How Unitarians and Universalists Helped to Invent "The Holidays" in the U.S.

Black and white pen and ink drawing of a decorated Christmas tree. Three adults - a man and two women - five children are standing in front of the tree, looking at it and each other. The caption at the bottom reads "The Christmas Tree"

Godey’s Lady’s Book, December 1850

As we close out 2025, the year that marked the 200th anniversary of the founding of the American Unitarian Association, we wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on the important role that Unitarians and Universalists – and Unitarian Universalists (UU) – played in creating what we think of as “the holidays” in the United States. And as members of the faith tradition have done throughout history, we were not surprised to learn that the denomination’s shared values and strong principles have helped to shape traditions both inside Unitarian Universalism and out.

It is true that Universalists and Unitarians played an integral role specifically in influencing how the Christmas holiday is celebrated – or even that it is celebrated at all. During the 17th and most of the 18th centuries, the English Puritan settlers who colonized New England had been largely successful in eliminating Christmas as a festival. But starting in the late 18th century, first the Universalists and then the Unitarians reintroduced it to the region. This is according to The Battle for Christmas, by Stephen Nissenbaum, professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst:

Largely a rural sect, Universalists openly celebrated Christmas from the earliest stages of their existence in New England. The Universalist community in Boston held a special Christmas Day service in 1789, even before their congregation was officially organized, and in the early nineteenth century it was this denomination that proselytized for Christmas more actively than any other.

The Unitarians were close behind… Unitarians were calling for the public observance of Christmas by about 1800. They did so in full knowledge that it was not a biblically sanctioned holiday, and that December 25 was probably not the day on which Jesus was born. They wished to celebrate the holiday not because God had ordered them to do so but because they themselves wished to. And they celebrated it in the hope that their own observance might help to purge the holiday of its associations with seasonal excess and disorder.

Unitarians Popularized the Christmas Tree

So it’s not a surprise that the United States maintains some of the traditions established by those early Unitarians and Universalists during the holiday season, even in current times. For instance, as many UUs already know, it was a Unitarian minister, Rev. Charles Follen, who first introduced and popularized the decorated indoor Christmas tree to Americans. As a 2013 story in UU World told it, Follen – an ardent abolitionist and believer in religious liberty – brought the tradition from his native Germany.

The German tradition of Christmas trees had been seeded in the United States before that famed evening in the Follens’ parlor, but the sight of a tree indoors, festooned with decorations, was still captivatingly new. The Follens’ tree was nudged into history with the help of their friend and sister reformer, Harriet Martineau, who wrote about it in the popular magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. Martineau could hardly find enough adjectives to describe the tree’s loveliness, and the children, she reported, were speechless: “All eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps arrested.” Historians cite that tree, illuminated by Martineau’s write-up, among the first Christmas trees in the United States.

Even today, the church named for Rev. Charles Follen, Follen Church Unitarian Universalist in Lexington, Massachusetts, maintains the tradition by operating a Free Christmas Trees program that allows people to donate Christmas trees to families who otherwise might not afford them.

Hymns and Christmas Music

But the impact that 19th century Unitarians and Universalists had on Christmas and the holidays does not begin and end with the tree. In fact, Unitarian ministers and lay people wrote or translated some of the nation’s most enduring Christmas songs, some of which reflected on issues of their day (a tradition that remains a part of UU hymns contemporarily).

One of the most prominent examples is “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” written by Unitarian minister Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears in 1849. In a 2002 UU World article on Sears and the hymn, Ken Sawyer wrote, “it has long been assumed to be Sears’s response to the just ended Mexican-American War. Sears’s pacifism would take second place to his commitment to abolishing slavery in the Civil War, but his carol remains, repeated all over the world every year.”

Similar themes are explored in “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” which is adapted from an 1863 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A lifelong Unitarian, Longfellow experienced the death of his first wife, Mary, due to a miscarriage and then lost his second wife, Fanny, in 1861 when her dress caught on fire. Two years later, when his son Charley was injured in battle during the Civil War, Longfellow poured out his anguish into the poem “Christmas Bells.” In 2014, the UUA’s Gail Forsyth-Vail asked us to imagine both the suffering that Longfellow experienced – and the hope that his faith brought him, which is reflected in the song.

Chronologically between the two songs lies “O Holy Night,” which was originally a French poem called “Minuit, Chrétiens.” In 1855, a Unitarian minister, Rev. John Sullivan Dwight, who was also known as the leading music critic in the United States at the time, translated the lyrics into English. According to the Jesuit magazine, America, Dwight’s translation also reflected political beliefs. “Dwight’s translation confronted listeners with the truth that Christ came to free humanity from sin, and therefore aligned the Christian witness with the abolitionist cause that sought to eliminate the evil of chattel slavery. It is thus unsurprising that ‘O Holy Night’ gained fast favor among Northerners during the Civil War,” wrote Delaney Coyne in a 2023 article on the song.

Kwanzaa and the Holiday Season

December second, Kwanzaa first celebrated (1966). Dr. Mona Lana Karenga, Kwanzaa's founder, received some of the money needed to develop and publicize Kwanzaa through a UU a fund set up to support black empowerment.

In the 20th century, Unitarian Universalists began to recognize that there were more holidays during the “holiday season” than the Christian ones. Perhaps the most prominent example of this is the role that the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) played in Kwanzaa. The UUA provided funding to Dr. Maulana Karenga, who established the holiday in 1966, through a fund that the association had designated to support Black empowerment. You can learn more about the role that Unitarian Universalism played in connection to Kwanzaa at this 2021 Leader Lab video interview of Dr. Mtangulizi Sanyika, a UU leader in this period, and find additional reflections and resources at UUWorld.org and the UUA’s website.

So during this holiday season, as we continue to face the darkness that exists in our current world, let us also follow the example of our Universalist and Unitarian forbears, who helped to create our understanding of who we are as a people — and who we can become.