A CHRISTMAS STORY
Therefore that whosoever shall be found any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forebearing of labor, feasting, or any other on any such at aforesaid, every person so offending shall pay for every offense five shillings as a fio the ty.
Statute enacted by the General Court of
Massachusetts, May 1659, repealed 1681
Twas the night before Christmas. Silent night, holy night. The snow lay deep and crisp and evec. etc. etc.; let these familiar words jure up the traditional anticipatory magic of Christmas Eve, and then -- fet it.
Fet it. Even if the white moon above Boston Bay ehat all is calm, all is bright, there will be no Christmas as su the village on the shore that now lies locked in a precarious winter dream.
(Dream, that unsorable state. They would forbid it if they could.)
At that time, for we are talking about a long time ago, about three and a quarter hundred years ago, the newers had no more than scribbled their signatures on the blank page of the tihat was, as it lay uhe snow, no whiter nor more pure than their iions.
They plan to write more largely; they plan to inscribe thereon the name of God.
And that was why, because of their awesome piety, tomorrow, on Christmas Day, they will wake, pray and go about their business as if it were any other day.
For them, all days are holy but none are holidays.
New England is the new leaf they havejust turned over; Old England is the dirty liheir brethren at home have just -- did they not retly win the English Civil War? -- washed in public. Bae, for the sake of spiritual iy, their brothers and sisters have broken the graven images in the churches, bahe playhouses where men dress up as women, chopped down the village Maypoles because they wele in the spring in altogether tiastic a fashion.
Nothing particularly radical about that, given the Puritans basic premises. Anyone see at a glahat a Maypole, proudly erect upon the village green as the sap is rising, is a godless instrument. The very thought of ather, with blossom in his hair, dang round the Maypole makes the imagination reel. No. The greatest genius of the Puritans lay in their ability to sniff out a pagan survival in, say, the of decorating a house with holly for the festive season; they were the stuff of which social anthropologists would be made!
And their distaste for the i of the lovely lady with her bonny babe -- Mariraven images! -- is less subtle than their disgust at the very idea of the festive season itself. It was the festivity of it that irked them.
heless, it assuredly is a gross ahenish practice, to wele the birth of Our Saviour with feasting, drunkenness, and lewd displays of mumming and masquerading.
We want none of that filth in this new place.
No, thank you.
As midnight approached, the cattle in the byres lumbered down upon their knees in homage, acc to the well-established of over sixteen hundred English winters when they had mimicked the kneeling cattle ihlehem stable; then, remembering where they were in the nick of time, they hastily refrained from idolatry and hauled themselves upright.
Boston Bay, calm as milk, black as ink, smooth as silk. And suddenly, at just the hour when the night spins on its spindle and starts to us own darkness, at what one could call, elsewhere, the witg hour --
I saw three ships e sailing in,
Christmas Day, Christmas Day,
I sa