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A Somber Yuletide

Puritan influences leave no room for decking the Christmas halls on Long Island

By Molly McCarthy | Staff Writer

A roasted goose rests on the table. A Christmas tree, adorned with candles and strings of cranberries, takes up a full corner of the room. Stockings hang from the hearth, stuffed with presents. And perhaps a Tiny Tim-esque boy offers the season's toast: ``God bless us every one!''

That's probably what most people picture when they envision how the earliest Europeans celebrated Christmas on Long Island -- but they're wrong.

When Dec. 25 rolled around in the colonial 1600s and 1700s, most Long Islanders did what they did on any other day of the year. Women cooked or spent the day catching up on the wash. Men worked in the barns or, if weather permitted, in the fields preparing for the next growing season.

``You have to remember that Long Island during the colonial period was heavily Puritan,'' explained Alice Ross, a local historian who has researched the Island's early Christmas celebrations. ``Puritans did not celebrate Christmas because they thought it was a very pagan ritual.

``People didn't walk around in the woods singing Christmas carols. The Puritans thought these things very severe.'' In fact, Ross added, Christmas is very rarely mentioned in letters, diaries or official documents of the day.

Christmas celebrations were actually declared illegal from 1659 to 1681 in New England, the hotbed of Puritanism, historian Stephen Nissenbaum noted in his recent book, ``The Battle for Christmas,'' which chronicles the evolution of the holiday in America. If anyone was caught observing Christmas by drinking, partying or song, they were fined five shillings.

December was a slow month for farmers and other laborers of the day. The harvest was gathered, and often the weather was too severe to work outdoors. It was also the time of year when beasts were slaughtered and beer and wine were ready for consumption. In other words, a perfect time to eat, drink and be merry.

But Puritan ministers frowned on this behavior. In 1712, the Rev. Cotton Mather of Boston wrote: ``The Feast of Christ's Nativity is spent Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking, and in all Licentious Liberty . . . by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Reveling.'' Another minister, this one a 16th-Century Anglican bishop, made a statement that is not unlike remarks made about Christmas today: ``Men dishonour Christ more in the twelve days of Christmas, than in all the twelve months besides.''

So, when the founding fathers of Southold and Southampton left New England for the twin forks in 1640, they brought with them this Puritan suspicion of Christmas.

But, while the Puritans were busy punishing anything smelling of Christmas revelry, the Dutch introduced their own version of the holiday celebration to western Long Island in the settlement of New Netherlands.

``The Dutch celebrated St. Nicholas Day, on December 6, more than Christmas,'' said Harrison Hunt, supervisor of collections and historic sites for the Nassau County Department of Recreation and Parks. ``Children would leave out their wooden shoes. That idea later evolved into hanging stockings on the mantel. And St. Nicholas was said to visit, later Santa Claus, and leave presents inside the shoes.''

If the idea for stuffing stockings originated in Holland, Hunt said, the Christmas tree was undoubtedly a German import. The first Christmas trees on Long Island were said to be spotted in Cedar Swamp (now Old Brookville) during the Revolutionary War. Hunt said he has never seen any firm evidence documenting this claim by local historians.

If they did exist in that settlement along the North Shore, they were probably the work of Hessian soldiers enlisted by the British during the occupation of Long Island. By decorating a small fir tree, the German soldiers didn't feel so far from home, where it was an integral part of their Christmas observance.

Despite these early sightings of Christmas trees during the Revolution, historians suggest that the adorned arbor didn't become a part of the American Christmas tradition until much later.

Hunt supervises the historic home of William Cullen Bryant, Cedarmere, in Roslyn Harbor. He recently came across a letter written by Frederick Law Olmsted's wife, Mary, to Bryant's wife.

In the letter, dated in the late 1800s, Mary Perkins Olmsted marveled at how the Christmas holiday had changed and the celebrations grown since the two of them saw their first Christmas tree at the Bryant home in the 1840s.

``The Bryants were people on the cutting edge of things,'' said Hunt, ``so they were probably among the first to adopt the Christmas tree as part of their celebration.''

Nearly a decade after the Bryants tried out their first Christmas tree, New York State in 1849 designated Christmas an official holiday. But it took many more years for the holy day to evolve into the commercial extravaganza it is today.

Consider these recollections of Christmases past by a prominent Hempstead resident as told to a reporter for The Hempstead Sentinel in 1916.

During his youth in the 1850s, Richard Brower talked of sleigh rides with the ladies and presents of fruits and homemade candy and trees decorated only with candles.

``I don't think they made quite so much of Christmas as a time for interchange of gifts,'' Brower recalled.

``They didn't give us elaborate toys and we didn't wait for our parents to give us sleds. We made them -- bob-sleds and double-runners -- and we kept their runners shining bright.''