The idea of Christmas as being a “national” holiday, a banking and business holiday when just about everyone gets a paid day off from work from their employer and when most if not all business are closed, rather than a merely a calendar and religious “feast day”, abeit an important one but not nearly as important as others like Easter, a day when there was a religious obligation to attend church (or Mass) and pray rather than a day to stay at home all day surrounded by all our family and friends, not to work and not to shop, is a rather recent phenomena, born primarily during the late Victorian era, a period of both romanticism and of a push for vast social reform.
In fact for many years, Christmas celebrations were banned outright and were illegal in England as it was deemed as being too “pagan” and not “religious” and it was the same in some of the American colonies like Massachusetts were Puritanism was strong and the ban on Chrismas was enforced.
Charles Dickens’ “A Chistmas Carol” was written during a time in the mid Victorian era when Ebenezer Scrooge would not have been at all unique in expecting his workers like his clerk Bob Cratchit to work on Christmas Day and feeling cheated for being pressured by changing customs and rather new socials norms into paying a man for not working, “a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December”.
But if you read and pay close attention to “A Christmas Carol”, after Scrooge wakes up on Christmas Morning after having been visited by the Three Spirits of Charismas; Past, Present and Future, he looks out his window to see a young boy. He asks the boy if the big prized turkey is still hanging in the butcher’s window. To which the boy says “The one as big as me, yes”. Scrooge then tells the boy to go buy the turkey. “Go buy it and bring it back here I’ll give you a shilling, come back in five minutes and I’ll give you half a crown.”
Notice that he doesn’t ask the boy to rouse the butcher out of bed or to make the butcher open up his closed butcher shop just for him, but just to go buy the prized turkey and have it delivered to Bob Cratchit’s house, sort of indicating that the butcher shop was open for business on Christmas morning and making deliveries.
I remember my mother and father telling me that when they were young and working during the 30’ and 40’s, that a six day, 10 hour per day work week was the norm and that there was no such thing as paid over time or such a thing a minimum wage or paid holidays. The business might have been closed on Christmas Day, but if that day fell on a normal work day, they didn’t necessarily get paid for it unless their employer was particularly generous.
I think Christmas came more and more into its own in the USA starting with the southern colonies.