In Boston, the Puritan government of Massachusetts Bay Colony officially banned the celebration of Christmas, imposing a five-shilling fine on anyone found feasting, drinking, or taking the day off work. The ban reflected the Puritan view that Christmas was an unbiblical pagan innovation with no scriptural warrant, and that its traditional revelry encouraged vice. The law remained in effect until 1681, long after the Restoration in England had revived Christmas festivities.

The Puritan Christmas ban became a rich source of irony and nostalgia in later American poetry, representing the extreme end of religious asceticism. Poets from the nineteenth century onward used the ban as a symbolic counterpoint to the warmth and communal feeling associated with Christmas in verse, and it influenced the tradition of American narrative poetry that contrasts Puritan severity with human joy, a theme explored by poets like Robert Lowell in his meditations on New England's religious heritage.