Christmas

This WSJ opinion piece might be the best overview of Christmas traditions I've ever read. Like the religion it celebrates, social traditions behaved like fluctuating market forces to determine the curvy, indirect path to today's orthodoxy.

Excerpt from A Brief History of Christmas:

In the English-speaking world, Christmas was abolished in Scotland in 1563 and in England after the Puritans took power in the 1640s. It returned with the Restoration in 1660, but the celebrations never regained their medieval and Elizabethan abandon. There was still no Christmas in Puritan New England, where Dec. 25 was just another working day. In the South, where the Church of England predominated, Christmas was celebrated as in England. In the middle colonies, matters were mixed. In polyglot New York, the Dutch Reformed Church did not celebrate Christmas. The Anglicans and Catholics did.