Paul Mills: The ghosts of Maine Christmas past
Paul Mills: The ghosts of Maine Christmas past By Paul Mills “Always winter, but never Christmas,” wrote C.S. Lewis some 70 years ago. He was not of course speaking of our own COVID-19 time. But he could have been speaking of most of Maine’s history until the middle of the 19 th century. Why then was Christmas not observed? The answer lies in the bedrock of early Puritan culture, which contended that no one knew the day when Jesus was born. The date, they argued, was one generated by other religions. Christmas, they pointed out, was based on the ancient two-week Roman festival of Sat...
Source: centralmaine.com