-makings.
Hospitality was universal. An English country gentleman of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries held open house. With daybreak on Christmas
morning the tenants and neighbors thronged into the hall. The ale was
broached. Blackjacks and Cheshire cheese, with toast and sugar and
nutmeg, went plentifully round. The Hackin, or great sausage, must be
boiled at daybreak, and if it failed to be ready two young men took the
cook by the arm and ran her around the market-place till she was ashamed
of her laziness.

With the rise of Puritanism the very existence of Christmas was
threatened. Even the harmless good cheer of that season was looked upon
as pagan, or, what was worse, Popish. 'Into what a stupendous _height_
of more than pagan impiety,' cried Prynne (...) 'have we not now
_degenerated!_' Prynne's rhetoric, it will be seen, is not without an
unconscious charm of humor. He complained that the England of his day
could not celebrate Christmas or any other festival 'without drinking,
roaring, healthing, dicing, carding, dancing, masques and stage-plays
(...) which Turkes and Infidels would abhor to practise.'

Puritanism brought over with it in the Mayflower the anti-Christmas
feeling to New England. So early as 1621 Governor Bradford was called
upon to administer a rebuke to 'certain lusty yonge men' who had just
come over in the little ship Fortune. 'On ye day called Christmas day,'
says William Bradford, 'ye Gov^r caled them out to worke (as was used),
but ye most of this new company excused themselves and said it went
against their consciences to worke on ye day. So ye Gov^r tould them
that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them till they
were better informed. So he led away ye rest, and left them; but when
they came home at noone from their worke, he found them in ye streete at
play, openly: some pitching ye barr, and some at stoole-ball and such
like sports. So he went to them and tooke away their implements, and
tould them that it was against his conscience that they should play and
others worke. If they made ye keeping of it matter of devotion, let them
kepe their houses, but ther should be no gameing or revelling in ye
streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least
openly.'

In England the feeling culminated in 1643, when the Roundhead Parliament
abolished the observance of saints' days and "the three grand festivals"
of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, "a