The origins of the "War on Christmas"...

Slaughter of the Innocents - Sano di Pietro

 

Yes poodles, it started way back when - even before the Gospels were written.

 

Then, as Gospel accounts were in production, the Apostle John had a vision...

 

Miguel Cabrera, "The Virgin of the Apocalypse"

 

Yet closer to modern times, rigorous Protestants in England,

consumed by self-opinion and pride,

attempted to do away with Christmas...

 

 

When Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan forces took over England in 1645, they denounced Christmas for its Pagan roots. The celebration was legally banned and any one found observing it was chastised. There was no feasting or decorating events and people were forced to work on this day.

 

You may ask, "But Why?"

 

Increasingly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many people, especially the more Godly, came to frown upon this celebration of Christmas, for two reasons. Firstly, they disliked all the waste, extravagance, disorder, sin and immorality of the Christmas celebrations. Secondly, they saw Christmas (that is, Christ’s mass) as an unwelcome survival of the Roman Catholic faith, as a ceremony particularly encouraged by the Catholic church and by the recusant community in England and Wales, a popish festival with no biblical justification – nowhere had God called upon mankind to celebrate Christ’s nativity in this way, they said. What this group wanted was a much stricter observance of the Lord’s day (Sundays), but the abolition of the popish and often sinful celebration of Christmas, as well as of Easter, Whitsun and assorted other festivals and saints’ days. - The History of Christmas in England.
 

Therefore, watch out my Godly friends, you who complain that lights and decorations go up much too early, and protest if someone says Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, lest you shrivel up into sour little prunes in your own dried out Christmas fruitcakes...  

 

To be continued...

 

Nota bene:

Just remember, though the Soviets

blew up cathedrals and outlawed

religion, they were never able

to destroy Christmas,

nor the faith of 

 Orthodox Christians.

 

Don't worry.