Pope, not God in his word had appointed Holy days to traine up the people in ignorance and ydleness, wherby half of the year, and more, was overpassed (by their ydle holy-dayes) in loytering and vaine pastimes & c., in restrayning men from their handy labors and occupations.6It should be stressed that the Puritans and Presbyterians were not the only descendants of the Reformation who held to this belief. Even the inheritors of the Radical Reformation, the Anabaptists, Baptists, and Quakers loathed Holy days as Papist abominations without scriptural warrant. This united support for the abandonment of feast days was to prove particularly important in the colonies of New England, where the celebration of feast days was to become virtually unheard of outside of the few Anglican enclaves that existed.7While the Reformers in the Anglican church corporately decided to retain these holy days in 1562 and endeavored unsuccessfully to gain control of them, the Puritans decided to strike them from their calendars entirely for the above stated reasons.When the Puritans assembled at Westminster in the 1640s to draw up the Standards that would define Presbyterian belief for centuries to follow, they did not mince words regarding holy days. The Directory for the Publick Worship of God, which was a part of the original Westminster Standards adopted by parliament, was intended to guide and inform (but not liturgically constrain like the Anglican Book of Common Prayer) the worship of the Church. Included in the Directory was the bold theological declaration:THERE is no day commanded in scripture to be kept holy under the gospel but the Lords day, which is the Christian Sabbath.Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.8The Puritans had declared Holy Days theologically unwarranted, and as they began to gain the upper hand in the English Parliament, they moved decisively against both the public and ecclesiastical celebration of Holy Days. In 1642 Parliament outlawed the seasonal plays and pageants that proliferated around holy days and purposely met on every Christmas from 1644 to 1652 to show their disdain for what they felt was an unwarranted innovation that produced nothing but moral abuses. Finally in 1652 after the Triumph of the Puritan Statesman Oliver Cromwell and the beheading of Charles I, the observance of Holy days was strongly prohibited and ministers who preached on the birth of Christ on Christmas risked imprisonment. Shops were required to keep open and Churches were heavily fined for attempting to put up decorations.9As was to be expected, many of the common English people and Anglican clergy, were not at all happy with this Puritan suppression of their holiday. Consequently, after the death of Cromwell and the restoration of both the King and the primacy of the Anglican Church, the celebration of holy days was once again declared legal. Their celebration returned as a permanent part of both the English secular and ecclesiastical landscape.In Scotland however, the Reformation was more thoroughgoing and the Presbyterian Church successfully purged holy days almost entirely from their landscape. All English attempts