Everyone thinks of Christmas as a Christian holiday. The story of the birth of Jesus Christ is recorded in the New Testament. It is the account that starts the documentation of His life. He, of course, is the central figure of Christianity. Unlike the biblical feasts of Israel, however, there is no biblical mandate for the birth of Jesus to be celebrated. Many of the traditions we now incorporate in our celebrations did not start until much later in history. Most of them are not even rooted in Christianity. Here are ten popular American Christmas traditions, how they came to be celebrated and whether they correlate to anything related to the Christian faith. ONE: The Christmas Tree The first identification of the Christmas tree as an American Christmas tradition was in 1832 when Harriet Martineau popularized it in New England [1] . It took until the 1850’s, after several waves of German immigration, for the Christmas tree to become a widespread tradition. The idea of the tree...

Christmas is a holiday rooted in the Christian tradition, so why is it a federal holiday? Ulysses S. Grant won the 1868 presidential election. He was inaugurated in 1869. The country was recovering from the Civil War. The president had a large challenge to reunite the nation. One tool that looked promising was to institute some federal holidays that everyone could celebrate together. Until this time, states designated their own holidays but it took an 1870 bill from Illinois Congressman Burton Chauncey Cook to name four new federal holidays. They were New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. President Grant signed the bill into law on June 28, 1870, four days after it had passed the Senate. This law only applied to federal employees and financial institutions within the District of Columbia. Fifteen years later, the paid holidays were extended to federal employees throughout the country [1] . By 1916, the Christmas holiday was given to employees of the Unite...

It took until 1850 and Kentucky’s third state constitution for the Commonwealth to guarantee public education for its citizens. The 1891 constitution [1] is still in effect which mandates the legislature to provide a common fund to pay for a state-wide school system that does not discriminate by race or color. The constitution does not permit the fund to be used to support sectarian or denominational schools. Initially, the Kentucky legislators were apathetic to the idea of a state public school system and resistant to the thought that anyone should have to pay for the education of someone else’s child. For decades the legislature prioritized roads, bridges and railways over education. These have been characterized as “short-term” goals by historian, Frank Mathies, that were more certain to be rewarded with votes [2] . It took the combined lobbying of the Kentucky Education Society founded in 1827, the Kentucky Common School Society, founded in 1834, and the Kentucky Association of ...

The Pew Research Center’s work on “Religion and Public Life” is available online. It includes articles, raw data and analysis. Consistent with the purpose of this blog to provide K-12 public school teachers in Kentucky with resources about the history of Christianity in the Commonwealth, this post is about an October 3, 2019 article, “Religion in the Public School ” [1] . The article summarizes the history of court rulings about the national debate since the mid-twentieth century about religion in the classroom. It considers school prayer, the 1954 inclusion of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, religion in the curriculum and the rights that students and teachers have to express their personal religious convictions at school. All of these issues are grounded in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. None of these rulings prohibit teaching about religion or using religious texts in the classroom. All of them have been ruled on based on...