Actually they don’t come from protestant countries, they come from countries with a heavy concentration of Germans. All of the traditions I cited date to pre-reformation German. Austria and the German, Czech and Polish territories all have these traditions in one form or another. They became popular in England only during the Victorian era. Christmas wasn’t popular in the United States until immigration brought us millions of Catholics and didn’t really become popular until the Northeastern WASP’s followed the Victorians and began celebrating.
The fact is the Dutch Reformed, Geneva Calvinists, Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians eliminated Christmas and Easter as unbiblical Catholic holy days. The celebration of Christmas was outlawed in Massachusetts for around a century. It isn’t the protestants that are responsible for Christmas.
I know well the history of Christmas in this country, and I find the Puritan outlawing of it to be reprehensibly reckless and a symptom of their bald historical and theological ignorance.
Partly because of their insanity on this point, assorted folk traditions of Northern Europe which used to have a profound Christian meaning were forced underground and out of the Church’s motherly embrace and into a kind of secular netherworld, where it was a short leap to full-on paganism. So St. Nicholas became Santa Claus. Collecting soul-cakes on All Hallows’ Eve became a day of dress-up and Candy Quest.
The “Northeastern WASPs” who revived Christmas did so out of a sense of restoring beauty and joy to an Anglicanism that the Puritans and their ilk had entirely bled out of parish life. The Victorian Christmas at its best was a beautiful and moving tribute to the Birth of Our Savior—one that even my non-Christian relatives deeply appreciate. That the Puritans’ descendants still don’t get it does not reflect well on them.