventors 13
heretofore, and always and forever gather for them; nor will there be a
man ever to prohibit our ancient and dearest festivals.”29 In the next cen-
tury the missionary St. Boniface complained to the pope about the delete-
rious effect the celebration of the Kalends was having on his work among
the Germans. When tribesmen visited Rome and saw—near the church of
St. Peter itself!—“throngs of people parading the streets at the beginning
of January of each year, shouting and singing songs in pagan fashion,
loading tables with food and drink from morning till night,” they believed
that this sort of seasonal behavior was sanctioned by Christian priests and
thereby fell prey to these bad examples.30
It is not surprising that the traditions of the old cultures continued to
permeate the new and that the Christmas season was influenced by pagan
forms of midwinter celebration. In the Middle Ages it was a time of the
year that cried out for festivity. Food was wonderfully abundant, and in the
absence of modern storage techniques, had to be eaten. The harvest was
in, which meant that there were grapes for wine and grain for baking and
for brewing beer; the livestock that could not be wintered over had to be
slaughtered and made into sausages or hams; the fish pens and eel pens
had to be emptied. These were the shortest days and longest nights of the
year, which called for fire and light and the hope of the return of the sun’s
warmth in the spring. It was the most barren time of the year, and folk
clung to the greenery that was left to them: the conifers and plants like the
holly. Little wonder that almost every culture in our planet’s temperate
zones has midwinter celebrations that emphasize celebratory excess and
hopes for renewal of life.31
In the face of such a reality, the Church considered changing its mind
about resisting every element of pre-Christian manners, especially on the
frontiers of Europe, where the vital job of evangelizing the barbarian
peoples was being carried out. In 597 Pope Gregory the Great sent out a
group of missionary monks to southern Britain, where a Germanic tribe
known as the Angles had settled. A letter of instruction, meant for Augustine,
the leader of the expedition, who would become the first archbishop of
Canterbury, revealed that a policy of cultural assimilation was now consid-
ered appropriate by Rome.
When Almighty God shall have brought you to our most reverend
brother the bishop Augustine, tell him that I have long been consid-
ering with myself about the case of the Angli; to wit, that the tem-
ples of idols in that nation should not be destroyed, but that the
idols themselves that are in them should be. Let blessed water be
prepared, and sprinkled in these temples, and altars constructed,
and relics deposited, since, if these same temples are well built, it is
needful that they should be transferred from the worship of idols to
the service of the true God; that, when the people themselves see
that these temples are not destroyed, they may put away error from
their heart, and, knowing and adoring the true God, may have recourse
with the more familiarity to the places they have been accustomed
to. And, since they are wont to kill many oxen in sacrifice to demons,
they should have also some solemnity of this kind in a changed
form, so that on the day of dedication, or on the anniversaries of the
holy martyrs whose relics are deposited there, they may make for
themselves tents of the branches of trees around these temples that
have been changed into churches, and celebrate the solemnity with
religious feasts. Nor let them any longer sacrifice animals to the
devil, but slay animals to the praise of God for their own eating, and
return thanks to the Giver of all for their fullness, so that, while
some joys are reserved to them outwardly, they may be able the
more easily to incline their minds to inward joys. For it is undoubt-
edly impossible to cut away everything at once from hard hearts,
since one who strives to ascend to the highest place must needs rise
by steps or paces, and not by leaps.32
This change in attitude would not end the Church’s war against common
people’s desire to continue enjoying their ancient traditions; churchmen
would long continue to battle against paganism infiltrating the Christian
calendar. Time after time, century after century, clergy would warn against
unseemly folk rituals being practiced by Catholic believers; Christmastide
was not the only battlefield but was a particularly contested one. Church
councils, papal decrees, and penitential handbooks that provided priests
with lists of sins and their appropriate penances all mandated against
enormities such as crossdressing, dancing in the churchyard, decorating
the house with vegetation, or wearing the guise of an animal. However,
the Church gradually took Gregory’s advice and accommodated the cus-
toms they deemed more harmless by constructing pious legends and
Christianizing them.
An example of this is the custom of leaving out food for the gods at
midwinter. As endless prohibitions seemed to have no effect, the clergy
learned to put a Christian spin on the practice. In fifteenth-century Bohemia,
The Inventors 15
the monk Alsso declared that it was wrong to put out bread for pagan dei-
ties, but it was “a laudable custom to make great white loaves at Christmas
as symbols of the True Bread [Jesus].”33 Across Europe food left out on
Christmas Eve was said to be meant for the Holy Family as they trudged
toward Bethlehem or the spirits of the family dead who would return on
this most sacred of nights to the ancestral hearth.34 Every European nation-
ality came to have Christmas traditions woven around the use of grain, a
traditional pagan symbol of fertility. Whether in bread form, like the Greek
christopsomo, or as the Twelfth Night Cake of England, the kutya porridge
of the Slavs, the oplatek wafer resembling the Host of the Mass in Poland,
the Christollen of Germany made to resemble the swaddling clothes, or the
sheaves tucked under the tablecloth on Christmas Eve in Ukraine, grain
was sanctified with one form of Christian symbolism or another.
Heathen processions during the Kalends in which folk carried about
images of their pagan gods were also safely Christianized: throughout
the Christmas season, parades of clergy and choirboys clad in white sang
joyful songs about the Nativity. In Germany and Spain folk processed
through the streets reenacting the search of Mary and Joseph for lodgings;
in eastern Europe troupes of Star Boys disguised themselves as Wise Men
journeying to see the infant king.
The expulsion of demons at midwinter as homes prepared to make
all things clean for the New Year easily found Christian equivalents. We
can see this during the period between Christmas and Epiphany, which
Austrians term Raunächte, the “Rough Nights,” or “Smoke Nights,” when
the house and farm must be cleansed of evil spirits. Across central Europe
processions of masked figures armed with brooms paraded to sweep away
the bad influences; some homes were purged using holy smoke from a
censer. On January 6 dwellings were visited by men dressed as the Magi,
and a seasonal ceremony took place; carrying a representation of the crib
and accompanied by a servant with a censer, the Three Kings moved
through the house blessing it and its inhabitants. As they left they chalked
a mark on a doorpost with the year of their visit and their initials, as in “14
K + M + B 99.”35 In Greece priests blessed the house against the appear-
ance of subterranean monsters known as Kallikantzaroi, who would oth-
erwise come down the chimney to torment the family.36
Decorating the house with greenery, which so enraged the churchmen
of late antiquity, who saw it as a pagan remnant of the Kalends, became a
means of not only brightening the home in the dark of winter but also a
way to tell a hundred little pious stories about the Nativity or foreshadowings
of the Crucifixion. Fragrant rosemary was said to be the plant on which

Mary had hung her cloak to dry (or, some say, the baby’s swaddling clothes).
Holly with its sharp-edged leaves and red berries was seen as a symbol of
Christ’s crown of thorns and the blood he shed. Christmas wreaths of
holly or evergreen were said to symbolize eternal life. Ivy was said to be a
female plant and a symbol of the human weakness that clings to divine
strength. Even mistletoe, long associated with the pagan Druids, could
find a place in church. In York Minster during the Middle Ages, a branch
of mistletoe was laid on the altar during the Twelve Days of Christmas,
and a public peace proclaimed in the city for as long as it remained there.
Even vagabonds and “unthrifty folk” were welcome to the town “in rever-
ence of the High Feast of Yule.” In southwestern England a particular
hawthorn bush became known as the Glastonbury Thorn, whose origins
were said to lie in the legendary voyage of the young Jesus and Joseph of
Arimathea to Britain. When Joseph plunged his staff into the earth it
miraculously produced white flowers, and the bush was said to burst into
blossom every Christmas Day.37
The giving of gifts at the Kalends had also long been criticized by the
Church, which thought it hypocritical and a form of social extortion in
which money passed from the poor to their superiors and which smacked
of lingering paganism.38 Gift-giving had also been excoriated for the part
it played in fortune-telling and luck-seeking as people laid wagers to tell
the future or opened their purses so as to let good fortune in. Gradually
the Church was able to sanctify these activities as well, partly by continu-
ing to emphasize charity in giving to the poor but also by using them to
celebrate the human nature of Jesus. Europe from the thirteenth century
on was taught by the Church to regard Christ as a kind of loving older
brother instead of the stern judge depicted in earlier eras. Therefore, just
as the birth of a baby brother called for gifts, so did the birthday of Jesus.
In late medieval Germany such gifts were termed “child’s-foot,” a name
also used to denote the extra helpings of fodder the livestock were given at
Christmas.39 The Church further sanctified the delivery of presents to chil-
dren during the Christmas season by explaining they had been left by vari-
ous saints on the eves of their holy days. Saints Barbara, Martin, and Lucia
and the Wise Men were all portrayed as miraculous Gift-Bringers; but by
far the most popular was Saint Nicholas.
In the Middle Ages, Nicholas was the most powerful male saint on the
Church calendar: the patron of sailors, Vikings, Russians, Normans, barrel-
makers, thieves, perfumers, picklers, florists, haberdashers, and many
The Inventors 17
more—but especially of children. He was credited with having saved the

daughters of a poor man from lives of prostitution by secretly delivering
bags of gold at night, and at some point, beginning in the twelfth century,
he was deemed to be the magical deliverer of small gifts to children on the
eve of his day, December 6. Soon children were praying to Saint Nicholas
and leaving out their shoes to be filled with treats; adults patronized doll-
and toy-makers, bakers were baking cookies in the shape of the saint, and
St. Nicholas markets were springing up in December to provide the ingre-
dients for feasting, play, and merry-making that the season had come
to demand.40
By the late Middle Ages the celebration of Christmas had adopted a
large number of traditional midwinter customs, many of which had once
been condemned by the Church, and had successfully blended them with
Christian teachings about the Nativity to create a holiday that was the high
festive point of the year. Round-dance music had become Christmas
carols, which put sacred words to popular music; midwinter feasting had
been sanctified by teachings of fellowship and insistence on charity; gift-
giving had lost some of the overtones of extortion, and the late December
period of agricultural idleness had become the Twelve Days of Christmas,
each day of which both marked a Christian saint and was dedicated to
some traditional folk activity that bound the community together.
Though the Church had ceased to struggle against the idea of merri-
ment at Christmas and seemed to be happy with the blended celebration
that mixed theology and mirth, it did not mean that there was an end to
vigilance or censoriousness. Clergy were ever alert for excesses that sig-
naled a descent into orgiastic behavior during the holiday season. Take for
example the scandalous behavior over Christmas at the court of the
Emperor Michael III (r. 842–867) in Byzantium, who brought down the
wrath of the Church by dressing himself as an archbishop and his com-
panions as clergy, all the while mocking the patriarch of Constantinople
and conducting a parody of the Mass.41 (A church council condemned
Michael’s behavior, though it had to wait until after his death before it
was safe to do so.) The fourteenth-century English reformer (or heretic,
depending on your point of view) John Wyclif, or one of his supporters,
deplored the debased state of popular entertainment at Christmas, com-
plaining that he “that kan best pleie a pagyn of the deuyl, syngynge songis
of lecherie, of batailis and of lesyngis [falsehoods], & crie as a wood man &
dispise goddis maieste & swere bi herte, bonys & alle membris of crist, is
holden most merie mon & schal haue most thank of pore & riche; & this
is clepid worschipe of the grete solempnyte of cristismasse; & thus for the
grete kyndenesse & goodnesse that crist dide to men in his incarnacion
we dispisen hym more in outrage of pride, of glotonye, lecherie & alle
manere harlotrie.”42 A century later the Croyland Chronicle deplored the
shameful activities—the dancing, the extravagant costumes, and the riot-
ous merriment—at the court of the doomed Richard III, who was cele-
brating what would be his last Christmas as king of England in 1484. Even
his supporter Bishop Thomas Langton noted that “sensual pleasure holds
sway to an increasing extent.”43
But it was unseemly behavior inside the Church itself that exercised
ecclesiastical authorities most gravely. In the Christian East, clergy were
misbehaving during services at Christmastime. In the Byzantine Empire
of the 900s, there were complaints of priests dancing, yelling, laughing,
and singing brothel songs in the midst of sacred celebrations, and a cen-
tury later Christmas and Epiphany services in Christendom’s greatest edi-
fice, Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, were
marred by clerics dressing as women, soldiers, and animals, inducing
mirth among the congregants. The celebration at Christmastime of festi-
vals with pagan roots continued in the East for some time, despite repeated
Church condemnation. This seemed to many to be a suitable period for
the emperor to hand out largesse and for everyone to exchange gifts and
to consider wiping the slate clean and starting things anew. Patriarchs of
Constantinople, starting around 1100, began to take these excesses more
seriously and attempted to crack down on these festivities, which threat-
ened to turn places such as Hagia Sophia “into places of business and a
den of thieves and the holy festivals into outrageous gatherings.” Though
the Church authorities were clearly interested in trying to impose a tighter
moral discipline on society, they were never completely successful in
extinguishing popular culture’s hold on Christmas celebrations.44
In the Latin-speaking West, the Christmas season, particularly those
days between December 25 and January 6, had become the time for younger
clergy to indulge in raucous shenanigans that would not have been toler-
ated at any other point in the year. The feast of St. Stephen, who had served
as a deacon before his martyrdom, December 26, was considered the day
for the deacons to act up; December 27, St. John’s Day, was given over to
the priests; the Feast of the Holy Innocents, December 28, was the climax
of activities for the choirboys, which began on December 6, St. Nicholas’s
Day; the subdeacons took center stage on the Feast of the Circumcision,
Epiphany, or the Octave of Epiphany (January 1, January 6, or January 13).
The Inventors 19
It was the behavior of the subdeacons that most caused superiors to tear
their tonsures out in rage and frustration throughout the late Middle Ages.
One of the chief spiritual lessons of Christmas for Christian believers
is the notion of social inversion, the world turned upside down. We can
see this in the appearance of the incarnated God in a manger—an animal
feeding trough—rather than a palace, and in the angelic first announce-
ment of this miraculous birth to lowly shepherds rather than princes. The
reaction of the peasant girl chosen to bear the Messiah was the Magnificat,
a celebration of the last becoming the first: “My soul doth magnify the
Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. Because he hath
regarded the humility of his handmaid, . . . He hath scattered the proud in
the conceit of their heart. He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
and hath exalted the humble. He hath filled the hungry with good things;
and the rich he hath sent empty away.”45
In this topsy-turvy view of the world, two curious ceremonies developed
in medieval churches, particularly in France but also elsewhere in Europe:
the Feast of Fools and the Feast of the Ass. In the former, subdeacons
elected a mock leader called the “Bishop of Fools” and engaged in spirited
hijinks inside the church and through the neighborhood. Theologians of
the University of Paris lamented:
Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous

visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir dressed as
women, panders or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat
black puddings at the horn of the altar while the celebrant is saying
Mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke
from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church,
without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the
town and its theatres in shabby traps and carts, and rouse the laugh-
ter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances,
with indecent gesture and verses scurrilous and unchaste.46
In the Feast of the Ass, the rowdy young clerics honored the donkey who
carried the Virgin Mary by bringing a real animal into the church while
singing a hymn of praise:
From Oriental country came

A lordly ass of highest fame,
So beautiful, so strong and trim,
No burden was too great for him.

Hail, Sir Donkey, hail!
At various points during the Mass the priest and congregation brayed
like donkeys.
Historians are divided over the meaning of these antics, some seeing
them as pagan leftovers, others as a kind of rough but pious liturgy.47 But
high-ranking churchmen of the Middle Ages were of one mind in wanting
to suppress this form of Christmas merriment. Bishops, archbishops,
popes, and councils all inveighed against the violence and mockery that
they saw in these ceremonies. Finally the king of France was moved to act.
In 1445 Charles VII declared:
It has been brought to our notice by Our beloved and loyal coun-
sellor the Lord Bishop of Troyes, in a complaint made by him, that
notwithstanding the decree [of the Council of Basel, 1436] by
which servants and ministers of Holy Church are expressly
debarred from celebrating certain derisive and scandalous cere-
monies which they call the Feast of Fools, which it has been the
custom to hold in several cathedrals and collegiate churches dur-
ing the Feast of Christmas, in which ceremonies the aforesaid ser-
vants of Holy Church have been accustomed to commit irreverence
and disloyalty towards Almighty God our Creator and His divine
and holy service, to the great shame and scandal of the whole
ecclesiastical state, making the churches like public places and
performing even during the celebration of Holy Mass divers inso-
lent and derisive mockeries and spectacles, disguising their bod-
ies and wearing habits indecent and not pertaining to their state
and profession, as the habits of fools, of men-at-arms, and of
women, with the wearing of masks, etc., all of which abuses, and
others customary at this season have been forbidden on pain of
penalties, nevertheless in this present year at the said feast of
Holy Innocents and the Circumcision these ceremonies have
been carried out at Troyes with such excess of mockery, disguis-
ings, farces, rhyming, and other follies as has not been known
within the memory of man.
All these things having been made known to the Faculty of
Theology of Our University of Paris, the Masters of the said Faculty,
after ripe deliberation, have composed a certain notable letter to
The Inventors 21
be dispatched to all the prelates and chapters of Our Realm, detest-

ing and condemning the said damnable Feast of Fools as supersti-
tious and heathen, and declaring its introduction to be the work of
pagans and unbelieving idolaters, as Monsieur Saint Augustine
expressly sheweth.48
Despite papal and royal disapproval, the Feast of Fools survived the
medieval period, both on the streets and in the churches. As late as 1645
such ceremonies could be found occurring during the Christmas season.49
Early Modern Christmas

By 1500 the celebration of Christmas was solidly entrenched in western
European cultures and the bearer of multiple meanings. As the second
most important feast on the Christian calendar, it was the occasion of spe-
cial religious ceremonies, sermons, liturgical dramas, glorious music, and
high art. It was the season of charity, with licensed begging by margin-
alized groups including old women, children, prisoners, and the lower
levels of the urban working class. It was the time for giving gifts, espe-
cially to children and to social superiors. It was the time of hospitality in
rural regions, when the country poor might expect their landlords to offer
free food and alcohol. The Twelve Days of Christmas, stretching from
December 25 to January 6, were also a welcome break in the agricultural
year when idleness was tolerated in the countryside and country folk cele-
brated with a myriad of raucous festivities, dances, and games. At royal
courts expensive masques were staged to entertain the high and mighty,
regulations against gambling were relaxed, and lords of misrule, abbots of
unreason, or les abbés de liesse directed the revels. In the city, greenery dec-
orated homes, streets, and churches; seasonal dishes were prepared with
rare ingredients bought at Christmas markets; wandering musicians sang
carols in the streets. Among the clergy it was the time for social inversion,
with boy choristers serving as bishops and lower clergy electing fools’
abbots or simpletons’ bishops to mock their superiors and staging cere-
monies like the Festum Asinorum, the Feast of the Ass, that sailed near to
blasphemy.
Such reservations as were expressed about Christmas concerned
excesses of celebration that might become abuses. Servant demands for
Boxing Day tips had to be kept within proper bounds; going about in the
streets in holiday masks was forbidden lest it lead to crime; the behavior
of the junior clergy and their subversive hijinks resulted in restrictions by

Church authorities; unseemly capering and dancing in churches and
churchyards was the subject of legislation—but it had been ever thus.50
Centuries of official cautions had moderated but never curbed the out-
bursts of midwinter misrule.
The sixteenth century saw a marked increase in authorities’ desire to
crack down on popular customs that had the flavor of disorder or lacked
the sanction of the ruling classes in the Church or government. Some of
these customs were religious in nature: mystery plays, processions, festi-
vals; some were secular: bear-baiting and bull-baiting, apprentice riots,
plays and ballads, and witchcraft. Social historians have called this phe-
nomenon “the Triumph of Lent.”51 We can see this in action in the moves
by the government of Henry VIII to suppress the celebrations of the boy
bishop, a practice whose origins go back at least to the tenth century, when
the Emperor Conrad found it celebrated in a monastery he was visiting.
Every December 6 (the feast of St. Nicholas, patron of children and stu-
dents) a cathedral choirboy was chosen to preside over activities until
December 28, the Feast of Innocents, when his term ended. The lad would
be given a cut-down version of episcopal robes and miter, and he would
process with his followers through the church and town. He was given
permission to collect donations for the boys’ revelries and in some cases
was even allowed to give a sermon. As boys will ever be boys, things some-
times got out of hand, with urban violence occasionally erupting—in 1367
a boy bishop in Paris was murdered in a street brawl, and in Salisbury an
act had to be passed “to restrain the insolence of choristers.”52 The author-
ities, touchy about misrule and parody of their power, gradually snuffed
out the custom over the centuries. During the reign of England’s Henry
VIII, a royal decree banned the practice whereby “children be strangelye
decked and apparelid to counterfaite priestes, bysshopps and women, and
so ledde with songes and daunces from house to house, bleasing the peo-
ple and gatherynge of monye.”53 His oldest daughter, Mary (known to his-
tory as Bloody Mary for her ruthless persecution of Protestants), renewed
the practice when she ruled in the 1550s, but during the reign of her suc-
cessor, Elizabeth I, the boy bishop custom vanished.54 Henry VIII also
forbade the traditional custom of masked revelers going door-to-door pre-
senting Christmas mumming plays in return for a donation or hospitality;
this was framed as an anticrime measure. The government of Mary Queen
of Scots abolished the post of abbot of unreason, which had traditionally
been responsible for guiding the court mirth and merriment during the
The Inventors 23
year-ending festivities, along with other seasonal celebrations that involved

large gatherings of common folk.
The “Triumph of Lent” was rooted in a vaster movement of the six-
teenth century that was going to revolutionize Western civilization, and
Christmas practices would not escape the consequences. The Protestant
religious reformations begun by Martin Luther in 1517 and the Catholic
responses to them engendered considerable debate about how to mark the
Nativity of Christ and the array of days surrounding it, or indeed, whether
it should be celebrated at all.
The Protestant reformers attacked an entire way of religious life that
had developed over a thousand years in Europe. They criticized what they
called the idolatry of the Mass, indulgences, belief in Purgatory, papal
supremacy, the role of the priesthood, fasting, clerical celibacy, the monas-
tic system, and the medieval notion of sainthood. Protestant reformers
universally despised the medieval cult of saints, which had claimed that
some Christian souls had more influence in heaven than others and were
therefore worthy of devotion and prayers. Across northern and western
Europe, where Protestants came to rule, saints’ days were abolished, their
statues were pulled down, their images were smashed, their feast days went
unmarked, prayers to them ceased, and a host of social customs under-
went change.55 Caught up in this was the magical Christmas Gift-Bringer,
St. Nicholas, who by rights ought to have been tossed on to the sacred
scrap heap along with the rest of his celestial companions.
There were certainly those who sought to see any veneration of
Nicholas obliterated. The sour English poet Barnabe Googe linked the
traditional December 5 gift-giving custom to the excessive veneration of
saints and other evils, saying: “Thus tender mindes to worship Saints and
wicked things are taught.” The Calvinist theologian Walich Sieuwerts
cried: “It is a foolish and pointless custom to fill children’s shows with all
sorts of sweets and nonsense. What else is this but sacrifice to an idol?
Those who do it do not seem to understand what true religion is.” The
attack on Nicholas was particularly important in the Netherlands, which
was in the midst of a religious civil war and rebellion against its Spanish
overlords. This area had a long history of devotion to the saint, but in the
town of Grave the authorities complained that the practice of St. Nicholas
Eve giving put “many decent people to great expense and stimulates the
youth in superstition.” They forbade all citizens from observing the early
December celebration or allowing their children to put out shoes in the
hope of expected presents. In Amsterdam iconoclastic patriots melted
down the silver statue of Nicholas in the Old Church (itself dedicated to
him) to pay for the war against the Spanish and banned the traditional St.
Nicholas market that had provided toys and goodies for the season. Bylaws
banned anyone bringing edible treats to the town square during the
traditional time of his festival. Frisian towns forbade the practice of youth
going door-to-door in search of confections on St. Nicholas Eve. In Arnhem
they banned the famous cookies baked in the shape of the saint, even
those made in the home.56
This war on Nicholas was only partially successful. His devotion contin-
ued in eastern Europe, where the appeal of the Protestant reformations
was weak and, remarkably, in Holland, with its population split between
Catholics and Protestants. (The cult of Nicholas would come to North
America via the Dutch colonization of the eastern seaboard of the New
World.) In England we hear no more of St. Nicholas’s nocturnal visits after
the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558. There and in Scotland, gifts were
henceforth reserved for New Year’s Day, and there are no records of pres-
ents for children for a long time. In many areas of Germany, both Protes
tant and Catholic parents retained the desire for a Christmas Gift-Bringer
but chose to replace the now controversial Nicholas with a new figure.57
Protestant clergy had warned that parents ought not to give presents in the
name of a discredited saint. “This is a bad custom,” they said, “because it
points children to the saint, while yet we know that not Saint Nicholas but
the holy Christ Child gives us all good things for body and soul, and He
alone it is whom we ought to call upon.” For Protestants the Christ Child,
or das Christkindl, as he was known in German-speaking lands, was an
excellent theological substitution: since it was God who brought all things
bright and beautiful, there was no better Gift-Bringer than the baby-god
himself. This replacement would also serve to move the celebrations away
from the saint’s day in early December to Christmas Eve, thus focusing
more clearly on (as later centuries would say) the reason for the season. So
sensible a custom was this that le petit Jésus or Ježíšek or Jézuska began to
appear on December 24 in many other Catholic areas as well.
The shift to the new-born Jesus was, however, not without problems.
In the family economy of 450 years ago, St. Nicholas was a superb aid
to strict parenting. Though he brought presents to good children, he
could be a terror to those who had misbehaved or refused to learn their
catechism. Not only did he bring switches to fill the stockings of the
naughty, he (or the disguised adult impersonating him) was known to
enter the house, quiz the children, and thrash those whose morality
The Inventors 25
or obedience was found wanting. This intimidation was, no doubt, a

spur to good behavior, but it was clearly not a pose the Baby Jesus could
adopt—what is less frightening than a babe wrapped in swaddling
clothes? Nor could the Christ Child, with his infant limbs, be imagined
trudging door-to-door carrying bags or baskets (customs varied region-
ally) of goodies.
These problems were met by the creation of a number of new super-
natural creatures who were expected to appear during the Christmas
season. Henceforth the Christ Child, when his physical presence was
required, would be represented by a young adolescent female dressed in
white. The tasks of frightening and carrying were delegated to a host of
lesser bogeymen (or -women) who would accompany the heavenly Gift-
Bringer—shaggy, sooty, and dark presences whose names were often
linked to the previous administration: Aschenklaus (Nicholas in Ashes),
Pelznickel or Belsnickel (Nicholas in Furs), and Ru-klaus (Rough Nicholas),
along with an assortment of devils, witches with iron teeth, female dis-
embowelers, monstrous goats, or monks armed with switches. European
children in the north and west of the continent learned to dread the arrival
of Père Fouettard, Berchta, Cert, Krampus, Hans Trapp, Klabauf, Joulupukki,
and Knecht Ruprecht, who might wave whips, shake chains, or threaten to
spirit away bad little boys and girls in their packs. (Children in Catholic
southern Europe tended to receive their gifts on Epiphany and were ser-
viced by Befana, a kindly witch, the Three Kings, or, in some cases, a poop-
ing log.)58
Though they deplored many Christmas superstitions, even many of
the strictest of European Protestants did not wish to eliminate the
observance of Christmas altogether. The authoritative Second Helvetic
Confession of 1561, drawn up by Swiss reformers and widely adopted by
Calvinists in other countries, allowed the celebration of “the festivities of
our Lord’s nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, ascension and the
sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples.”59 This was not the case,
however, in Scotland, where an English-backed coup had put a Calvinist
regime in power. There clerics, led by the fiery John Knox, felt that the
creeds proposed by their continental correligionists did not go far enough
in cleansing the Church of “popish dregs.” They adhered closely to the
regulative principle that held that all forms of worship not specifically
mandated by God were idolatrous and to be eliminated; Calvinists in
mainland Europe feared to tread on the traditional holidays, but the Scots
had no such fears. Their 1560 Book of Discipline stated:
We understand whatsoever men, by Laws, Councils, or Constitutions

have imposed upon the consciences of men, without the expressed
commandment of God’s word: such as be vows of chastity, fore-
swearing of marriage, binding of men and women to several and
disguised apparels, to the superstitious observation of fasting days,
difference of meat for conscience sake, prayer for the dead; and
keeping of holy days of certain Saints commanded by men, such as
be all those that the Papists have invented, as the Feasts (as they
term them) of Apostles, Martyrs, Virgins, of Christmas, Circumci
sion, Epiphany, Purification, and other fond feasts of our Lady.
Which things, because in God’s scriptures they neither have com-
mandment nor assurance, we judge them utterly to be abolished
from this Realm; affirming further, that the obstinate maintainers
and teachers of such abominations ought not to escape the punish-
ment of the Civil Magistrate.60
And, indeed, such abominations that marked the Christmas season were
the subject of the Scottish civil magistrate’s (and churchmen’s) stern glare
during the early modern period. Scots had hitherto been wont to make
merry at Christmas; there is much evidence of feasting, caroling, snowball-
ing, masking (including festive crossdressing), door-to-door begging,
dancing, and piping. Folk played football through the town or gambled or
drank to excess, while bakers baked huge Yule loaves. Under the new
Protestant dispensation, however, local kirk officials and town governments
began to crack down on such mirthful pastimes. In 1574 fourteen women
of Aberdeen were charged with “playing, dancing and singing of filthy
carols on Yule Day.”61 Those who opened their houses to give hospitality
to holiday singers were to be fined 5 pounds. In 1581 Perth bakers who
observed St. Obert’s Eve (December 10) with its dances and plays, their
traditional festival of their patron saint, were jailed until they paid 20 shil-
lings to the poor and were made to sit in the public seat of repentance in
the church during the next Sunday sermon. These scofflaws were also
censured in 1597, when they baked “great loaves at Yule, which was
slanderous and cherishing a superstition in the hearts of the ignorant.”
The Glasgow kirk in 1583 ordered excommunication for those who kept
Christmas, and in 1593 the minister at Errol equated carol singing with
fornication. The commission of such sins at Christmas need not even
have been public. In a number of Scottish towns ministers were known to
go door-to-door on Christmas Day to ensure that families were not feasting.
The Inventors 27
In England few voices were raised in opposition to Christmas. Protes

tantism’s arrival in England with the accession of the boy king Edward
VI brought significant changes to that country’s religious life: the destruc-
tion of images and the abolition of the Mass, church guilds, and the cult
of saints, and the appearance of new prayer books, married clergy, and a
vernacular liturgy. As part of this reformation from the top, Protectors
Somerset and Northumberland attacked the customs of the old ritual
year in England, discouraging such traditional activities as midsum-
mer bonfires, Plough Monday festivities, Corpus Christi processions,
church ales, maypoles, the ringing of bells for the dead on the feast of All
Saints, creeping to the cross, and St. George ridings; but with the excep-
tion of continuing the abolition of the boy bishop that Henry VIII had
begun), Edward’s government left most of the Christmas traditions
unscathed.62 In fact the Edwardian court continued to employ a lord of
misrule to direct the expensive seasonal festivities meant to amuse the
young king during the Twelve Days. During the years 1553–1558, when
a short-lived Catholic revival under Bloody Mary was undertaken, no
moves against holiday traditions were made, and the boy bishop was
even briefly revived.
It was at the Christmas Mass in 1558 that Elizabeth I signaled her
intention to follow Protestantism and the Church of England in the style
her brother, Edward VI, had established. This meant, among other things,
that during the Elizabethan era (1558–1603) Christmas was kept lavishly at
court, where the Virgin Queen maintained a sharp eye on the value of gifts
given her and gambled with her courtiers using loaded dice; in the lawyers’
chambers, where dramas were performed and cats were set upon by dogs
for sport to the sound of hunting horns; and in homes decorated with
greenery and redolent of the odor of roast goose and gingerbread. Those
who objected to Christmas tended to be the hotter sort of gospeler, those
who would come to be known as Puritans, marginal voices during the
reign of Elizabeth but destined to become louder in the seventeenth cen-
tury. One such was the pamphleteer Philip Stubbes, who in his 1583
Anatomie of Abuse moaned that
in Christmas time there is nothing els used but Cards, Dice, Tables,
masking, mumming, bouling, & such like fooleries. And the reason
is, for that they thinke they haue a Commission & prerogatiue that
time, to do what they list, & to follow what vanity they will. But
(alas) do they thinke that they ar priuiledged at that time to do euil?
the holier the time is (if one time were holier then another, as it is
not) the holier ought their exercises to be. Can time dispence with
the, or giue the liberty to sin? No, no: the soule which sinneth shal
die, at what time soeuer it offendeth. But what will they say? Is it
not Christmas? must we not be merry? Trueth it is, we ought both
then, & at all times besides to be merie in the Lord, but not oth-
erwise, not to swill and gull in more then will suffice nature, nor
to lauish forth more at that time, then at any other times. But the
true celebration of the feast of Christmas is, to meditate (and as
it were to ruminate in the secrete cogitations of our mindes)
vpon the incarnation and birth of Iesus Christ, God and man: not
only at that time, but all the times and daies of our life, & to
shew our selues thankful to his blessed maiesty for the same.
Notwithstanding, who knoweth not, that more mischief is that
time committed then in all the yeare besides? what masking and
mumming, wherby robbery, whoredome, and sometime murther
is committed: what Dicing and Carding, what eating & drinking,
what banquetting and feasting is then vsed, more then in all the
yeare besides? to the great dishonour of God, and impouerishing
of the Realme?63
Stubbes introduced here two of the principal criticisms of Christmas that

would underpin the radical Protestant critique in the years to come: the
observation that the holiday is the occasion for riotous behavior and the
assertion that Christians should not regard days other than the Sabbath
as special.
Elizabeth was unmoved by such criticisms. The royal court continued
to be the site of merriment and play at Christmas, and in fact the queen
acted to reinforce traditional attitudes toward the holiday among her sub-
jects. Poets such as Thomas Nashe had complained of a decline in cus-
tomary seasonal hospitality and fellowship and of a world where Christmas
had become lean and mean:
Christmas the one, a pinch-back, cut-throate churle,

That keepes no open house, as he should do,
Delighteth in no game or fellowship,
Loves no good deeds, and hateth talke,
But sitteth in a corner turning Crabbes,
Or coughing o’re a warmed pot of Ale64
The Inventors 29
Nashe’s complaint had some merit. Landlords of the late sixteenth century
felt less of the feudal noblesse oblige that had motivated their medieval
ancestors to see Christmas as a charitable season that bound servant
and master together. The culture of the elites was becoming increasingly
separated from that of the lower orders, and the nobility were being
increasingly accused of abandoning their rural holdings—and traditional
hospitality—during Christmas to spend their time and money in the cap-
ital. Asserting that the nation’s aristocracy had neglected their customary
seasonal obligations, Elizabeth ordered her nobles and gentry to abandon
London at Christmastime and return to their manors in the countryside.
There they were to strengthen social ties by opening their homes in the
good old-fashioned way and to feast their neighbors.
The maintenance of traditional Christmas observances was a concern
of James I when he succeeded Elizabeth in 1603 and inaugurated the
Stuart dynasty. While king in Scotland he had maintained a festive atmos-
phere despite the criticism of the Edinburgh presbytery, which twice
attempted to curb the Yuletide merriment at his court.65 In Basilikon Doron,
his book of advice to his son on successful kingship, he advocated a
national policy of seasonal merriment:
In respect whereof, and therewith also the more to allure them to a

common amitie among themselues, certaine dayes in the yeere would
be appointed, for delighting the people with publicke spectacles of all
honest games, and exercise of armes: as also for conueening of neigh-
bours, for entertaining friendship and heartlinesse, by honest feast-
ing and merrinesse. For I cannot see what greater superstition can
be in making playes and lawfull games in Maie, and good cheere at
Christmas, then in eating fish in Lent. . . . And as this forme of con-
tenting the peoples mindes, hath beene vsed in all well gouerned
Republicks: so will it make you to performe in your gouernment that
olde good sentence, Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit vtile dulci.66
He also had rebuffed Puritan attempts in 1604 at the Hampton Court

Conference to abolish those holy days remaining on the Church of
England’s calendar. James, therefore, was inclined to view an attack on
merriment as an attack on the solidarity that should exist between ruler
and subject and, indeed, on royal authority itself.
The short play entitled Christmas His Masque written by Ben Jonson for
King James I and played at court on Christmas Day 1616 is a politically
charged defense of the traditional English Christmas and an attack on

Puritans and the government of the City of London who have slighted the
old-fashioned ways. (James’s administration viewed London as a strong-
hold of Puritanism, religious nonconformity, and cheeky defiance of royal
power.) In the masque the figure of Old Christmas defends his Protestant
leanings from the accusation that he is a popish innovation and intimates
that Londoners have insulted their king and abandoned their national tra-
ditions by their Calvinist opposition to mirth and the celebration of
Christmas.
Why, gentlemen, do you know what you do? Ha! would you have
kept me out? CHRISTMAS!—Old Christmas—Christmas of
London and Captain Christmas! Pray let me be brought before my
Lord Chamberlain; I’ll not be answered else. “’Tis merry in hall,
when beards wag all.”67 I have seen the time you have wished for
me, for a merry Christmas, and now you have me, they would not
let me in: I must come another time! A good jest—as if I could
come more than once a year. Why I am no dangerous person, and
so I told my friends of the guard. I am old Gregory Christmas still,
and though I come out of the Pope’s Head-alley, as good a Protestant
as any in my parish.68
James fought back with a series of measures. In 1618 the Five Articles of
Perth overrode Scottish church legislation against the celebration of
Christmas and four other traditional religious observances. (The Scottish
response was lukewarm at best. An observer reported of church attend-
ance on December 25: “The great Kirk was not half-filled, notwithstand-
ing the provost, bailies and council’s travels . . . the dogs were playing in
the flure of the Little Kirk, for rarity of people, and these were of the
meaner sort.”)69 That same year in The Book of Sports the king listed the
pleasurable pastimes that were permissible on Sunday and challenged
the Sabbatarianism of “Puritans and precise people,” whom James termed
“contemners of our authority and adversaries of our Church” who had
attempted to persuade Englishmen “that no honest mirth or recreation is
lawful or tolerable in our religion, which cannot but breed a great discon-
tentment in our people’s hearts.”
The ballad “Christmas His Lamentation for the losse of his acquaintance;
showing how he is forst to leave the Countrie and come to London,” which
appeared during James’s reign and again under Charles I, complained:
The Inventors 31
Christmas is my name, far have I gone, without regard

Whereas great men by flocks there were flown,
There to be flown, to London-ward;
Where they in pomp and pleasure do waste
That which oulde Christmas was wonted to feast,
Welladay!
Houses where music was wont for to ring
Nothing but bats and owlets do sing.
Welladay! Welladay! Welladay!
Where should I stay?
Christmas beef and bread is turn’d into stones
and silken rags;
And Lady Money sleeps and makes moans
in miser’s bags;
Houses where pleasure once did abound
Nought but a dog and a shepherd is found,
Welladay!
Places where Christmas revels did keep
And now become habitations for sheep.
Welladay! Welladay! Welladay!
Where should I stay? 70
Heeding such voices, James also took pains to imitate Elizabeth and dis-
perse the nobility from London in December to spend Christmas in cus-
tomary hospitality. (According to Francis Bacon, James was wont to say to
his country gentlemen: “At London you are like ships at sea, which show
like nothing; but in your country villages, you are like ships in a river
which look like very great things.”)71
By the time of Charles I’s accession in 1625 the warriors eager to fight
over Christmas had only fired a few opening salvoes, but the ammunition
each camp was using had become clear. On one side were the claims to
authority, tradition, and popular amusement—defense of time-honored fes-
tivities had become a litmus test in which supporting the right to be merry
was to support the Stuart Church and polity. Arguing against Christmas
seemed to proclaim adherence to Puritanism and an oppositionalism that
bordered on treason.72 On the other side was a reforming zeal that saw only
idolatry, licentiousness, and popery in customary observances.
It was in 1633 that the battle was waged in a more menacing manner,
when William Prynne, a lawyer, produced the massive tome Histriomastix.
Chiefly aimed at the evil he perceived in stage plays, his book also mar-
shaled a number of Puritan-style attacks on the celebration of the Nativity.
Christmas, he said, was generally spent in “reveling, epicurisme, wanton-
nesse, idlenesse, dancing, drinking, Stage-playes, Masques, and carnall
popmpe and jollity” to the peril of one’s soul. The celebration of Christmas
was but an imitation of Saturnalia brought into Christianity by “the pagan-
izing Priests and Monks” of the Roman Church, who had embarked on
Pope Gregory’s ill-advised policy of assimilating pre-Christian customs.73
The government responded brutally. Prynne, this monster of men and
nature, was said to have “spit his venom against the people in general, the
magistrates and his majesty’s house and household”—indeed against the
throne itself. He had “railed, not only against stage plays, comedies and
dancings, and all other exercises of the people, and against all who such as
behold them, but further and particular against hunting, public festivals,
Christmas-keeping, bonfires and maypoles,” and even “against the dress-
ing up of a house with green ivy.” The hapless author was placed in the
pillory, his ears were cropped, his cheeks were branded with “SL” (sedi-
tious libeler), and he was sentenced to life in prison. Partly in response
to Prynne, Charles I reissued his father’s Book of Sports, with an addition
that linked opposition to traditional entertainments with opposition to
royal authority.74
In 1642 England erupted into a civil war that pitted royalist supporters
against Parliament, a war in which the struggle over Christmas became
part of the national debate. Parliament was in the hands of the godly party
(as they called themselves), aided by an alliance with the Christmas-hating
Scots (who had repudiated the Five Articles of Perth and Christmas obser-
vances in 1638), who demanded church reform as the price of their help.75
With the example of their northern neighbors before them, legislators
moved in 1644 to encourage preaching against the holiday and then to
bury its observances in a mandatory fast on December 25. In the next year
the authors of the Directory of Public Worship, the replacement for the
Book for Common Prayer, urged the discontinuance of Christmas and all
other church festivals. In 1646 Parliament concurred and announced: “Be
it ordained, by the Lords and Commons in parliament assembled, that the
Feast of the Nativity of Christ, and all other festival days commonly called
Holy-days, be no longer observed within this kingdom of England.”76
This was easier said than done. Most churches seem to have ignored
the decree in 1646; 85 percent of parishes surveyed had purchased the
Communion elements for Christmas and Easter. Pro-Christmas riots
The Inventors 33
occurred in country towns, and shopkeepers who tried to stay open on

December 25 were abused and their goods scattered about. It was worse in
1647; despite armed vigilantes gathered to keep church doors open, the
government had to arrest a number of ministers attempting to preach on
Christmas Day. The lord mayor of London went about with his men trying
to tear down seasonal greenery and was roundly abused for his efforts. (A
royalist poet mocked this sort of anti-Christmas effort: “Their madnesse
hath extended itselfe to the very vegetables, the senselesse Trees, Hearbes
and Weedes. . . . Holly, Ivy, Mistletoe, Rosemary, Bayes, are accounted
ungodly Branches of Superstition.”)77 There were serious disturbances,
with dead and wounded, in Canterbury, Ealing, Ipswich, and Oxford.
Such violence never reached that level again, though shopkeepers over
the next decade still sought protection from thuggish apprentices who
resented their Christmas commerce. Parish snoops made themselves nui-
sances by trying to catch housewives in the act of making Christmas pies
(easily spotted because they were traditionally in the shape of a crib), and
churches wishing to hold services on the holy days had to do so under-
ground. Troops were on occasion called in to break up these clandes-
tine services.
The battle for Christmas then became a war in print, with both sides
setting out their cases for the public. Dozens of publications, ranging
from single-sheet ballads to short satirical tracts to lengthy learned texts,
provide the Christmas historian with a full range of arguments for and
against observing all of the customs, religious and social, that surrounded
Christmas. Both viewpoints were trumpeted with vigor, but it is fair to say
that the wittier and more alluring material came from the friends of
Christmas; its opponents often adopted a hectoring tone that seemed to
express more interest in scoring debating points than winning hearts
and minds.
The chief argument against Christmas, invariably mentioned by oppo-
nents of the feast, was the regulative principle: that worship not spe-
cifically commanded by God was therefore forbidden. Time and again
supporters of Christmas were asked, “Where does God authorize the
observance of Christmas or of any special days in the Gospels?” (It was
assumed that Old Testament festivals were not binding on Christians.)
A corollary to this was the assertion that December 25 was unlikely to have
been the day of the birth of Jesus in any event and thus was even more
unworthy of special observance. Perhaps, said the tract Mercurius Religiosus
of 1651, God kept the true date a secret so as to prevent its idolization—in
much the same way the burial spot of Moses had been hidden from the
eyes of man. The only day to be kept holy, the Puritans asserted, was the
Sabbath.78
Having demonstrated to their satisfaction that Christmas had no scrip-
tural warrant, its opponents then turned up the temperature. Not only was
the festival not based in Bible teaching, it had not been observed in the
early Church, which in fact had inveighed against the celebration of birth-
days. But the sin of contemporary Christmas-keepers was even worse—not
only was it unscriptural and historically unrooted in Christianity, it was
in fact directly derived from pagan festivities. Starting in the fourth cen-
tury the papacy had foolishly attempted to adopt heathen practices and
Christianize them—Pope Gregory’s letter to Augustine of Canterbury had
made that policy quite clear. Christmas merriment was merely an exten-
sion of Saturnalia; carols were an imitation of songs sung to honor Ceres;
and the custom of seasonal gift-giving was a hangover from the Kalends of
January. What the defenders of Christmas were doing was not keeping
harmless old customs but rather perpetuating paganism and idolatry. “And
how will you one day acquit yourselves before God for placing and crying
up men’s inventions instead of the institutions of Jesus Christ?” asked
Certain Quaeries touching the Rise and Observation of Christmas (1648), one
of the more restrained Puritan tracts.79
The linkage of Christmas to the papacy, an institution thoroughly dis-
credited in seventeenth-century England among Protestants of all sorts,
was a shrewd move. It was well known that Catholics (including Charles
I’s queen, Henrietta, a Frenchwoman and an open papist!) certainly made
much of the feast. If Christmas was popish, surely it was also unworthy of
a true Englishman’s devotion.
The friends of Christmas used barrels of ink to refute these charges.
Christmas, they asserted, had been observed in apostolic times; December
25 was the correct date of Christ’s birth; Jesus himself had observed holy
days, and as for the regulative principle and denying the magistrate the
right to designate certain non-Sabbath days as religiously special, well,
why then did the Puritans support the right of the state to proclaim fasts?
As for Christmas’s popish origins, they were admitted but shrugged off;
the early papacy had not been corrupt (unlike its present-day successors),
and many valuable things had proceeded from dubious beginnings.
The second line of Puritan attack was always to bring up the bad
behavior of Christmas celebration: dicing, carding, sexual incontinence,
drunkenness, transvestitism, dancing, gluttony, riot, cats and dogs living
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first—John R. Loftin, Forrest Dillard, Haggerton and others. It was
good to be with the old comrades once more. We took up our work
again. I began selling drugs. I married here and am still in Jackson
county, at Newport, Arkansas.
(THE END.)
Jacksonport, Ark., April 24, 1877.
At an informal meeting called at Col. L. C. Gause’s law office, the
following members of the old Jackson Guards, or Company “G,” First
Arkansas Regiment, Infantry, were present:
L. C. Gause, John R. Loftin, M. A. Mull, Clay Lowe, Peter Bach and
W. E. Bevens. Also by invitation Frank W. Lynn.
On motion, L. C. Gause was chosen temporary chairman and
W. E. Bevens temporary secretary. By consent of those present, we
propose to organize the old Jackson Guards and all members are
invited and solicited to invite and solicit all members they see and
know of, and ask all to meet at Col. L. C. Gause’s law office on
Saturday, April 28th, 1877, to get up a re-organization and
celebration by the 5th day of May, and the secretary is ordered to
invite those of the Company we know of at a distance to be with us
on the 5th day of May, 1877. Also to invite General F. Fagan; also
John W. Colquitt, our last Colonel.
A committee on finance was appointed by the president,
Peter Bach. Also a committee consisting of the following persons:
John R. Loftin, W. E. Bevens, Peter Bach, M. A. Mull, Clay Lowe, to
look after the dinner and see when we will have it and at what hour,
and make preparations for the same. Col. L. C. Gause was appointed
a committee of one to draw up resolutions of re-organization, also to
address the meeting and to invite Captain J. C. Matthews and wife
and all the widows of the Jackson Guards. Also to invite
Frank W. Lynn.
Meeting adjourned to meet on Saturday, April 28th, 1877, at
Col. L. C. Gause’s office.
L. C. GAUSE, President.
W. E. BEVENS, Secretary.
Jacksonport, Ark., May 4th, 1877.
At a regular meeting of the Jackson Guards at the residence of
Mart A. Mull, the following members were present:
L. C. Gause, temporary chairman; W. E. Bevens, temporary
secretary; John R. Loftin, H. Clay Lowe, Peter Bach, G. K. Stephens,
John Cathey, F. W. Dillard, W. D. Shackleford, Jasper May,
Frank Richardson, J. B. Waddell, James Hudson, Robert D. Bond,
M. A. Mull.
The following resolutions were adopted:
RESOLVED:
That We, the surviving members of the Jackson Guards, for the
purpose of re-organizing ourselves for a social re-union, will annually
on the 5th day of May, elect from our members the following
officers: One President; One Vice President; One Secretary and
Treasurer; and the President shall appoint three members as an
executive committee to serve one year and shall exercise the powers
and perform the duties usual to such offices respectively.
ON MOTION:
The secretary be ordered to publish four weeks before the next
annual meeting, in both County Newspapers, notices when and
where it shall be held.
RESOLVED:
That the Jackson Guards do hereby tender their sincere thanks to
Mrs. Laura Ewing for the beautiful bouquet tendered us on this
occasion.
RESOLVED:
By the Jackson Guards, that our sincere thanks be hereby
tendered Mr. M. A. Mull and kind lady for the hospitable donation of
their home for our re-union, and grand dinner at which we have had
the time of our lives talking over old times once more and for their
supervision over the same.
RESOLVED:
That our thanks are also tendered our Lady Friends and wives for
their presence and assistance in our dinner.
We, the undersigned surviving members of the Jackson Guards
agree to organize ourselves in accordance with the foregoing
resolution:
L. C. Gause,
W. E. Bevens,
H. Clay Lowe,
Peter Bach,
G. K. Stephens,
John A. Cathey,
F. W. Dillard,
M. A. Mull,
W. D. Shackelford,
John R. Loftin,
Jasper May,
Frank Richardson,
J. B. Waddell,
Robt. D. Bond,
James Henderson,
A. C. Pickett was elected President.
L. C. Gause was elected Vice President.
The President not being present the Vice President presided and
appointed the following as an executive committee:
J. B. Waddell,
Mart A. Mull,
John R. Loftin.
ON MOTION:
The following members were appointed to assist in perfecting the
organization:
H. Clay Lowe, F. W. Dillard, Robt. D. Bond, and on motion
L. C. Gause was added.
ON MOTION:
Of Mr. Clay Lowe, the following resolution was adopted:
WHEREAS, Since the organization of this Company sixteen years
ago, many of our Brave Comrades have passed away, many on the
battlefield, daring and dying for their Country, others from disease,
therefore,
RESOLVED, That we will ever cherish their memory, emulate their
virtues and honor their heroism, and that as a testimonial of our love
and respect we erect, at an early day as possible a suitable
monument to the dead of the Jackson Guards.
L. C. Gause,
W. E. Bevens,
H. C. Lowe,
Peter Bach,
G. K. Stephens,
F. W. Dillard,
W. D. Shackelford,
John R. Loftin,
John Cathey,
Jasper May,
Frank Richardson,
J. B. Waddell,
James Hudson,
Robert A. Bond,
W. T. Barnes,
M. A. Mull.
Those who have answered our Call but could not come:
Captain A. C. Pickett,
Wm. Bunnell,
Lyman B. Gill,
B. F. McCowan,
Lem McKee,
Lon Steadman,
Luther Steadman,
John Murphy,
Jerry Love,
George W. Roberts,
Austin Choate,
Mart Howard.
All of whom are the total known living at that time, (1877.)
And now, March 5th 1913, there are only living, as far as we
know, out of 154 members on May 5, 1861:
John Loftin,
Lon Steadman,
John Cathey,
Luther Steadman,
W. T. Barnes,
W. E. Bevens.
THE ORIGINAL MUSTER ROLL OF COMPANY “G”

FIRST ARKANSAS REGIMENT, INFANTRY,
JACKSON GUARDS.
Colonel James Fagan’s Regiment,
General Polk’s Brigade,
General D. C. Govan’s Brigade,
Cleburne’s Division,
Hardee Corps,
Army of Tennessee.
FIRST OFFICERS ELECTED MAY 5TH, 1861.
1. Captain A. C. Pickett in 1862, Colonel of Stearns. Mo.,

8 Regiment.
2. 1st Lieutenant L. C. Gause in 1862, Col. of 32 Ark. Regiment.
3. 2nd Lieut. L. L. Moore, Discharged.
4. 3rd Lieutenant George Paine, Discharged.
NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS.
3rd. First Sergeant James F. Hunter, transferred.
2nd Sergeant W. B. Densford, discharged over age.
3rd Sergeant John R. Loftin.
4th Sergeant Peter Bach, wounded by Cliff Dowell.
5th Sergeant H. C. Lowe.
First Corporal John M. Waddell.
2nd Corporal Sam Shoup.
3rd Corporal Henry Clements.
4th Corporal W. E. Bevens.
OFFICERS FROM MARCH 1862 to 1865.
5. Captain Sam Shoup, wounded on July 22nd at Atlanta.

6. 1st Lieut. A. T. Walthall, killed at Kennesaw Mountains.
7. 2nd Lieut. H. C. Lowe, wounded at Chickamauga and
Jonesboro.
8. 3rd Lieut. John R. Loftin.
PRIVATES.
9. W. T. Barnes, detailed with Bond.

10. Robert D. Bond, wounded at Atlanta, captured at Nashville.
11. W. H. Baker, discharged over age.
12. George W. Baker, transferred to Georgia Regiment.
13. Ben B. Bradley.
14. William Bunnell, transferred to Navy Department.
15. John Baird, wounded at Mobile Bay.
16. T. H. Brogden, killed by James Garrett.
17. T. A. Byler.
18. J. J. Bobo, detailed to drive ambulance.
19. John Boiler.
20. J. K. Bedwell, died.
21. Edward Burnett, killed at Kennesaw.
22. John Baldridge, wounded and captured at Franklin.
23. Alex Baldridge, wounded at Franklin.
24. W. E. Bevens, wounded at Shiloh.
25. Pete Bach, wounded by Cliff Dowell.
26. W. H. Clayton, killed at Golgotha.
27. William Cooper, died.
28. Jack Conn, discharged from sickness.
29. John A. Cathey, wounded at Shiloh.
30. Austin Choate, wounded and discharged.
31. F. Collins.
32. John Carpenter.
33. B. L. Covey.
34. Henry Clements, wounded at Franklin.
35. E. V. Dale, killed at Shiloh.
36. George F. Dickson, transferred.
37. Ed Dempsey, wounded.
38. Richard Dorsey, discharged.
39. Thomas B. Davis, died at Dalton.
40. Allen Davis, killed at Bentonville.
41. Clifton Dowell, who wounded Peter Bach.
42. F. W. Dillard.
43. Ben H. Ferrell, discharged over age.
44. J. F. Ferrell.
45. James Falcher.
46. James Garrett, who killed Brogden, transferred.
47. S. S. Gause, transferred.
48. Arthur Green, killed at Murfreesboro.
49. Lyman B. Gill.
50. E. Haggerton, detailed with Pioneer Corps.
51. Robert Harl.
52. John D. Heitt.
53. James M. Hensley, wounded at Ringold, killed at Atlanta.
54. Dan Hays, discharged over age.
55. John E. A. Harl, killed at Shiloh.
56. Jonathan Harrison, wounded at Shiloh.
57. James Hudson.
58. Martin Howard, wounded and transferred to Navy.
59. Richard Hayden, transferred to Trans-Miss. Dept.
60. Joseph Hamilton, transferred.
61. W. H. Hunter.
62. Joseph Hubbard, killed at Nashville.
63. W. H. Henson, died.
64. Robert A. Hail
65. James F. Hunter, transferred.
66. Lou Harl.
67. Dave Kelley, died.
68. B. F. Kinman, discharged.
69. John Lamb.
70. Joseph Joslin, transferred.
71. Wilson Love.
72. Joe Lax, died.
73. Jerry D. Love, wounded.
74. John D. Love.
75. Nathen Love.
76. A. R. Logan, killed at Golgotha.
77. T. Shannon, wounded at Ringold, captured at Franklin.
78. Pat Murphy, furnished substitute.
79. Lemuel McKee, wounded.
80. Wm. M. Mathews, wounded at Murfreesboro.
81. J. H. Murphy, discharged.
82. Jasper May, wounded.
83. Mart A. Mull, wounded at Chickamauga.
84. John Moore, transferred.
85. D. Myers, wounded.
86. W. H. Moore, killed at Shiloh.
87. John A. McDonald, wounded.
88. J. McLain, killed at Shiloh.
89. B. F. McCowan, wounded.
90. Dave McCullough, transferred.
91. W. M. McCartney, discharged.
92. W. A. Myers.
93. Robert Morris, discharged.
94. John M. Murphy.
95. Dave Mulligan.
96. John K. Murphy, discharged.
97. Michael Nash, transferred.
98. John Orric, died.
99. W. P. Pinkley, killed at Chickamauga.
100. Henry Powell, discharged.
101. Jack Porter, discharged.
102. J. P. K. Prichard, discharged.
103. Y. R. Ridley, detailed to General Holmes’ Guard.
104. G. A. Raney, discharged, over age.
105. J. W. Robinson.
106. J. R. Roberts.
107. G. W. Reager.
108. Geo. W. Roberts, transferred to Morgan Cavalry.
109. Joseph R. Roberts, wounded at Missionary Ridge.
110. W. H. C. Reed, wounded at Munsfordsville, Ky.
111. John M. Rodgers, wounded.
112. B. F. Richardson.
113. J. W. Readen.
114. George Rice, wounded at Shiloh.
115. B. F. Reeves, wounded in Cairo.
116. Fred Roy.
117. David Roby, transferred.
118. H. Ratcliff.
119. Arthur Rhodes, dead.
120. D. Shackleford, detailed in Government shops.
121. Alfred Stewart, killed at Franklin.
122. Tom R. Stone, transferred to Mississippi Army.
123. James M. Stimson, killed at Jonesboro.
124. Charley Steadman, killed at Ringold.
125. Lon Steadman.
126. Luther Steadman.
127. Joseph Sample, discharged.
128. George K. Stephens, discharged.
129. Henry Smith, died.
130. R. H. Sullivan, discharged.
131. R. L. Slaughter.
132. Pony Stewart, killed at Franklin.
133. Eli Stringfellow, discharged.
134. J. H. Sherr.
135. George Sparling, wounded.
136. James Seward, discharged.
137. John B. Trail.
138. George P. Thomas, wounded at Murfreesboro, killed at
Atlanta.
139. M. N. Tucker, discharged.
140. Joseph Vaughn.
141. B. F. Vanderfer, wounded.
142. B. F. Vanderfer, lost a leg at Shiloh.
143. Boon Winneham.
144. —— Winneham, killed.
145. W. D. Winneham.
146. Beverly Willard, discharged over age.
147. B. F. Whitely.
148. B. F. White.
149. John Wilson, discharged over age.
150. John M. Waddell, discharged from sickness.
151. J. B. Waddell, lost a leg at Shiloh.
152. W. Fletcher Williams, wounded.
153. Rawlings Young.
Surgeon of First Arkansas Regiment—Dr. T. R. Ashford.

Assistant Surgeon of First Arkansas Regiment—Dr. W. E. Arnold.
Killed 19, discharged 29, wounded 38, dead 8, detailed 4,
transferred 18.
LIST OF ARKANSAS COMPANIES.

Company A, from Eldorado, Capt. Asa Morgan.
Company B, from Arkadelphia, Capt. Starks.
Company C, Camden, Capt. Crenshaw.
Company D, Pine Bluff, Capt. Dan McGregor.
Company E, Benton, Capt. W. A. Crawford.
Company F, Little Rock, Capt. W. H. Martin.
Company G, Jacksonport, Capt. A. C. Pickett.
Company H, DeWitt, Capt. Robt. Crockett.
Company I, Monticello, Capt. Jackson.
Company K, St. Charles, Capt. Boswell.
The following is a list of the battles that the Jackson Guards, or

Company “G.” 1st Arkansas Regiment Infantry, was engaged in, from
1861 to 1865:
First Battle, Manassas, Blockade of Potomac at Evansport, Shiloh,
Farmington, Corinth, Perryville, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge,
Ringold Gap, 74 days’ battle from Dalton to Atlanta, Peachtree
Creek, Atlanta, and Murfreesboro.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REMINISCENCES
OF A PRIVATE, COMPANY "G", FIRST ARKANSAS REGIMENT
INFANTRY: MAY, 1861 TO 1865 ***
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Around the World in 40 Years 1st Edition Ram Sehgal

© Oxford University Press 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

i would like to thank the staffs of the libraries of the University of

in the twent y-first century, Christmas is a worldwide phenome-

The Protoevangelium of James, which invented details about the youth of

heavens. Second- and third-century pseudo-Gospels such as The Revelation

following: it was the custom of the pagans to celebrate on this same

Let us not put wreaths on our front doors, or assemble troupes of

These warnings continued through the centuries. In North Africa in 404

The Council of Trullo also took time to denounce another custom

of the Crucifixion. Fragrant rosemary was said to be the plant on which

more—but especially of children. He was credited with having saved the

Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous

From Oriental country came

No burden was too great for him.

be dispatched to all the prelates and chapters of Our Realm, detest-

Early Modern Christmas

of the junior clergy and their subversive hijinks resulted in restrictions by

year-ending festivities, along with other seasonal celebrations that involved

or obedience was found wanting. This intimidation was, no doubt, a

We understand whatsoever men, by Laws, Councils, or Constitutions

In England few voices were raised in opposition to Christmas. Protes­

Stubbes introduced here two of the principal criticisms of Christmas that

Christmas the one, a pinch-back, cut-throate churle,

In respect whereof, and therewith also the more to allure them to a

He also had rebuffed Puritan attempts in 1604 at the Hampton Court

charged defense of the traditional English Christmas and an attack on

Christmas is my name, far have I gone, without regard

occurred in country towns, and shopkeepers who tried to stay open on

THE ORIGINAL MUSTER ROLL OF COMPANY “G”

1. Captain A. C. Pickett in 1862, Colonel of Stearns. Mo.,

OFFICERS FROM MARCH 1862 to 1865.

5. Captain Sam Shoup, wounded on July 22nd at Atlanta.

9. W. T. Barnes, detailed with Bond.

Surgeon of First Arkansas Regiment—Dr. T. R. Ashford.

LIST OF ARKANSAS COMPANIES.

The following is a list of the battles that the Jackson Guards, or

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In England few voices were raised in opposition to Christmas. Protes