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Did Thanksgiving Cost John Adams His Presidency? He Thought It Did

Today people will undoubtedly celebrate Thanksgiving in some fashion across America. But for President John Adams, Thanksgiving was very much an optional holiday.

Thanksgiving celebrations themselves date to the earliest days of New England’s colonies, and they were paired with Fast Days. (New Hampshire observed Fast Day until 1991. But local and colonial governments issued proclamations of the day of Thanksgiving. When the United States came into existence, Thanksgiving proclamations were political hot potatoes. President George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789, but not without considerable debate in Congress about its appropriateness..

Some John Adams Thanksgiving advice

Roger Sherman, U.S. senator from Connecticut, played a key role in persuading the Congress approve the proclamation. Washington then issued a second Thanksgiving proclamation in 1795.

Roger Sherman by Ralph Earl

John Adams Thanksgiving

John Adams, during his presidency, declared two days of fasting and thanks giving, in May of 1798 and April of 1799.

“I do hereby recommend accordingly, that Thursday, the 25th day of April next, be observed throughout the United States of America as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer,” he wrote in his second proclamation. He ordered the citizens to abstain from their secular occupations and to “devote the time to the sacred duties o religion in public and private.” Citizens should think about their offenses against God and implore forgiveness, he wrote.

Adams hoped that “through the grace of His Holy Spirit we may be disposed and enabled to yield a more suitable obedience to His righteous requisitions in time to come.” And he recommended that thanksgiving for “the countless favors which He is still continuing to the people of the United States, and which render their condition as a nation eminently happy when compared with the lot of others.”

Church and State

Adams was a New England Puritan, born into the Congregationalist religion. He evolved into a Unitarian, and he felt a civilized society depended on religion.

But in 1800, Thomas Jefferson soundly thumped him when he ran for reelection. Jefferson firmly believed the Constitution prohibited the president from having any role in “intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline or exercises.” That included issuing a Thanksgiving proclamation, which Jefferson did not do.

President Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale

The election of 1800 turned on a number of issues, but later in life Adams concluded his beliefs about religion, and his Thanksgiving proclamation, helped topple him from office. In an 1812 letter to Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Rush he wrote that his Fast and Thanksgiving proclamations fueled rumors that he belonged to the Presbyterian Church.

Benjamin Rush by Charles Wilson Peale.

“The National Fast, recommended by me turned me out of Office,” he wrote to Rush. He argued people connected the holiday with the Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, which he had nothing to do with. Then he commented on the church’s unpopularity.

“That assembly has allarmed and alienated Quakers, Anabaptists, Mennonists, Moravians, Sweedenborgians, Methodist, Catholicks, Protestant Episcopalians, Arians Socinians, Arminians & &c.,” Adams told Rush. You could even add Deists and Atheists to the list, he wrote. Then he explained that “a general Suspicion prevailed that the Presbyterian Church …aimed at an Establishment as a National Church.”

Secret Whisper

His political enemies represented him as a Presbyterian who headed the effort to establish a national church. “The Secret Whisper ran through them all the Sects “Let Us have Jefferson Madison, Burr, any body, whether they be Philosophers, Deist or even Atheists, rather than a Presbyterian President,” he wrote.

“Nothing is more dreaded than the National Government meddling with Religion,” Adams concluded.” This wild Letter I very much fear, contains Seeds of an Ecclesiastical History of the U.S. for a Century to come.”

Read Adams’ complete letter here. Years later, President James Madison also issued a Thanksgiving proclamation. But then no president proclaimed the holiday until Abraham Lincoln did in 1863.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

This story about John Adams’ Thanksgiving was updated in 2022.

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Six Brutalist Buildings In New England

Two of the most famous Brutalist buildings in America are still provoking strong emotions in New England decades after they first reared their heavy concrete heads.

The massive buildings – Boston City Hall and Rudolph Hall — are appropriately in Boston and New Haven. Both places are key to the development of modern architecture.

For example, the influential modernist Walter Gropius found a home in Boston after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937. He joined the faculty at Harvard, where he brought modern ideas about architecture to the United States.

And in New Haven, Yale President Whitney Griswold’s building campaign from 1950-1963 had an outsize influence on modern architecture. Glass-and-steel International Style office buildings are called Yale Boxes.

Brutalist Roots

Like much New England architecture, Brutalism came from Britain. The British didn’t love it much. Prince Charles called a Brutalist shopping center in Portsmouth, England, a ‘mildewed lump of elephant droppings.’

Many Brutalist buildings were part of urban renewal programs and, like urban renewal, were born of idealism and quickly viewed as a big mistake.

Brutalist buildings got shabby fast as concrete aged faster than the architects predicted. They turned out to be unfriendly to pedestrians and difficult to subdivide.

When Michael J. Lewis entered architecture school in 1980, Brutalism was ‘unlovely, irrelevant, a universally acknowledged historical blunder.’

And now it’s coming back.

Nikil Saval, in the New York Times, wrote in October 2016, that enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings is taking hold.

“Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness,” he wrote.

Brutalist buildings can be found throughout New England. Here are examples of six for you to love or hate.

Rudolph Hall, Yale University

The Yale Art and Architecture Building was the crown jewel of Yale President Whitney Griswold’s modern building program after World War II. Under Griswold, nearly a dozen new buildings were designed by such leading modernist architects as Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft and Philip Johnson.

Paul Rudolph, who studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard in 1963 designed the Brutalist Art and Architecture Building.

Critics called it ‘the most provocative American building of the decade.’

Rudolph, then chair of Yale’s architecture department, created a heavy concrete structure with 36 (or 37, depending on who’s counting) levels within seven stories.

The building had problems from the start. First, art students threatened to picket the dedication ceremony. Then during the ceremony itself, 2,000 people heard architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner condemn the building as oppressively monumental.

And yet it appeared on the cover of every major architectural magazine, and New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved about it.

Inside, the building had bright orange carpets, incandescent lighting and plaster casts of Classical artworks.

Sculpture students had to work in small, dark studios in the sub-basement. The rope curtains didn’t keep out sunlight.

“It ignored about two-thirds of its users,” said Mark Simon, an architect who had to use it. Richard Benson, who taught in the building for 18 years, called it ‘awful.’

A spectacular fire raced through the building not five years after its dedication. It was widely believed (though never proven) the fire had been set by student architects forced to use it. Yale remodeled the building, cutting up the interior space into a ‘depressing rabbit warren of white-walled rooms.’

Yale then spent $126 million to restore and expand the Brutalist building, renaming it Rudolph Hall. The New York Times called it, ‘a masterpiece of late Modernism.’

Hillside, Colby College

The problem with Brutalist architecture, wrote critic Michael Lewis, was that people ‘could not be made to see that the problem with modern architecture was that it was insufficiently surly.’

Corporate and commercial clients wouldn’t buy Brutalist architecture. Only administrators of academic institutions, government and the occasional church seemed to like it.

In Waterville, Maine, Colby College administrators belonged to that select group. The college hired Boston architect Ben Thompson, a partner of Walter Gropius, to design dormitories. He came up with a network of five interconnected dorms called Hillside.

A confidential student guide to Colby describes them as ‘ugly.’ “But they have their charm, including spacious common rooms, that cozy small-dorm feeling, and their own parking lot… Plus, “I live in Hillside” can be another point of bonding– bonding through adversity, hah.”

Boston City Hall

Boston City Hall arose from the urban renewal program that demolished the immigrant West End neighborhood in the 1950s. From the rubble rose the State Health, Education and Welfare Service Center, designed by none other than Paul Rudolph.

Mayor John F. Collins then continued urban renewal with the New Boston program. It leveled the bawdy Scollay Square neighborhood, to the regret of countless sailors.

Collins wasn’t careful enough for what he wished. When presented with the blueprints of City Hall, he is said to have gasped. Someone in the room then said, “What the hell is that?”

The architectural firms of Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles with Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty designed the Brutalist behemoth and completed it in 1968.

It is easily the most hated building in the city. Boston’s late mayor Tom Menino wanted to tear it down. So did the next mayor, Marty Walsh. Boston Globe columnist Paul McMorrow agreed with them. “Its great crime isn’t being ugly; it’s being anti-urban,” he wrote.

“The building and its plaza keep a crowded city at arm’s length,” he wrote. “It disperses crowds, instead of gathering them together. It creates an island of inactivity, several blocks long and wide, in the middle of what is otherwise a bustling commercial district.”

Some, though, view it as a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture. An American Institute of Architects poll listed it as one of the 10 proudest achievements of American architecture in 200 years.

Phillips Exeter Academy Library

The writer Tom Wolfe had little use for Louis Kahn, the architect who designed the Brutalist Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, N.H.

Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, described Kahn as a ‘shambles,’ who had deep within a ‘molten core of confidence.’ “Kahn would walk into a classroom, stare blearily at the students, open his mouth… and from the depths would come a remarkable voice: “Every building must have … its own soul.”

Kahn was hired in 1965 to design a home for the Phillips Exeter’s 60,000 volumes. The collection has grown to 160,000 since the library opened in 1971. Today it’s the largest secondary school library in the world.

Kahn designed the library in three concentric squares. The brick outer ring includes the outer walls and the library carrel space, the concrete middle ring holds the stacks and the inner ring is an atrium with circular cutouts that reveal the stacks.

In 1997, the American Institute of Architects 1997 gave the library the Twenty-five Year Award, which recognizes architecture of enduring significance and given to one building per year.

On the Brutalism website, someone commented,

This is exactly how I imagine the library from A Clockwork Orange (book).

Knight Campus, CCRI

In 2017, admirers of the Brutalist style held a funeral for the John E. Fogarty Building, torn down in 2017. (Watch the video here.)

It’s the third Brutalist building torn down in Providence. Also gone are The Outlet parking garage on Friendship Street and the circular Gulf gas station off Broadway.

But in Warwick, R.I., the Knight Campus of the Community College of Rhode Island still stands.

The Brutalist architectural firm The Robinson Green Beretta Corporation, viewed the building as an educational megastructure. They rejected the traditional sprawling college campus with buildings separated by disciplines. Instead they tried to promote diversity and interaction among students in a single, gigantic structure.

It was built on the former Knight Estate, a gentleman’s farm owned by the founders of the Fruit of the Loom brand.

When the building opened in 1972, people already considered it outdated.

Cathedral Church of St. Paul

In 1971, a fire destroyed the Gothic Revival building where years to Episcopalians in Burlington, Vt., had worshiped. The city had undertaken a massive urban renewal project at the time. It therefore offered to swap the old St. Paul’s land for a large tract overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. Though controversial, St. Paul’s took the deal.

The cathedral’s leaders wanted to make a new architectural statement. They thought it shouldn’t function as a museum, but home to the arts, lectures and discussion. So an international competition was held, and the winner was a local firm Truex, Cullins & Partners. The Brutalist building was consecrated in 1973.

Images: Rudolph Building, Yale By Photographer: interrupt; – edit of flickr image, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11872101; Hillside (Sturtevant dormitory), By Colby Mariam – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49324860; Boston City Hall, By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12229690 Phllips Exeter Academy Library, By Gunnar Klack – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57029474; St. Paul’s Cathedral, By Beyond My Ken – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29111530. This story about Brutalist buildings was updated in 2023.

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Six Churches (All Gorgeous) Designed by Ralph Adams Cram

Once the most famous architect of his day, Ralph Adams Cram designed many churches, schools and libraries throughout New England. He also planned much of Princeton University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the great cathedral St. John the Divine in New York City.

Phillips Church, by Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram

Cram was born Dec. 16, 1863, in Hampton Falls, N.H., to an old New England family. His parents named him for Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Adams.

He became not only a prominent architect but an Anglo-Catholic, or High Episcopalian. He also founded the Catholic magazine Commonweal. Cram headed MIT’s architecture department for seven years. In 1926, he made the cover of Time magazine.

Though an ardent advocate of Gothic Revival, Ralph Adams Cram also designed buildings in the Colonial Revival and Art Deco styles.

Cram died Sept. 22, 1942. Unlike his contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, his fame has dimmed. The Episcopal Church, though, celebrates his birthday as a feast day.

Here, then, are six churches designed by Ralph Adams Cram, one in each state. If you know of another, please mention it in the comments section.

Seymour St. John Chapel

In 1924, The Choate School in Wallingford, Conn., had 339 male students and a pressing need for a chapel. (John F. Kennedy would later attend Choate.)

Then-headmaster George St. John wrote in his autobiography, “To run a school without a chapel seemed like running a line for light and power without a powerhouse.”

To raise the $100,000 to pay for the chapel, alumni, parents and friends contributed, as did students who sold bricks for $5.

Ralph Adams Cram designed the chapel in the Colonial Revival style. Choate broke ground for the building in May 1924 and dedicated it in 1925.

Choate merged with a girl’s prep school in 1971 and became Choate Rosemary Hall. In 1998, the school rededicated the chapel and renamed it after the Rev. Seymour St. John, headmaster from 1947 to 1973.

All Souls Congregational Church

In 1911, a great fire destroyed much of Bangor, Maine, including the First Congregational church, which overlooked the central business district. The Third Congregational Church also burned in the fire, so the two parishes joined together to build a new church on the site of the First’s old one.

The two parishes commissioned Ralph Adams Cram, who designed an exceptionally creative (some say odd) Gothic Revival church. He incorporated flying buttresses, a rose window, a slender copper-clad spire, a small bell tower and stone from the Third’s building.

The church, which occupies a city block, once faced a row of stately homes. Today it looks across at offices, gas stations and retail stores.

All Saints Church, Ashmont

One stormy Sunday, a snow squall stranded Mary Lothrop Peabody and her husband Oliver near the small wooden chapel of All Saints in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. They were on their way from their estate in Milton to church. They had just lost a young child. Coincidentally, so had the rector of the All Saints chapel. The storm hit them on Dec. 28, 1879, the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

The Peabodys stopped in the chapel instead of forging on to church in Boston. The sermon moved them deeply. The minister preached, “Rachel, weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

Oliver had co-founded the investment bank Kidder, Peabody. He and Mary decided to build a new All Saints church. They, like Cram, were children of Unitarian ministers who became Anglo-Catholics, aka High Episcopalians.

The Peabodys hired young architects, Ralph Adams Cram and his partner Bertram Goodhue. They persuaded the Peabodys (or perhaps they needed little persuading) to revive the Gothic style in the design of All Saints. It was Cram’s first church. Cram biographer Douglas Shand-Tucci said of All Saints, Cram’s first church:

A significant landmark in American architectural history, All Saints’ is, of its type, Cram and Goodhue’s masterpiece, and a model for American parish church architecture for the first half of the 20th century.

All Saints Church

The Episcopal All Saints Church, Peterborough, is one of Cram’s small masterpieces, considered by some to be the most beautiful church in America. It’s set back from the road on four acres in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. Ralph Adams Cram modeled it after St. Mary the Virgin Church in Iffley, Oxfordshire, England.

Cram stressed local workmen and local materials – hence, he ordered the building built of granite. Some of the finest Arts and Crafts artisans in the region decorated the interior: woodcarver Johannes Kirchmayer, ironworker Frank Koralewski and stained glass artisan Charles Connick.

Mary Lyon Cheney Schofield commissioned the building in 1913 to honor her family. Her first husband, Charles Cheney, was the son of the founder of American Express. He died in 1897, shortly before their third child was born. Her second husband, Harvard professor William Schofield, died in 1920. One of her sons died in World War I. Mary lived until 1947. She, her husbands and her son are interred in the chapel.

Emmanuel Church

In the early 19th century, many residents of South Newport, R.I., couldn’t afford to attend church because they had to buy pew seats. So in 1841, three women from Trinity Church began to hold religious meetings in their homes.

Eight years later, with 88 members, they bought an empty Baptist church. Within three years, the Rhode Island Episcopal diocese admitted Emmanuel Church. The parish soon built a wooden Tudor-style church.

By the turn of the century, the old church needed repair or replacement.

Rhode Island’s prominent Brown family stepped in and commissioned Ralph Adams Cram to design Emmanuel Church in Newport. He later designed other buildings for the princely Browns.

Natalie Bayard Brown built the church in memory of her husband, John Nicholas Brown I. It took two years to build, reaching completion in 1902. Cram’s partner, Bertram Goodhue, designed the rich interior ornamentation, which went wildly over budget.

In the early 1930s, concert organist E. Power Biggs served at the church.

Today, Emmanuel still prides itself on welcoming anyone who wishes to worship.

St. James Episcopal Church

The parish of St. James was organized in the summer of 1826, when Woodstock, Vt., was a prosperous mill town that produced scythes, carding machines, woolens, carriages and tack.

It was built in time for Christmas Eve service in 1827 and consecrated the next year. The founders of the parish bought stone for the church, but discovered quicksand under the land donated for the site. They built a wooden frame church instead, and put a Paul Revere bell in the tower.

In 1907, St. James got the stone church its founders wanted. Ralph Adams Cram designed the building, considered one of his most distinguished smaller churches. He incorporated the brass pulpit and lectern, the marble font and three stained glass windows, one of which came from Tiffany studios.

If you’d like to read more about Gothic Revival buildings in New England, see our story about Henry Vaughan.

Photos: St. James Episcopal Church, AlexiusHoratius~commonswiki; Emmanual Church By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434397; All Saints Church, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19104034; All Saints, Ashmont By Jim Roberts – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51960817; Seymour St. John Chapel, Wallingford, Conn. By Daderot (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

This story about Ralph Adams Cram was updated in 2021.

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We Won’t Go Until We Get Some: New England Colonial Christmas Traditions

Just how rowdy was a New England colonial Christmas? It depended on who was celebrating. But it bore little resemblance to Christmas today, and New Englanders found it a touchy subject from the start.

Illustration of Gov. William Bradford putting down the Christmas revels in the earliest days of Massachusetts. (Howard Pyle)

Illustration of an early New England colonial Christmas tradition: Plymouth Gov. William Bradford putting down the Christmas revels. (Howard Pyle)

The Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth were a mix of people. They were led by separatists who despised the Christmas traditions of the Anglican Church as well as the Roman Catholic Church. They wanted to establish their own protestant churches, free of Christmas.

But many of the Pilgrims did not come to America for religious reasons at all. They were craftsmen or farmers recruited to ensure the colony would survive, and they simply wanted to make a better life in America.

New England Colonial Christmas

On their first Christmas at Plymouth, the Pilgrims celebrated the best way they knew how: They worked right through it. By the next year, Christmas traditions began infiltrating the group, and Gov. William Bradford had to put down the celebrations. He went so far as to call the Christmas treat mincemeat pie ‘idolatrie in a crust.’

As the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony gained ascendance, they had plenty of disagreements with the Pilgrims in Plymouth. But they largely agreed in their dislike of Christmas.

There remained in their midst, however, people who did celebrate Christmas with gusto. The fishing communities especially embraced the New England colonial Christmas, with their less-literate members mostly celebrating the holiday. Much of what actually happened was never recorded. What was recorded was seen through the eyes of the Puritan theocracy, and they painted an ugly picture of Christmas indeed.

Paganism

The Puritans complained that Christmas arose from an unnatural ideological marriage between the Roman Catholic Church and the pagans. They thought it originated in the Roman festival Saturnalia.

Just how pagan is Christmas? We won’t try to settle that debate. But the New England colonial Christmas increasingly irritated the Puritans, and they decided to stomp it out.

In 1647, the reformers in England outlawed Christmas. And the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut soon followed suit. People who celebrated Christmas would be subject to a fine of five shillings.

In 1662, a Beverly, Mass., man found himself in court for hosting a drunken gathering on Christmas Day. He was a troublemaker whose family frequently tangled with Puritan society. His wife would eventually die on the gallows, but that’s another story.

More Mayhem

A second glimpse of Christmas mayhem occurred on Christmas Day in 1679 in Salem, Mass. Joseph Foster, Benjamin Fuller, Samuel Brayebrooke and Joseph Flint decided they wanted some booze for the holiday. They knew 72-year-old John Rowden had made perry, a liquor made from pears. So they dropped in to pay him an unscheduled visit.

Rowden told them to get out. Fuller refused, saying, “it was Christmas Day at night and they came to be merry and to drink perry, which was not to be had anywhere else but here and perry they would have before they went,” according to court records. The encounter ended in a fight and stolen property.

Twelfth Night (The King Drinks), by David Teniers the Younger (1634-1640), foreshadowing the New England colonial Christmas.

Drinking was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Christmas debauchery. The New England colonial Christmas included wassailing, mumming, gambling and feasting.

The Puritans constantly struggled to keep Christmas under control. The hoi polloi embraced the New England colonial Christmas as quite a good time.

With the harvest over, the cupboards full and the long winter yet to come, December seemed a perfect month for a ripping good celebration.

Lord of Misrule

In England and elsewhere in the colonies, towns would appoint a “lord of misrule.” This custom borrowed from Saturnalia as well. Generally the towns appointed someone of lower standing to this role to serve as master of ceremonies of the Christmas celebration either up to or including the Twelfth Night festivities.

The reason? During the New England colonial Christmas, people reversed their roles and the poor ruled over the wealthy. In addition to the feasting and drunkenness, the more outgoing celebrants used the holiday as an excuse for wassailing. Wassailing involved barging into the houses of the wealthier citizens, singing a song or two or putting on a short skit, and demanding food, drink and money.

Figgy Pudding

Perhaps you’ve sung the Christmas carol, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, with its chorus of “Oh, bring us a figgy pudding…we won’t go until we get some.” They meant it.

Figgy pudding with flaming brandy

The more obliging citizens would fork over the goods. Others, however, declined — resulting in fights, rock-throwing and hard feelings. Even more abhorrent to the Puritans was the sexual promiscuity that accompanied Christmas. Celebrants cast aside their inhibitions.

One of the more colorful New England colonial Christmas traditions was mumming, in which men dressed like women (and vice versa) or simply disguised themselves in a range of costumes. Mumming could be as innocent as street theater or as bawdy as a loosely disguised roving orgy.

The Puritan objected to the custom because a person disguised could slip into a neighbor’s house for an assignation without raising eyebrows. How commonplace was the debauchery? It’s probably impossible to say, though the good Puritans wanted nothing to do with it.

In 1681, with the Civil War over in England, the crown began pressuring Massachusetts to embrace the Anglican Church and roll back Puritan reforms. The colony complied by repealing the laws against Christmas. But the holiday remained frowned upon.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Mad Mirth

In 1687 the Puritan minister Increase Mather railed against Christmas. He declared that those who celebrated it “are consumed in compotations, in interludes, in playing at cards, in revellings, in excess of wine, in mad mirth.”

No one really disagreed. It just didn’t bother some people the way it did Mather and the Puritan leadership.

It would take more than 100 years for Christmas to develop the wholesome, twinkly veneer it has today. While the southern colonies and New York, with its Dutch roots, embraced Christmas earlier, New England Protestants would hold out well beyond 1800.

The rest of the nation also felt the influence of the New England colonial Christmas tradition. In 1789, for instance, Congress held a session on Christmas Day. Businesses throughout New England always opened on Christmas. And children attended school on Christmas well into the 1800s.

The New England Colonial Christmas Gets a Facelift

By the early 1800s, however, with Episcopalians and Catholics already celebrating Christmas, the holdout Protestants felt pushed to join in. Most, though, still considered Christmas a pagan holiday that the Catholic Church had co-opted for its own purposes.

The holiday got a facelift with the poem Twas The Night Before Christmas, published in 1822. and Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol in 1843. The opposition in the church then began to relent.

Marley’s Ghost, from A Christmas Carol. Original illustration by John Leech from the 1843 edition

After the Civil War, the battle ended. New England joined the rest of the country in embracing Christmas. And Christmas, by the way, embraced New England values, at least to some degree. The over-the-top debauchery and drunkenness gave way once and for all to the quieter, conventional celebrations we know today.

* * *

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

To read more about the history of New England colonial Christmas, you may want to read The Battle for Christmas, by Stephen Nissenbaum.

This story about New England colonial Christmas traditions was updated in 2022.

Images: Figgy pudding By Ted Kerwin – originally posted to Flickr as Figgy Pudding with Flaming Brandy, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7162734. Twelfth Night by David Teniers By David Teniers the Younger – PradoWeb Gallery of Art: Image Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15885934.

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Philander Chase, Frontier Bishop of the Episcopal Church

Philander Chase brought the infant Episcopal Church to America’s frontier and founded one of the country’s finest liberal arts colleges in what was then wilderness.

Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase, daguerrotype by Matthew Brady

Chase was descended from Aquila Chase, who arrived in Hampton, N.H., from England in 1640. He was born on Dec. 14, 1775, to parents who were among the first settlers of Cornish, N.H. Chase wanted to be a farmer like his father, but at 15 he broke his leg and severely cut his foot. His father persuaded him that studying at Dartmouth would assuage the pain of a long lameness.

Philander Chase, Episcopalian

At Dartmouth he happened upon a copy of The Book of Common Prayer, which inspired him to abandon his Congregational upbringing and become an Episcopalian minister. As a Dartmouth student, he persuaded the pioneers of Cornish to build Trinity Church, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Trinity Church

The Episcopal Church had split from the Church of England during the American Revolution. Young American men who wanted to be ministers couldn’t attend English seminaries, and at first there were no seminaries in America. So Chase, upon graduation, went to Albany, N.Y., to study under the Rev. Thomas Ellison. He was ordained in 1799 as one of the very few Episcopal clergymen in the United States. As a missionary he helped organize St. John’s Episcopal Church in Canandaigua, N.Y., and other parishes in western New York.

Moving Around

Chase and his new wife Mary Fay accepted an invitation in 1805 to found Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans. Five years later he returned to New England to become the rector of Christ’s Church in Hartford. He clashed with the bishop of New York, though, and decided to head west. He and his family settled in Worthington, Ohio.

Salmon P. Chase

His fatherless nephew Salmon P. Chase came to live with them, and would grow up to become a U.S. senator, governor of Ohio, Treasury secretary and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Old Bexley Hall building at Kenyon College

Philander Chase was named the first Episcopalian Bishop of Ohio, but he didn’t get paid for it. He also had no help, as there was almost no trained clergy on the frontier. So he decided to establish a theological seminary. His rivals in the east wouldn’t support him, so he went to England to raise money. He founded Kenyon College and Bexley Hall, named after his chief benefactors, Lord Kenyon and Lord Bexley. He moved the college to Gambier, where he had bought 8,000 acres. According to legend, he was scouting a location and reached the crest of Gambier Hill, where he exclaimed, “Well, this will do.”

Surprise Bishop

Chase set about creating a self-sustaining institution with a farm, a gristmill and a printing press. But he fought with the trustees, faculty and clergy, and finally quit to live a quiet life on a farm in Ohio.

Former chapel and dormitory of Jubilee COllege

Then, without his knowledge, a group of Illinois parishes formed a diocese and elected him bishop. He accepted the job and went about fundraising for another college in Illinois, called Jubilee. Philander Chase died, exhausted, in 1852, and Jubilee College failed several years later. It is now a state park.

The Episcopal Church honors Philander Chase with a feast day on Sept. 22.

This story last updated in 2021.

Image: Bexley Hall By Chamberednautilus – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61324774. Trinity Church By bruce denis – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21099185. Jubilee College State Park By Wonderrenae – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21548905.

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