The History of Christian Holidays in America

The Christian holidays Americans celebrate today are a layered thing. Some elements go back to the early church. Some come from medieval Europe. Some were added by German immigrants in the 19th century. Some were shaped by American retail culture in the 20th. What looks like a timeless tradition is often a relatively recent assembly of pieces from very different times and places.

That doesn't make them less meaningful. It makes them American -- a country built on exactly this kind of synthesis, where things from different origins combine into something that feels entirely native.

Christmas: The Long Journey

Christmas as a Christian holiday dates to the early church, though December 25 wasn't universally settled as the date until the 4th century. The early American colonies had an ambivalent relationship with Christmas. The Puritans of New England actively discouraged it. Massachusetts actually banned Christmas celebrations between 1659 and 1681, on the grounds that it had become an excuse for "disorder." Christmas was not a federal holiday until 1870.

The transformation of Christmas into the holiday Americans know today happened primarily in the 19th century, and it involved several distinct streams.

German immigrants brought the Christmas tree tradition. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, who married Queen Victoria, popularized the Christmas tree in England and from there in America. Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" (1843) helped codify the holiday's emotional character -- generosity, family, redemption, the warming of a cold-hearted man. Clement Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (1823) gave Americans Santa Claus in something close to his modern form, though the sleigh and reindeer were his additions to an older Dutch tradition.

By the late 19th century, American Christmas had become what it largely remains: a religious holiday and a cultural institution simultaneously, with the two coexisting sometimes comfortably and sometimes with friction.

Easter: The Oldest and the Most Changed

Easter is the oldest Christian holiday and the one that requires the least historical reconstruction: it has been the central observance of Christianity since the first century. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the event the entire faith is built on, and Christians have been gathering on the Sunday after Passover to commemorate it since before the New Testament was written.

What has changed is everything around it. Easter eggs, the Easter bunny, and the pastel-colored basket tradition came to America through German and Dutch immigrants, many of whom had spring traditions that predated their Christian conversion. The Easter egg as a symbol of new life maps neatly onto resurrection theology. The bunny is harder to map onto anything theological, but it persists.

Easter in America has never been as commercially elaborated as Christmas, partly because it falls at an unpredictable time in spring, partly because its theological core is more somber, and partly because it resists easy gift-giving in the way Christmas does not. This is, many Christians argue, appropriate. Easter should be harder to domesticate. It is about death and the defeat of death, and even the chocolate bunny hasn't entirely obscured that.

Thanksgiving: The Holiday Christianity Half-Owns

Thanksgiving is worth including here because it sits in an interesting middle position. It is not a specifically Christian holiday, but its origins are explicitly religious.

The Plymouth colonists who celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621 were Separatists -- Protestant Christians who had broken with the Church of England over what they considered insufficient reform. Their settlement was conceived as a religious project. Their day of thanksgiving was addressed to God.

Abraham Lincoln declared a national day of Thanksgiving in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, in language that was explicitly theological: he called on Americans to give thanks to "our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens." The holiday has secularized considerably since then, but its roots are in a faith tradition that understood good fortune as gift rather than accident.

Advent: The Season America Almost Lost and Then Found

Advent -- the four-week season before Christmas -- was largely absent from American Protestant practice for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was observed by Catholics, Episcopalians, and Lutherans, but most evangelical and non-denominational churches didn't mark it liturgically.

The recovery of Advent in recent decades is one of the more interesting developments in American Christianity. Churches that previously went straight from Halloween candy to Christmas carols began slowing down, lighting candles, and reading texts about waiting and expectation. The Advent calendar, which went from devotional booklet to chocolate dispensary over the course of the 20th century, is now everywhere.

The recovery has something to do with a cultural hunger for slowness -- for a rhythm different from the frantic commercial Christmas that begins in October. Advent offers structure, anticipation, and a reason to resist the rush. It turns out people were ready for that.

The Ongoing American Project

What makes American Christian holidays distinctive is the speed and completeness with which they absorb cultural elements from every source available. Christmas trees from Germany, Santa from the Netherlands via England, Easter eggs from European folk tradition -- all of these are now so thoroughly American that most people assume they've always been this way.

This is very American. The country has always taken things from everywhere and made them its own. The Christian holidays that anchor the American year are a product of the same process -- layered, synthetic, thoroughly naturalized, and genuinely meaningful to the people who observe them.

The theological core of each has survived the layering. Christmas is still about the incarnation. Easter is still about the resurrection. Thanksgiving is still about gratitude to something beyond the self. The chocolate and the trees and the parade balloons surround these things without replacing them. Which is, all things considered, a pretty good outcome for two thousand years of religious tradition navigating American commerce.