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While looking up legislative divorce cases from the 1820s—when the only way to get divorced in Kentucky was by an act of the state legislature—UofL law librarian Kurt Metzmeier saw a reference to a Senate session held on December 25, 1823. Turning to that page in the Senate Journal, he discovered that the body had convened on Christmas Day and worked a full day.
The long and complicated history from the Puritans in Massachusetts, who criminalized the observance of Christmas, to the "creche" and Christmas tree cases that made it to the US Supreme Court in the 1980s are the subject of Metzmeier’s article, “The War(s) on Christmas in the Law Books,” in the December 2018 issue of the Louisville Bar Association Bar Briefs.
In the 1660 Colonial Laws of Massachusetts, there is a law for “observing such festivals, as were superstitiously kept in other Countrys, to the great dishonour of God,” and setting a five shilling fine for celebrating Christmas “by forbearing labour, feasting, or any other Way.”
Early Kentucky didn’t ban the holiday but they didn’t officially observe it either. Not until 1868 did a Kentucky statute establish “the twenty-fifth day of December called Christmas” as one of 19th century Kentucky’s few public holidays.
So, on behalf of the law library and the 1867-68 Kentucky legislature: Happy Holidays and a Merry “twenty-fifth day of December called Christmas” to all!
Sources:
The statutes cited in this article can be accessed via HeinOnline’s State Session Laws Library.
The Senate (and House) Journals of the Kentucky legislature are part of our Kentucky collection, which has items back to the 1820s.
The best history of Christmas in America is Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), available at UofL’s Ekstrom Library and the Louisville Free Public Library.
The Battle for Christmas by
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