Talk about your "war against Christmas": Until 1869, Boston schoolchildren could be expelled for the offence of skipping school on Christmas Day.

Resident Fellow David Frum

Premature political correctness? Not exactly. The Puritan founders of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had long disliked and distrusted the Dec. 25 holiday--not because it was too Christian, but because they regarded it as not nearly Christian enough.

The carol, The 12 Days of Christmas, reminds us that in medieval times, Christmas in northern Europe extended for almost two weeks of drunken revelry: eating, boozing, gift-giving all presided over by a "father Christmas"--usually one of the poorest villagers elevated suddenly to a kind of master of ceremonies. Yule logs were burnt, holly and mistletoe hung, evergreen trees decorated.

The founders of Massachusetts recognized all these customs for what they were: survivals of the pagan religions of pre-Christian Europe. "Yule" was the name of the winter solstice holiday of the ancient Germans. Mistletoe and holly were symbols of the immortality of the Norse gods. And "Father Christmas" was the "lord of misrule" who presided over the Roman midwinter holiday, Saturnalia.

Back in Europe, the godly Protestants who won the English Civil War had attempted to suppress these disorderly heathen festivities. In 1647, Parliament forbade Christmas feasts outright and ordered the Lord Mayor of London to compel shops and markets to open on Dec. 25.

The parliamentary ban on Christmas did not succeed, obviously. And yet it left behind an impact: Over the next two centuries, the more devout British Protestants downplayed the Christmas holiday. (Or Christ-tide, as they often named it, to eschew the Catholic word, "mass.")

In New England, however, the Puritan disapproval of Christmas exerted much more lingering influence. Well into the 19th century, Dec. 25 remained just another day on the calendar of the Congregationalist churches of Massachusetts and Connecticut.

In the 1840s and 1850s, the British revived some of their quaint medieval customs in sanitized forms. You can see the revival underway in Charles Dickens' famous story, A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843. Notice that when Ebenezer Scrooge wakes up reformed on Christmas morning, it is possible for him to buy a fat goose to give to the Cratchit family: The poultry shops are open. Apparently, the Lord Mayor's ordinances of the 1640s were still having their effect.

Americans took longer to change their minds about Christmas. In the 1840s and 1850s, the United States received a surge of Irish and German immigration. These newcomers, many of them Catholic, often behaved in ways that shocked and threatened their older-stock neighbors--and in reaction, those neighbors clung more firmly than ever to their Puritan beliefs and customs.

But Americans read their Dickens too, and the new Christmas customs were soon being adopted on this side of the Atlantic. The German-American (but staunchly Protestant!) cartoonist Thomas Nast drew his first Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly in 1863.

By the 1860s, New York was overtaking Boston as the cultural centre of America. New York had never had much use for Puritanism. Its Dutch founders had brought with them their own version of "Father Christmas." He was no more Christian than his English counterpart, but he had been retrofitted with the name of a fourth-century saint: Nicholas. An Episcopal clergyman in New York, Clement Moore, had invented the apparatus of sleigh, reindeer, red suit, pipe and fat stomach in his poem, The Night Before Christmas.

Combined with another post-Civil War development--the department store--the modern American Christmas was launched.

Along the way, though, history took an ironic bounce. Christmas, once targeted by the most devout Christians, has instead become the special hate object of militant secularists. In reaction, the spiritual descendents of the devout Protestants who once tried to ban Christmas are now rallying to its defence.

And most ironically of all, the most fiercely contested of all Christmas symbols are precisely those about which Christians have historically been most dubious: the trees, boughs and Father Christmas.

These ironic facts point the way to a historic compromise.

We should recognize: There is nothing inherently Christian about the visual ornaments of the Christmas season. Quite the contrary: They are explicitly non-Christian objects that have been imbued with Christian symbolism hundreds and thousands of years afterward. A Christian can look at the Christmas evergreen and see a symbol of the eternal life promised by Jesus to his followers. But a non-Christian remains free to look at that same tree and see . . . just a tree.

Well, maybe not "just" a tree. These are trees that emerge from the ancient culture of northern Europe and the British Isles--a culture inherited by every English-speaking person, regardless of his or her particular creed or ethnicity. It is from that culture that we have derived our free society, our separation of church and state, and our rights to protest and complain.

So maybe those trees deserve a little veneration from everyone, Christian or not. And maybe, for just a few weeks of the year, those rights to protest and complain should go unexercised.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.