modern day puritans

Some key quotes from a story in today's Chicago Tribune (subscription required)

A few Christian churches to this day dismiss Christmas with a polite theological humbug, among them a small number of independent Pentacostal churches.

[A] mother of three, sat quietly in the back pew. She covered her head with a white lace, as she said the Bible required women to do in church.

The 3-year-old is the one who asks more than any other," she said, smiling. "He sings the songs of merry Christmas and that he wants Christmas and he wants a tree. We tell him that Christmas is all the time, we celebrate Jesus every day.

"There is nothing biblical" in the yuletide celebrations, said Pastor Santos Carrasco, 56. "And we only practice what Jesus orders us to practice."

[F]or all the pleas to "keep Christ in Christmas," Christmas has not always been, well, Christian.

The day that Christians today think of Jesus' birthday was marked in pre-Christian days by midwinter agricultural and solar observances.

Oliver Cromwell persuaded the British Parliament to make the holiday illegal, terming it both "papist and pagan."

"Christmas was really a carnival season," Stephen Nissenbaum, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts and author of "The Battle for Christmas," said. "There's that warm remnant of the Christmas season as a time of drinking and letting go and just misbehaving. That survived but it has survived only on New Year's Eve."

To which I say MERRY CHRISTMAS!