Modern Christmas is a retail invention, just like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day etc. Personally, I find all the hype and hysteria rather entertaining.
Not to be remiss but in many respects the people in the Plymouth colony had more freedom than those back in England.
Women for instance, had standing in court, could own property, inherited at least a third of their husbands estate even if he tries to write them out of the will and operate businesses. At the time, I don’t think women in England could do any of those (except maybe royalty or nobility). There were at least two drinking establishments owned by women in the records. (Yes, those things existed and even had female customers!)
I did some reading about it.
The Plymouth Colony and the Massachussetts colony were separate entities for a very long time, this writer should have pointed that out.
Do not learn the ways of the nations...
For the practices of the peoples are worthless;
they cut a tree out of the forest...
They adorn it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so it will not totter.
Deuteronomy 12:4
You must not worship the LORD your God in their [the pagan's] way.
When it was written, Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was understood by all and sundry who read it as a critique not of miserliness, but of Puritanism, with its disdain for feasts, for ostentation of any sort, and its idea that God’s favor included (or perhaps was most shown by) material prosperity. The choice of Ebenezer as the name for the protagonist was meant to make the point more obvious: the Puritans much more so than other Christians in the 16th through 19th centuries were given to using Hebrew-derived names.