re: ‘the war on christmas’

In case you thought that the Christ­mas tree con­tro­ver­sies in the Unit­ed States is a mod­ern thing brought on by non-Christians:

Most 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­cans found Christ­mas trees an odd­i­ty. The first record of one be­ing on dis­play was in the 1830s by the Ger­man set­tlers of Penn­syl­va­nia, al­though trees had been a tra­di­tion in many Ger­man homes much ear­li­er. The Penn­syl­va­nia Ger­man set­tle­ments had com­mu­ni­ty trees as ear­ly as 1747. But, as late as the 1840s Christ­mas trees were seen as pa­gan sym­bols and not ac­cept­ed by most Americans.

It is not sur­pris­ing that, like many oth­er fes­tive Christ­mas cus­toms, the tree was adopt­ed so late in Amer­i­ca. To the New Eng­land Pu­ri­tans, Christ­mas was sa­cred. The pil­grims’ sec­ond gov­er­nor, William Brad­ford, wrote that he tried hard to stamp out ‘pa­gan mock­ery’ of the ob­ser­vance, pe­nal­iz­ing any frivolity. 

The in­flu­en­tial Oliv­er Cromwell preached against ‘the hea­then tra­di­tions’ of Christ­mas car­ols, dec­o­rat­ed trees, and any joy­ful ex­pres­sion that des­e­crat­ed ‘that sa­cred event.’ 

In 1659, the Gen­er­al Court of Mass­a­chu­setts en­act­ed a law mak­ing any ob­ser­vance of De­cem­ber 25 (oth­er than a church ser­vice) a pe­nal of­fense; peo­ple were fined for hang­ing dec­o­ra­tions. That stern solem­ni­ty con­tin­ued un­til the 19th cen­tu­ry, when the in­flux of Ger­man and Irish im­mi­grants un­der­mined the Pu­ri­tan legacy.

I love Christ­mas, I love Christ­mas trees. I have well over 200 or­na­ments, some dat­ing back to my child­hood, some my mom made. For me it is a de­light­ful time of re­liv­ing my child­hood. I still wake up every Christ­mas morn­ing with a tiny hope of some­thing be­ing by the fire­place. Hav­ing said that, I am not a Chris­t­ian. I do how­ev­er have a God, my God was here be­fore any oth­er gods. My God can­not be ex­plained, per­son­i­fied, or de­pict­ed. From my God sci­ence and evo­lu­tion were born. My God lives in the space be­tween. The noth­ing be­tween every­thing. No mat­ter how far we go into nano tech­nol­o­gy there will be still noth­ing keep­ing things apart, there has to be no-thing there, for with­out noth­ing there every­thing would be one thing. Be­cause of that ‘no-thing,’ things ex­ist, we ex­ist. That is my God, the ‘No-thing,’ and I thank my God daily.
 
 

—Louis Warfield

Flom­mist Louis Warfield is a fab­ri­ca­tion spe­cial­ist who runs the award-win­ning Rhi­no De­sign Stu­dio, “You dream it, we’ll build it.” Copy­right © 2017 Louis Warfield. Pic­tured: Vic­to­ria and Al­bert and Tree.

MOR D’ARTÍCULOS  MOR FLOMM !

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