The anti-Christmas movement remained strong in the colonial era. Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Congregationalists were firmly against it, and Methodists who arrived in 1765 celebrated quietly and only in church. But other American colonies were more tolerant of Christmas celebrations. Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, which were not Puritan, celebrated modestly, constrained in part by the meager conditions of settler life. New Amsterdam, the future New York City, saw Christmas celebrations in the traditions of the many foreigners who came there to trade. Florida, under Spanish Catholic rule, celebrated midnight Mass, as did New Orleans, Maine, and Texas, which were settled by French Catholics.
Where there were Dutch, French Huguenots, and Germans, notably in New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania, the light of Christmas slowly crept in, as if under a locked door. German-speaking Moravians settled Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1740. They celebrated Christmas more than any other Protestant denomination, and they did so in a way that eventually became familiar in America. They brought with them the custom of the decorated tree, complete with a little yard, or putz, in which they placed tiny carved figures of the Christ child, Mary, and Joseph. To this they added a winding road populated by up to three hundred wooden animals marching two by two, as if journeying from Noah’s ark to be present at the birth of Jesus. The charm of the figures of the Holy Family apparently obscured the fact that they were tiny statues being used in religious observance, which their fellow Protestants were strictly against.
Over time, the celebration of Christmas was introduced into Sunday-school curriculums, first in 1854 as “The Christmas Gift,” a story in The Well-Spring, a Congregationalist weekly for Sabbath schools. Secular magazines also began including stories about Christmas, such as the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” attributed to the New York scholar Clement Clarke Moore. It features St. Nicholas of Myra, patron of children and merchants, whose December 6 feast day in Europe was marked by giving children presents and retelling folk tales about him. Multiple countries had given him different names: Germans came to call him Kris Kringle, and in America—it is unclear just how—he became known as Santa Claus.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, political and economic troubles in the German states inspired a wave of emigration to the United States that first peaked in the 1850s. Arriving in ever larger numbers after the Civil War, they formed communities where they spoke their own dialects and held on to their traditions, like decorated indoor trees and gift-giving at Christmas. Both Catholic and Protestant Germans celebrated, and even German-Jewish immigrants enjoyed Christmas for its reminder of home.