Christmas Past was once a Puritan humdrum of ‘chopped in woods’ and ‘worked on bridle’
By Steele Hays
Stock photo by Unsplash.
As the classic Christmas song goes, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”
But the ways in which Mainers celebrate Christmas have changed dramatically over the last 200 years. Christmas wasn’t recognized as a legal holiday in Maine until 1858 and if you go back to the 1600s, when Maine was part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans actually made it illegal to publicly celebrate Christmas. They saw Christmas as a pagan holiday, noting that there is no scriptural basis for Christmas celebrations.
According to the Puritans, the Catholic Church chose December the 25th as Christ’s birthday largely to coincide with the Roman Saturnalia celebration and the celebration of the Winter Solstice.
Blue Hill’s most iconic religious leader, Parson Jonathan Fisher, did not celebrate Christmas and treated December 25 like any other normal, working day, according to his diary entries from the 1820s.
His complete diary entry for Christmas Day 1824 was: “Wrote upon sermons. Moderate weather. Willard and Reuben chopped in the woods.”
On December 25, 1826, his entry was: “Mr. Johnson called on me. Went to the head of the bay. Settled with Mr. Ellis. Lent Mr. Savage Thoughts on Infant Baptism. Set down accounts. Worked on a bridle.”
Jumping forward, by the mid-1900s Christmas holiday celebrations and traditions on the Blue Hill Peninsula and nearby communities had become much like they are today. Looking through the bound issues of The Weekly Packet from the 1960s in the Blue Hill library, it’s easy for any baby boomer to feel nostalgic for the era. The town’s Main Street and Union Street merchants arranged for Santa Claus to visit each of their stores in mid-December, including Sally’s Variety, Partridge Drug, Merrill’s Market, Blue Hill Department Store, Babson and Duffy Hardware, TaCo café, Merrill & Hinckley, Madeline’s Fashions, First National Bank and Candage Hardware. Only one of those retail stores–Merrill & Hinckley–remains today, and even that has a sign in its window for more than a year announcing it would be going out of business as it liquidates its inventory.
In 1960, the former Castine High School held a Christmas Ball and crowned a king and queen, as reported in the local newspaper. Maine Maritime Academy’s dance band provided the musical entertainment for the ball.
Miss Marion Witham, the queen, was described as “a pretty, green-eyed junior… She is 5’2” tall and has light brown hair.”
Another picture of Christmas in our area was painted by the late newspaper columnist and garden writer Roy Barrette of Brooklin, one that was less commercial and glittery.
In a 1981 article for Down East Magazine, Barrette wrote: “Here, the first signs of Christmas may be detected in the sudden appearance of ancient trucks piled high with undecorated Christmas wreaths lurching around the corners of the narrow roads. Or the load may be simply brush balsam fir tips headed for somebody’s dooryard where it will serve as a supply depot for the members of the family who are engaged in ‘wreathing.’ Out here on Naskeag Point …. we escape the commercialization of Christmas to a great degree. I don’t claim we are as we were two-hundred years ago when Saddrach Watson ran his store here on The Point…but there are no more houses or people than there were one hundred years ago.”
Barrette concluded his article with an account of his and his wife’s drive from their home to Stonington a few days before Christmas:
“It was dark when we started, but we had no trouble until we reached the causeway, which had been flooded at high water. The ebbing tide had left ice floes here and there the whole length of the road. Already a truck was using its snowplow to shove the larger pieces back into the ocean. The chore was not a straightforward job because the causeway is lined each side with big granite boulders and the floes had to be eased through the open spaces between them. Anyway, with ingenuity and patience we got across. It took a while and the car was not too warm, but when we climbed the hill on Deer Isle and I began to see candles in the windows and a few colored lights here and there, I felt rewarded for our efforts. The moon came out, too, and I have seldom seen anything more beautiful than the combination of twinkling lights, dark water covered with ice floes, and the high bridge silhouetted against a sky of hurrying broken clouds.
“I am going back for another look this Christmas,” Barrette continued. “A new Christmas, but the enchantment will be the same. The moon and the ice floes have been around since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, older than Christmas, and are about as close as I shall come to touching the hem of the robe of immortality.”
However local residents choose to celebrate the holidays, Merry Christmas to all!
