When Americans banned Christmas
The first ‘War on Christmas’ was declared almost 400 years ago, courtesy of our Puritan forefathers.
Compiled by David Rapalyea:
FIRST MEETING-HOUSE IN SALISBURY
Now known as the
Salisbury Congregational Community Church
The information that follows is from John J. Dearborn’s History of Salisbury, New Hampshire, published in 1890. This is a watered down version of the actual events of the time. Those events were very volatile and split the Town into various factions, with “every man forming an opinion and ready to defend it.”
LOCATION AND BULDING THE FIRST MEETING-HOUSE
The building site of this Meeting-house in 1764 consisted of 10 acres on the north side of what is now known as Searle’s Hill. The land was purchased and cleared, retaining the lumber for timbers and other material need to complete the house. A vote to build the Meeting-house of the same bigness as “the second parish in Kingston,” now East Kingston, in 1767 was taken and in the spring of 1768 the frame was laid and the Meeting-house was boarded and shingled. It was then voted to sell pews to the highest bidder and on April 7th 1768 that sale took place in Kingston N.H. Additional pews were sold in Salisbury in May of 1768.
THE FIRST CEMETERY
Soon after the Meeting-house was built the first cemetery established in Salisbury, was laid out just to the east of the Meeting-house. Buried here were many citizens of Salisbury, including the first minister and his wife. This 10 acre tract came into the possession of Stephen Perrin. The parcel was then passed to David Pettengill, who sold it to Samuel Guilford who had no respect for the dead and removed all the head stones and plowed up the land thus this cemetery disappeared. At this time (1890) the land is used as a pasture, now it has returned to forest.
THE PARSONAGE
The parsonage was built northwest of the meeting-house on the same 10 acres. The house was large with two stories’, it was known as a “comb-case roof.” The parsonage was now ready for the first minister. The Rev. Mr. Searle was asked to be the pastor of the church and became the first settled minister of Salisbury on November 17th 1773. He and his wife lived in the parsonage until his death in 1819. He had owned the parsonage for only a few years before his death.
MOVING THE MEETING-HOUSE
The Meeting-house, being on the northerly slop of one of the highest hills in Town, difficult to travel to in winter. As the land had been cleared, for pastures and crops, thus allowing snow to drifted over the road and having nothing to block the wind made travel not only difficult but dangers. From about 1773 many parishioners started talking of relocating the meeting-house. This led to the question “where to build a new Meeting-house?” This was discussed throughout the town with “every man forming an opinion and ready to defend it.” The two main areas for the location for the Meeting-house were Garland’s Hill, which is just up the hill fom the intersection of Center and Whittemore Road, and the other being the Crank section of South Road. There were many votes pertaining to the location of the Meeting-house. It became so volatile that the Town almost went to war over this question. Through there no records, it is thought, the old Meeting-house was brought by leading citizens of South Road, taken down and with new timbers rebuilt “a few rods southwest from its present location.” This was sometime between July 13, 1790 and the next April.
The original Meeting-house was erected parallel with South Road, having a porch and entrance door at each end. The west porch had a steeple and belfry above it. At some time, being unclear in Dearborn’s History, the Meeting-house became the Congregational Church. It remained this way until 1835, when it was move north and partly turned with the steeple facing South Road. The Church has remained at this location ever since and is now known as The Salisbury Congregation Community Church.
Salisbury Community Based Creche
A newer Tradition created in a historical creche styling.
In very late fall, 2008 an idea was floated to create a creche that was a community effort. It came together quickly and folks then found themselves in a bitterly frigid garage in mid December rushing to finish up the project before Christmas. It happened and without frostbite!
The concept was to create a Folk Creche in the manner of the early medieval creches which celebrated Christmas using scenery, materials and dress consistent with the citizenry of the day, for the purpose of reconnecting people to the original event. The concept for the Salisbury community creche was to do the same but stylistically reflect colonial New England in some way instead. An Americana Folk Creche was created.
Location. It was hoped to find a spot where many passing through could see it. Though not a project of the Salisbury Congregational Church they have generously permitted using its front lawn for the display. It is located near the crossroads of rte 127 and rte 4 in Salisbury New Hampshire. There has been Christmas Caroling gathering that occurs before Christmas at the creche with a warm up invite inside the Church meeting room.
It was not a church or town project but a variety folks from both came together to make it happen. Interestingly, they are of various spiritual persuasions, Catholics, Buddhist, Protestants, and religiously unaffiliated and it was created and maintained out of a labor of love with great respect and appreciation for the first Christmas and its meaning.
Often in the early winter evenings cars will stop and people will gaze in.
The Church parking lot serves as a school bus stop and the children delight in the creche year after year.
It is a community project::
Materials: Joe Garneau of Franklin NH who donated the building materials
Carver: A local chain saw artist who carved the figures in folk art styling.
Fabric: Another volunteer dressed the figures in simple handmade garments.
Artist: A mural backdrop was painted. Instead of 3 wise men there are 3 moose coming forth and bears and animals approaching to view the baby Jesus. The landscape is a New England setting reflecting the rural nature of our town. Folk angels decorate the head board.
Carpentry Labor: donated to construct the creche.
Assembly & Storage: Volunteers maintain it, re assemble, disassemble and store it each year.
We do not have any record of a community creche in our town until now, however if you have any information please contact the webmaster.
online@salisburyhistoricalsociety.org
Who was Sal. S. Bury and what did he have to do with town decorations?
Sal. S. Bury was a large Pumpkin!
Sal S. Bury came to Salisbury for the first time in 1996.
He was raffled as part of a fundraiser to purchase our town’s Christmas decorations and spring bulbs.
In 1996 a town large wide fund raising venture was underway.
On Oct 3, 1996 a Ham and Bean, Brown Bread,Crisp dinner was put on with excellent entertainment.
For the first year, Friends of the Salisbury Free Library received a grant from the New Hampshire Council of the Arts and sponsored The Two Fiddlers with Dudey Laufman Calling.
Cost was $6 for adults and $3 for children and there was a very good crowd.
Town Organizations that participated in this fundraising were:
Selectmen
Historical Society
Friends of the Library
Members of the Rescue Squad
Firemen
PTG
Church
Salisbury Youth Group
Grange
Recreation Committee
There were also special donations from:
Weeks Dairy
Mac Donalds of Penacook
Crossroads Country Store
TDS telephone
1996 – 2003 The dinners continued over this time but after awhile the raffle for a new Sal S. Bury pumpkin stopped. Entertainment after the dinner did not continue the whole time. After 2003 the larger events discontinued but fundraising goes on to this day. In addition to funds raised to replenish holiday decorations there has been the purchase of “Smokey the Bear” and the microwave at town hall, to name two. There are many when asked who do lend a hand or their time to continue this work.
We are grateful for their efforts as each spring we can see the daffodils in various spots in town, each Christmas our town buildings look wonderful, Smokey is an eye catcher and the microwave etc.. Much appreciated!
Thank you for the following article courtesy of:
https://theweek.com/articles/479313/when-americans-banned-christmas
“How did the first settlers celebrate Christmas?
They didn’t. The Pilgrims who came to America in 1620 were strict Puritans, with firm views on religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter. Scripture did not name any holiday except the Sabbath, they argued, and the very concept of “holy days” implied that some days were not holy. “They for whom all days are holy can have no holiday,” was a common Puritan maxim. Puritans were particularly contemptuous of Christmas, nicknaming it “Foolstide” and banning their flock from any celebration of it throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. On the first Dec. 25 the settlers spent in Plymouth Colony, they worked in the fields as they would on any other day. The next year, a group of non-Puritan workmen caught celebrating Christmas with a game of “stoole-ball” — an early precursor of baseball — were punished by Gov. William Bradford. “My conscience cannot let you play while everybody else is out working,” he told them.
Why didn’t Puritans like Christmas?
They had several reasons, including the fact that it did not originate as a Christian holiday. The upper classes in ancient Rome celebrated Dec. 25 as the birthday of the sun god Mithra. The date fell right in the middle of Saturnalia, a monthlong holiday dedicated to food, drink, and revelry, and Pope Julius I is said to have chosen that day to celebrate Christ’s birth as a way of co-opting the pagan rituals. Beyond that, the Puritans considered it historically inaccurate to place the Messiah’s arrival on Dec. 25. They thought Jesus had been born sometime in September.
So their objections were theological?
Not exclusively. The main reason Puritans didn’t like Christmas was that it was a raucously popular holiday in late medieval England. Each year, rich landowners would throw open their doors to the poor and give them food and drink as an act of charity. The poorest man in the parish was named the “Lord of Misrule,” and the rich would wait upon him at feasts that often descended into bawdy drunkenness. Such decadence never impressed religious purists. “Men dishonor Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas,” wrote the 16th-century clergyman Hugh Latimer, “than in all the 12 months besides.”
When did that view win out?
Puritans in the English Parliament eliminated Christmas as a national holiday in 1645, amid widespread anti-Christmas sentiment. Settlers in New England went even further, outlawing Christmas celebrations entirely in 1659. Anyone caught shirking their work duties or feasting was forced to pay a significant penalty of five shillings. Christmas returned to England in 1660, but in New England it remained banned until the 1680s, when the Crown managed to exert greater control over its subjects in Massachusetts. In 1686, the royal governor of the colony, Sir Edmund Andros, sponsored a Christmas Day service at the Boston Town House. Fearing a violent backlash from Puritan settlers, Andros was flanked by redcoats as he prayed and sang Christmas hymns.
Did the Puritans finally relent?
Not at all. They kept up their boycott of Christmas in Massachusetts for decades. Cotton Mather, New England’s most influential religious leader, told his flock in 1712 that “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty…by mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!” European settlers in other American colonies continued to celebrate it, however, as both a pious holiday and a time for revelry. In his Poor Richard’s Almanac of 1739, Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin wrote of Christmas: “O blessed Season! Lov’d by Saints and Sinners / For long Devotions, or for longer Dinners.”
So Christmas was finally accepted at that time?
No. Anti-Christmas sentiment flared up again around the time of the American Revolution. Colonial New Englanders began to associate Christmas with royal officialdom, and refused to mark it as a holiday. Even after the U.S. Constitution came into effect, the Senate assembled on Christmas Day in 1797, as did the House in 1802. It was only in the following decades that disdain for the holiday slowly ebbed away. Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” — aka “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” — was published in New York in 1823 to enormous success. In 1836, Alabama became the first state to declare Christmas a public holiday, and other states soon followed suit. But New England remained defiantly Scrooge-like; as late as 1850, schools and markets remained open on Christmas Day. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow finally noted a “transition state about Christmas” in New England in 1856. “The old Puritan feeling prevents it from being a cheerful, hearty holiday; though every year makes it more so,” he wrote. Christmas Day was formally declared a federal holiday by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870.”
Excerpts from 2 Oral Histories with Elders:
Liza Buzzell
Excerpts from an Interview by Paul S. Shaw, MD. and Joy Chamberlain
Dec 6, 1988 Place: the New London Nursing Home
Liza attended South Road School
Joy Chamberlain- “There was a school at West Salisbury?”
Liza- “Yes, and there was a school at Salisbury Heights. And every Memorial Day when I was a kid they had a band come here and they used to come down in one of those old coasters and then they went around to all the cemeteries with flags. We kids were crazy to get a ride. You had to toe the mark to get along. You had to keep still. Then they had the exercises down in the Gallinger Grove. Senator Gallinger had a lane that went from Salisbury Heights over to Leander Sawyer’s. It was quite a celebration. they used to have a band, a ball game, and a dance in the evening.”
Isabel Eaton b. Salisbury 1907
Excerpts from an Interview by Paul S. Shaw, MD.
Date November 1992 Place: Greenville, NH
Isabel was a student at Smith’s Corner School
The cemetery referred to below is the Bean/Smith’s Corner Cemetery which was moved adjacent to Maplewood off rte 4, during the creation of the Blackwater FLood Control area by the US army Corps of Engineers in the early 1940’s.
Isabel- “Now what else about the school. We had good programs, too! Really! Wonderful for what we had to do with.”
Paul Shaw- “Such as?”
Isabel- “Plays. All of us spoke pieces at Christmas , of course and especially at Memorial…at Memorial time we’d do our program, then we’d march down to the cemetery just beyond McAlister’s and march home again. That’s when you’d get stuff kicked in your shoes.
The boys were trying to figure something they could do to plaque the girls.”
Paul Shaw- “How long were your school days?”
Isabel- “We’d be in session at nine and wouldn’t get out until four. And for our lunch we’d sit with our boxes at our desk and eat our lunch, started right in again and we were busy until four.”
Paul Shaw- “At four o’clock in December it must have been…”
Isabel- “Dark, dark, yeah!”
Coyne, Edward Letters
Location: Archives Office, Correspondence Box,
From: Ed Coyne
To: Mary Philips, Curator of the Salisbury Historical Society
Date: approximately 2000
Topic: Reminiscences of childhood in Salisbury 1940’s.
Format: Handwritten original letters
Excerpt: Collecting Milkweed pods in the WW2 war effort.
England is Grateful letter, SHS Archives, Correspondence Box
From: Mrs. Ada B Teetgen of Kent England
To: The Ladies of the West Salisbury Sewing Bee
Date: Sept. 20, 1941
Copy of a correspondence likely reformatted for a newspaper article
Swing into Spring!
The Salisbury Historical Society will kick off its 50th anniversary with a jazz concert
on Sunday, April 24, at 6 pm in the Town Hall.
The Mike Parker Trio will present 90 minutes of music with one intermission.
These world-class professionals have performed extensively, including at the White House.
Members include bassist Mike Parker, guitarist Ed Eastridge and recording artist Lydia Gray,
whose mother, Betty Johnson, sang on television, stage and clubs for many years.
The evening will feature tables for eight in a nightclub-like atmosphere.
The $25- per person ticket price will include catered hors d’oeuvres plus dessert and your
choice of beer, wine or soft drinks.
Seating is limited and will be on a first-come, first-served basis so please send your
checks today to:
The Salisbury Historical Society
P.O. Box 263
Salisbury, NH 03268
The deadline for receipt of checks will be April 1, 2016
You won’t want to miss this evening of excellent entertainment!
According to Paul S. Shaw, MD in his book Salisbury Lost, Mill’s School 1890:
Front Row: Walter E. Dunlap, John A. Huntoon, Wm. E. Dunlap, Lewis C. Shaw, Abbie F. Shaw, May Prince (back of May with hood) Sadie Sanborn, (front on ground) Lizzie Sanborn, Linnie De Merritt, Teacher, Fred Prince, Ned Prince, Leon Prince, George Sanborn
Second Row: (behind Abbie Shaw) Sarah Prince, James S. Shaw, Ned C. Rogers, Laura Prince, Kate Sanborn, Fred A. Dunlap, John R. Prince.
In front of John Prince, Gladys Sargent.
Standing in doorway: George Dunlap, Steve Sanborn.