ho ho ho
Moving on to the next holiday. May we now anticipate an annual revival of the past few years’ flap about the war on Christmas — i.e., how liberal secularism suppresses Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus by removing creches from village squares and forcing everybody to say “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas”?
[UPDATE: Yes, we may. See J.L. Bell’s comment on the Inhofe holiday parade, below.]
If so, I’d like to bring back those socialist Pilgrims for a reprise role and credit them with starting the war. For of course Pilgrims, and indeed all of Puritan New England, didn’t celebrate Christmas and would have severely prosecuted anyone who did, or at least did so loudly. They hated Christmas, for all the obvious reasons.
No, not because it requires putting toys together at three in the morning on Christmas Eve and having the family over when you’ve just seen them at Thanksgiving. That’s why we hate Christmas. [UPDATE: That’s just a joke.] Pilgrims and Puritans hated it because it was a pagan-based feast of the Antichrist Pope of Rome, a sacrificial revelry, a ceremony of the Harlot, and contrary to Scripture. The whole idea of a “Christ mass” was what they’d been fighting to the death for a long time, the work of the Beast.
The point isn’t, of course, that the Puritans would have been sympathetic to modern secularism. Anything but. The point is that the idea of a “Christian nation” denies the antipathy our founding Christians felt, mainly and most significantly, for other Christians. The Pilgrims came here to get away from Anglicans. If a boatload of Lutherans had pulled into Plymouth harbor, muskets would have come out. And if Samuel Adams came back to life, and were forced to walk past the Roman Catholic churches in today’s North End of Boston, he’d be sure that his entire life’s work had been for nothing, wasted in what had become a horrifying enabling of the forces of utter spiritual evil, staining what he’d once hoped would become a Christian Sparta (meaning to him a Congregational one). The ancestors of Bill O’Reilly and the ancestors of Glenn Beck would have been a lot more interested in trying to kill each other than in trying to kill, say, Jews.
Happy Holidays!
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William Hogeland 
The ancestors of Bill O’Reilly and the ancestors of Glenn Beck would have been a lot more interested in trying to kill each other than in trying to kill, say, Jews.
What are you intimating?
On a historical note, I think you underestimate Samuel Adams. It was he that agreed to pray with those of different sects in preparation for the Declaration of Indpendence:
September 6, 1774, the second day of the Congressional Congress
“What are you intimating?” seems to suggest I’m implying something without saying it, so just to be clear: Despite the anti-Semitism that marked all of our founding Christians sects’ attitudes, their most significant, vociferous, and often violent enmity was for one another. On the Adams question, I believe Adams didn’t merely agree to but actually proposed having an Anglican minister lead prayer in the Congress. I don’t ever understimate Adams: That was tactical. I stand by my fantasy of Adams’s feelings if he could see the North End a Catholic enclave.
Sen. Imhofe of Oklahoma has already started the “War on Christmas” drumbeat, refusing to march in a holiday parade unless it’s called a “Christmas parade.”
Curiously, Sen. Imhofe is not insisting that his “Christmas parade” take place on Christmas, showing that he’s willing to make compromises for his own convenience, just not for other people’s faiths.
Add in that Adams would be appalled at the modern militia movement as well!
Agreed, the reason for the Separation of Church and State is that the founders knew that they could be at the mercy of some other church’s doctrine. I don’t think they envisioned the amount of Catholics that would come to the US either.
Imagine the thought of the make up of the current US Supreme Court, 6 Catholics and 3 Jews, in the minds of the founders!
One Time machine, a trip to the future for John and Samuel Adams, and I betch they’d have been the most vociferous of tories!