Updated: December 30, 2025
Christmas Beyond Washington’s Crossing
This post isn’t just about dramatic Christmas moments from the American Revolution, like Washington crossing the Delaware River, nor is it a light look at decorations, caroling, or festive foods. Instead, it explores the evolution of how we Americans have observed and celebrated Christmas, which, in many ways, is revealing of our nation’s cultural and political transformation since the Colonial Era.
Here’s how I’ve structured the post:
- Part I:
- Importance of Revolutionary Christmas
- Christmas across the colonies
- Christmas highlights of the Revolution
- Part II:
- Backdrop to Christmas in America – my take on this history
- Part III (this post):
- Christmas and U.S. presidents: video and edited transcript of my in-depth interview with Dr. Carey Rober
The featured image is titled Washington Crossing the Delaware. Its Revolutionary history is detailed later in the post.
Christmas in the Revolutionary Era: Why It Matters
When we think of Christmas during the American Revolution, most of us picture Washington crossing the Delaware River for a surprise attack on the Hessians. That is an iconic and transformative event of the Revolution and should be remembered – hence it’s the featured image of this post. Still, it should not overshadow the many different Christmas traditions of the Revolutionary Era. Why? Because the evolution of Christmas in America mirrors and impacts the evolution of American culture and history.
In this post, you will note the diversity of how American colonists and later Americans observed and celebrated Christmas, if at all! This diversity stems from regional, religious, and ethnic differences. It also reflects the transformation of our federal government into a large national administration (think FDR, which we discuss below) as well as the explosive growth of commercial industries and our consumer culture.
To a great extent, the evolution of Christmas traditions from colonial America to Revolutionary America, and then to the United States and our modern superpower, reflects the transformation of our country from separate colonies — and later separate states — into a nation that stretches from sea to shining sea, and later influences events around the world.
If I were to sum it up, evolution of the American Christmas is part and parcel of our nation-building project. And that’s why it interests me.
In short, the evolution of the American Christmas is inseparable from our nation-building story — and that’s what makes it so compelling to me.
Celebrating Christmas In America – My Interview with Dr. Roberts
The notes below are excerpts from the edited transcript of my 2023 interview with Dr. Carey Roberts, a professor of History and Online Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Liberty University, which has the following tagline: “Training Champions for Christ since 1971“.
His research focuses on early American intellectual and economic history, the American Founding, and southern literature. He has served as a ruling elder in both the Presbyterian Church of America and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
Dr. Roberts explains why Christmas took time to become a nationally celebrated holiday in America. The video below begins at our discussion of Christmas in the American colonies; while earlier segments cover the biblical origins of Christmas and its evolution and bans in Europe.
How Christmas Came to American Colonies
Adel: Dr. Roberts, how did Christmas enter America’s culture?
Dr. Roberts: Well, that’s an incredible question, and I really love that question because it gives me an opportunity as a historian to talk about not only what Christmas means to Americans over time, but how Christmas is a reflection, if not a microcosm, of the diverse regional cultural identities that characterize the American past.
It really is a microcosm.
It’s more than just a reflection. It almost encapsulates all of these various regional and cultural forms that are so important, not only to early American history, but to America today.
We think about culture wars, right? I don’t know that many folks talked about culture wars that often, you know, in the 90s and the early 2000s.
But, you know, that sort of thing has always been a part of American life. It’s there from the very beginning as settlers move up the James River from Jamestown. It’s there in Plymouth.
It’s there across Massachusetts Bay and in other colonies. So, each one of these major cultural groups is going to be bringing with them certain attitudes and traditions related to Christmas.
And in some places, there was an attitude of dismissiveness.
Adel: Of Christmas?
Dr. Roberts: Of Christmas.
There was an insistence that Christmas was really distracting Christians of all people from the rudiments of the Christian faith.
Adel: But you just said it’s central in the last segment.
Dr. Roberts: It is central to Christianity as a whole, but not necessarily with all groups of Christians. Over the course of Christian history of the past 2000 years, some elements of the faith have emphasized Christmas.
Some have emphasized the crucifixion and resurrection. Others have emphasized various aspects of Jesus’s life. But there have been some that have downplayed our obsession with various parts of Jesus’s earthly ministry, the Puritans being one of them.
The Puritans would argue over and again that we should not just be celebrating or honoring Jesus’s birth one day out of the year. We should be doing that every day out of the year. With our hard work, with our deeds.
Same thing with Easter. Easter was not something that was special just one day of the year for the Puritans.
Adel: What you’re saying, if I may interrupt you, Puritans come in December 1620 to the Plymouth area. Let’s say I visited Plymouth, let’s say 1640, 20 years later on December 25th. I wouldn’t see big Christmas celebration, right?
Dr. Roberts: Well, when the pilgrims come to Plymouth, the Pilgrims were a part of this same sort of attitude that there were too many festivities, too much celebration, that Christianity had lost its way because it was really focused on the experiential and not the relative doctrinal truths.
So the Pilgrims were separatists, and they wanted to separate from various forms of Christianity in order to pursue its purest form. So no, in the 1620s, if you went to Plymouth, you would not have really seen anything like a Christmas day.
For the Puritans, who were a part of the Church of England and wanted to purify the Church of England from its festivities, they too would not have celebrated Christmas in any robust fashion through the 1620s, 30s, and 40s.
But Adel, the Puritans died off. They didn’t last. So, I guess in some ways, Christmas won.
Program Note:
To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, in 2021, Dr. David Silverman guest participated in our sister program, History Behind News podcast, to share with us the real history what happened in that 1621 feast between Pilgrims and Indians. For example, why did Pilgrims select Plymouth for their settlement? As for the feast, was eel on the menu? Here is the video of that interview.
How Christmas Celebration Started In American Colonies
Adel: So which group of immigrants introduced Christmas to America? Or is that even the wrong question to ask?
Dr. Roberts: Not really introduced, it sort of grew.
They all know of Christmas, and I want to be clear about that. Every Puritan child would have heard the word Christmas.
The Anglicans are probably the ones who are most responsible for its widespread honoring, and in the colonial period, it probably would have been associated with a period of fasting and feasting. And it would have occurred during that third week of December.
Now the Dutch, the Dutch Calvinists who settled the New Netherlands in what became New York, they had even more robust appreciation for Christmas.
And it is the Dutch that really are going to be bringing in the stories of Saint Nicholas.
Of course, based on Nicholas the Bishop of Myra, really in present-day Turkey. And then the Dutch words for Saint Nicholas kind of got Dutchified over the centuries and became Sinter, instead of Nicholas, Sinterklaas, which is where we get Santa Claus.
Regional Differences in Early American Christmas Celebrations
Adel: So was there a regional difference in America then? So let’s say, I don’t know, Benjamin Franklin is a child, it’s 1740, well, actually he’s not a child by then, but a relatively young man, and he goes from New England to South Carolina where you have Anglicans, more Anglicans than you do up north. Does he see a difference in celebration of Christmas?
Dr. Roberts: Yes, he would have seen a significant difference.
And he would have seen a difference in Pennsylvania to the degree to which Quakers did celebrate Christmas, it probably would have been an emphasis on the fasting side of it.
Whereas had he journeyed to the Carolinas where there’s a much stronger Anglican presence and also of other Presbyterian presence than what Franklin would have grown up with or where he was from, there would have been a greater emphasis on the feasting side of Christmas. So they’re still Presbyterians, but sort of a different, I don’t want to say denomination, but they emphasize, they focus on different aspects, i.e. feasting.
Yeah, the famous South Carolina writer, Antebellum writer, William Gilmore Sims produced a short novel called The Golden Christmas in the 1840s where he describes these Christmas rituals that were common in South Carolina and across other parts of the South.
And it was a boisterous time of partying and feasting and the great hunt that actually was kind of a part of Nordic traditions related to this period of time. And they came together on a plantation on Christmas Eve and decided to go hunt a boar. Then they slaughtered the boar, they partied all night, and then feasted on Christmas Day.
Adel: So we’re talking about the tradition of the South, and this sounds really wild and fun. Tell me about the church, the church members, the clergy, were they watching this and saying, shame on you, this is abhorrent? Or were they more familiar with these celebrations because they also were from the South?
Dr. Roberts: I think typically across the South, most Christian ministers were willing to endure some honoring of Christmas. And to varying degrees, they would make it a celebration.
And this is in the colonial and into the Antebellum period. We’re talking about before the Civil War. After the Civil War, everything really starts to change.
How Scots and Presbyterians Influenced Christmas Celebration
Adel: And we’re going to get into that because of industrialization.
Dr. Roberts: Yeah. Right, right. And just the consequences of the war.
I mean, in some ways that culture war was kind of finalized as a result of the war. And so you start seeing a harmonization of some Christmas traditions.
But there was in the South, just going back to your question about Presbyterians, Presbyterians were particularly sensitive to festivities, not just because they were anti-Catholic and they wanted to reject medieval Catholic practices of going back to the old Passion plays and dramas of the medieval period.
The Scots themselves had a really hard time with seasonal celebrations, particularly in terms of Christian Communion or the Lord’s Supper that’s considered to be a sacrament of Christian worship. The Scots tried to have it very regularly.
They even mandated that Presbyterian churches had to have Communion either every quarter of a year or at least twice a year, but they could never get enough ministers to do it. Yeah. And so, they ended up having Communion just once a year and it became known as the Communion season.
Well, in good Scottish fashion, these things quickly degenerated into times of debaucherous partying and celebrations. So, there’s this line of Presbyterians in really all over the United States, but even in the South, even up until this day, that kind of frown upon seeing holy things turned into celebrations like that.
Adel: That’s fascinating.
Commercialization of Christmas
Adel: Dr. Roberts, when did businesses begin capitalizing on Christmas?
Dr. Roberts: Well, they certainly capitalize upon Christmas today. Of course, yeah. It is estimated by economists, by the World Economic Forum, by businesses involved in currency transfers that in 2023, globally, between $1 to $2 trillion will be spent on Christmas.
Now, that may include gifts. It may include travel. It may include food.
And of course, it varies from country to country over where the emphasis is. I mean, in Nigeria, the emphasis is on food. In the United States, the emphasis is on presents.
Now, that $1 to $2 trillion may not seem like a lot, but when you realize that those same economists and banks estimate that the global petroleum industry is somewhere fluctuating between $4 to $7 trillion, we think the world rests on petroleum. You get some sense of how important Christmas spending can be. Okay.
How the Civil War Changed Christmas
Adel: So how about, let’s say, 1870, 1880?
Dr. Roberts: Well, it really begins to be commercialized in a robust fashion in the 1870s. Following the Civil War, even during Reconstruction, you start seeing stores marketing things toward Christmas giving, Christmas presents. R.H. Macy is usually given the title as the first man to put in a storefront window a Christmas display.
I think that was probably around 1874, and it included among many things, it was a story out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, along with some baby dolls that Macy wanted to sell for children.
But you really can’t have storefront displays, Adel, until you have gas lighting. So, until gas lighting expands economically around the country in the 1870s and 1880s, you don’t really see those storefront displays becoming popular.
But once they start, once that domino begins to fall, it quickly proliferates around the United States.
Adel: When you say proliferates around the United States, now 1870s, President Grant is in office those eight years. Would he have seen this proliferation up in Boston as well as, let’s say, down in Savannah?
Dr. Roberts: He would have.
Adel: I’m asking that question, by the way, in the context of our conversation in the previous segment where we talked about Puritans. Yeah, he would have seen that, because in all parts of the United States by the time of the Civil War and immediately afterward, Christmas is going to be, and I’m going to now use the word, celebrated. But the celebration will vary in level from region to region.
Grant would have recognized it. Now, Adel, you and your viewers cannot hold me on account to this.
Adel: Don’t worry, we won’t.
Dr. Roberts: I have now forgotten the important date. It was around this time that the first Christmas tree is used at the White House. I don’t remember if it was Grant or maybe Cleveland.
But the Christmas trees are actually become popular in the United States in the 1870s. They’re called German trees at first because- and that becomes an industry.
Program Note:
According to the White House Historical Association, the first White House Christmas tree was in 1889, during Pres. Benjamin Harrison’s administration. It was displayed in the Second Floor Oval Room, which was the family parlor and library back then. Although Christmas was not a grand White House affair, the upstairs family tree was decorated with candles for the President’s grandchildren.
For more on White House history, listen to my 2024 with interview with Matthew Costello, Director of the National Center for White House History. Dr. Costello takes us through White House remodeling and renovations, including plans to move the White House from its current location altogether. And, of course, he talks about the constant need for more space to hold larger gatherings and events, which is the history behind Pres. Donald Trump’s new ballroom construction.
Continuity of American Christmas Culture Since the Revolution
Adel: I want to speak with you about the continuity of our Christmas culture.
I know it’s a big topic. We’d have to sit here for hours. But I’ll approach the question this way.
I’ll pick four individuals.
George Washington Christmas
Adel: Would George Washington recognize our Christmas?
Dr. Roberts: So if we think historically over how Christians have practiced Christmas, it is usually a time of fasting, feasting, and thankfulness. George Washington would have definitely recognized the fasting side of this.
And he would have recognized the thankfulness side of this. But when he is at Valley Forge, he’s not going to be recognizing the feasting side of this. And that’s just not going to happen.
So that begins, I think, the important part of our conversation.
Andrew Jackson Christmas
Adel: How about, let’s say, Andrew Jackson? Now we’re talking about 1830s.
Yeah, Jackson would have begun to recognize the feasting element of it, that Christmas was something to be celebrated, that it was a time in which there was a gathering of friends and family. Probably not an obsession. I shouldn’t use that word, but an obsession with family – that evolves after World War II.
But he certainly would have recognized it as a special day in which there was some special meal being served and a time of joy. Probably a lot of liquor.
Evolution of Family Christmas
Adel: Before I ask about the next person I have in mind, you said obsession with family started, sort of evolved out of World War II. Why World War II?
Dr. Roberts: Well, that’s when you really begin to see, coming out of the Depression and into World War II, popular culture associating this holiday season with family togetherness. And of course, the movies are, you know, I’ll Be Home for Christmas and Holiday Inn and Bing Crosby and others singing these popular tunes, emphasizing family togetherness as something that is synonymous with the holiday season.
Adel: It’s funny, I would have never thought otherwise. So are you suggesting that prior to this development after World War II, Christmas may have been something more akin to New Year’s Eve or something like that? Where people celebrated in groups with friends?
Dr. Roberts: So, Adel, the way I like to think of it is that what Americans do, remember, thankfulness, fasting, and feasting. We basically take those three things and we break them up across an entire holiday season, beginning with Thanksgiving and ending with New Year’s.
In fact, there’s not a lot of fasting in the 20th century American holiday traditions, but I would argue that we’re starting to see that resurface in the 21st century because…
Adel: Oh, we are?
Dr. Roberts: In January, we all join a gym and go on diet.
So things like our celebrations that we have on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, in the Antebellum Period, in the Antebellum South, that was what Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were like. In fact, even in the 20th century in parts of the South, fireworks were associated with Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, not with New Year’s Day.
Abraham Lincoln Christmas
Adel: Oh, okay. Now, you mentioned cultural wars and one that really comes to mind that reached some sort of conclusion was the Civil War. So would President Lincoln in the middle of a war in an America that was fundamentally changing recognize our Christmas?
Dr. Roberts: Well, that’s an interesting question in light of what we now are beginning to understand about Lincoln.
I mean, if you go to Springfield today – Springfield, Illinois, you visit Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln’s home, you get a picture of a corporate lawyer on the make, someone who he and his wife wanted the latest technology, the latest fashion, the latest curtains, the latest wallpaper.
In other words, you would get a sense of a family that was commercialized or at least commercializing. And yet, Abraham Lincoln is the man almost singular responsible for the modern American Thanksgiving. That is where our contemporary Thanksgiving comes from, Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863.
Though Jefferson Davis did have a proclamation in 1862 for the Confederacy a year earlier, but it’s really Lincoln’s that we can count on. So he would have recognized that part of it and maybe even get a few hints on the commercialized side.
That’s a part of Lincoln that I think most of us don’t really appreciate, his personality.
The Roosevelts’ Christmas
Adel: How about, let’s pick another president that’s really on the cusp of modernization of our broadcast system, Teddy Roosevelt. We don’t have the radio yet, but newspapers are just ubiquitous.
You get the morning paper, you get the afternoon paper. I’m old enough to remember the afternoon paper still in San Francisco.
So, how about Teddy Roosevelt? He was a fun, good, rollicking guy.
Dr. Roberts: Well, Adel, I’m so grateful that you chose one of the Roosevelts, one of our Dutch presidents. Because by the 20th century, this culture war that has long been a part of American society, certain things begin to settle out.
And you start seeing symmetry and cross-pollination in a very substantial way by the end of the 19th and the early 20th century. And so, Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency and that of his cousin, Franklin’s, coincide with an important cross-pollination that occurs with Christmas. And that is the emergence of Santa Claus.
You still have across many parts of the United States, the presence of Father Christmas, which is much more closely associated with St. Nicholas and the giving of gifts to children. Many parts of the United States still celebrated St. Nicholas Eve and St. Nicholas Day, which I believe we are actually recording this on St. Nicholas Eve.
Adel: Oh, really? Interesting. December 5th.
Dr. Roberts: Yeah, 5th and 6th is when it was usually celebrated.
But then you have the Dutch emphasis on Sinterklaas, which gets mixed in with various medieval traditions, even some non-Christian traditions that evolve into modern-day Santa Claus.
But Santa Claus really doesn’t become Santa Claus until the late 1920s, or really 1930, 1931, when a Southern beverage company, Coca-Cola. This is a great story.
Executives at this Southern beverage company hire a Michigan-born designer, a Dutch-Michigan-born designer named Haddon Sundblom (full name: Haddon Hubbard “Sunny” Sundblom), to design a marketing ad based on this guy named Santa Claus.
Well, he goes back to a poem that had been produced by Clement Clark Moore in 1822. Now, we know this poem as Twas the Night Before Christmas. I think it was called A Visit from St. Nicholas when it was first published.
But that’s where he gets this image of Santa Claus. He draws on all these Dutch traditions, and he literally draws our modern-day Santa Claus for this Coca-Cola ad in 1931.
Adel: Oh, wow. That’s fascinating.
So, Moore is Dutch, and both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt are Dutch.
There’s another reason why I asked you about Teddy Roosevelt, and what he would think of our Christmas.
Just, I don’t know, maybe a couple of decades before his presidency, we get a humongous influx of Catholic and also, maybe to a lesser extent, Orthodox Christians that come to our country. Now, we have Slavic people, we have Italians, we have Spanish from Spain who are then, we thought of them as completely outsiders. Now, Catholicism is so ingrained.
How did that impact Christmas when Teddy Roosevelt was president? Are there stuff that we do that would be foreign to him now?
Dr. Roberts: Well, I would argue that these new Eastern European communities, which are by and large Roman Catholic, they’re not all Roman Catholic. As you mentioned, they are also, many of them are Orthodox. They have no hesitation celebrating, with a C, the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
And there is no coincidence that early Hollywood film producers really capitalized upon this desire to celebrate Christmas in those early Christmas films that we all have come to know and love today. It took Protestants a little while. It really took Protestants to be able to get through the Depression and World War II before they finally said, okay, we’re going to celebrate Christmas.
So, beginning in the 1950s, I would say 1950s and 1960s America is peak Christmas. So much of what we do today with modern Christmas celebrations kind of gelled together in the 50s and 60s. So, Protestants start having elaborate Christmas musicals.
Lots of feasts go along with this. And they start decorating their churches, which was an old Anglican tradition. Mainline churches did have hanging of the greens and things along those lines.
But the idea of having some major entertainment with a Protestant church for Christmas really originates in the 50s and 60s. Do we have Roman Catholic immigrants to thank for this?
Maybe so. Maybe so.
In our full interview, Dr. Roberts explains how Christmas emerged out of early Christian traditions and evolved over the centuries.
Discover more about America’s Christmas traditions in Parts I and II:
About the Featured Image
The featured image is Washington Crossing the Delaware by German-American artist Emanuel Leutze. Painted in 1851, it depicts George Washington leading the Continental Army across the Delaware River on the night of December 25–26, 1776.
The original painting was destroyed during World War II. One version is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while another was later sold at auction in 2022 for $45 million.
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Question:
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Options:
A) Boston Tea Party
B) Ship Polly turned away from Philadelphia
C) Battle of Bunker Hill
D) Declaration of Independence
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