Thanksgiving: The Yankee Holy Day Born From Anti-Christmas Theology

America treats Thanksgiving as if it were carved into granite at the dawn of the republic, a timeless national feast reaching back into misty antiquity. But strip away modern sentimentality, and you find something very different. Thanksgiving is not ancient. It is not universal. And it is certainly not rooted in historic Christian tradition.

Thanksgiving, as Americans know it today, is a Yankee holy day, shaped by the theology of the same Puritans who once banned Christmas, fined its observance, and sought to erase the liturgical calendar from Christian memory. It is a New England invention that rose to national prominence only because the North conquered both the South and the American imagination.

To understand Thanksgiving, you must understand the people who created it.

The Puritans: Anti-Christmas and Proud of It

The English Puritans despised the Church calendar inherited from centuries of Christian practice. To them, holy days not explicitly commanded in Scripture were “popish inventions.” Christmas in particular offended them. It bore the scent of old England, old Christendom, and old piety. Worse, it encouraged festivity — and festivity was simply not a Puritan virtue.

Thus in 1659, Massachusetts passed a law fining anyone who attempted to keep Christmas:

“Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas… shall pay five shillings.”

Shops were ordered to stay open on December 25. Ministers were forbidden to preach Christmas sermons. For the Puritan mind, Christmas was not a celebration of Christ’s nativity, but a “Romish” corruption, unbiblical and disorderly.

These are the people who founded New England. Their descendants shaped early American culture. And their theology would birth a new kind of holy day altogether.

If You Won’t Keep Christmas, You Must Invent a Substitute

Human beings naturally order time. Remove sacred time, and something else rushes in to replace it.

The Puritans abolished Christmas and the entire liturgical calendar, but they still felt the human need for rhythm and meaning. Their solution was to create occasional days of fasting and thanksgiving, tied not to sacred history but to “providences” — harvests, victories, or deliverance from hardship.

Over time, these occasional days hardened into an annual rhythm. And eventually one of them — tied loosely to the survival of the Plymouth colony — became the “Thanksgiving Day” later mythologized in classrooms.

Thanksgiving was never a Christian liturgical feast.
It was a Puritan civic feast, born from the rejection of Christian feasts.

This is the heart of the matter.

Thanksgiving Was Never a Southern Holiday

Before the Civil War, Thanksgiving was almost exclusively a New England observance. The South, shaped by Anglican tradition, had:

• Christmas
• Easter
• Advent
• Saints’ days (in many communities)
• Epiphany
• A stable and ancient liturgical rhythm

The South had no theological, cultural, or ecclesiastical need for a Puritan holy day.

Southern diaries of the 1700s and early 1800s mention Christmas with joy, but rarely — if ever — Thanksgiving. When Robert E. Lee proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving during the War, it was a political concession, not an ingrained tradition.

Southerners historically viewed Thanksgiving the same way they viewed Puritanism itself: a Northern peculiarity, born of theology alien to Anglican sensibilities.

Thanksgiving Becomes National — By Northern Power, Not Consensus

George Washington proclaimed a day of thanksgiving, yes — but the practice never took deep national root. It remained largely a New England custom until the Civil War.

The decisive moment came in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln — guided by New England’s cultural class and its providential rhetoric — declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. The South, needless to say, was not consulted.

After the war, during Reconstruction, federal authority and Northern influence spread the New England holy day across the reunited country. By the time the 20th century arrived, Thanksgiving had become as American as the Fourth of July — but only because the South had been forced to assimilate to Northern custom.

In short:

Thanksgiving became “national” not by tradition, but by triumph.

The Irony No One Notices

Consider the deep irony:

• The Puritans who created Thanksgiving banned Christmas.
• The South, with its Anglican heritage, kept Christmas joyfully and continuously.
• America now celebrates both holidays, but with Thanksgiving often overshadowing Christmas in civic life.
• And few realize that Thanksgiving exists largely as a replacement for the very feast the Puritans hated.

Thanksgiving carries within it the DNA of a worldview that distrusted color, joy, celebration, festivity, and feasts — the heart of Christian timekeeping for two millennia.

The modern American family gathering is pleasant enough, but its theological ancestry is unmistakable: sober, didactic, anti-liturgical, and thoroughly New England.

What the South Retained — and Why It Matters

The South kept something older, richer, and wiser — the Christian ordering of time. Christmas, Easter, Epiphany, Pentecost, Advent, and the long story of the Church’s year weave human life into the story of Christ.

Where the Puritans flattened time, the Church sanctified it.

Where the Puritans replaced the Nativity with national providence, the Church proclaimed:

“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Where the Puritans refused the joy of the feast, the Church remembered that the Incarnation is, in fact, a feast worthy of celebration.

Thanksgiving Isn’t Evil — But It Isn’t Ancient

Thanksgiving has become harmless enough today. It brings families together and encourages gratitude. Nothing is wrong with that.

But the origins matter.

Thanksgiving is not part of the Christian tradition.
It is not part of the Southern tradition.
It is not part of the Anglican tradition.

It is, historically and theologically, a Yankee holy day, the product of a religious movement that rejected Christmas — the very feast that heralds the birth of the Savior.

To remember that fact is not to reject the holiday, but simply to understand it. History, after all, is never neutral. Holidays are never innocent. They come from somewhere, carry something, and shape us whether we realize it or not.

Thanksgiving is a window into America’s Puritan past.
Christmas is a window into Christendom’s sacred past.

And the Church must always know the difference.