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    Christmas-keeping even entered into print culture during the Andros regime. The most dramatic example was an almanac, written by a resident of Saybrook, Connecticut, named John Tully and published in Boston during each of the three years of Dominion government, 1687–89. We have already seen that the Puritans purged New England’s almanacs of all reference to Christmas and the various saints’ days of the English church calendar. But Tully boldly labeled December 25 in capital letters, as “CHRISTMAS-DAY,” and he also added every one of the red-letter days recognized by the Church of England. December 21 thereby became “S. THOMAS,” December 26 was “S. STEVEN,” and December 27 was “INNOCENTS.” (In all likelihood, Tully used capital letters simply because his Boston printer did not have any red ink.) The following year,Tully’s almanac was published with the official imprimatur of Andros’s deputy, Edwin Randolph, on the title page. 31
    That same year, Tully made an even more dramatic gesture to signify his incorporation of English popular culture. At the end of his 1688 almanac Tully added a series of monthly “prognostications,” all of them satirical and most of them bawdy or scatological. For example, he concluded his prognostication for the month of March by announcing that if it failed to come true, the reader should “light tobacco, or make bum-fodder with our Observations” (in other words, use the pages of his almanac to wipe their asses). For February, Tully wrote:
    The Nights are still cold and long, which may cause great Conjunction betwixt the Male and Female Planets of our sublunary Orb, the effects whereof may be seen about nine months after, and portend great charges of Midwife, Nurse, and Naming the Bantling.
    Tully’s prognostication for December was a verse that opened by referring to the feasting that would take place during the Christmas season:
    This month the Cooks do very early rise,
To roast their meat, & make their Christmas pies.
    And it went on to associate this feasting with the social inversion of rich and poor.
    Poor men at rich men’s tables their guts forrage
With roast beef, mince-pies, pudding & plum porridge.
    In prose, Tully added: “This month, Money & Rum will be in great request; and he that hath the first shall not need fear wanting the latter.” 32
    T HE OVERTHROW of the Dominion of New England in 1689 put a stop to this flurry of popular culture, and it ushered in two decades in which there is little in the public record about Christmas. That changed in 1711, when the Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston recorded some disturbing news in his diary for December 30: “I hear of a number of young people of both sexes, belonging, many of them, to my flock, who have had on the Christmas-night, this last week, a Frolick, a revelling feast, and Ball [i.e., dance]….” The very next year Mather denounced the holiday in a sermon, published immediately after its delivery under the title
Grace Defended
. The biblical text on which he based his sermon, drawn from the Epistle of Jude, showed what was on Mather’s mind: The text he chose was an attack on certain early Christians who had deceitfully “crept into” the early Christian church, using religion as a cover for sexual license, “giving themselves over to fornication”—“ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness.” (Mather substituted the word “wantonness.”) 33

    Christmas in a New England Almanac . The December page from John Tully’s notorious 1688 Boston almanac. Along with weather predictions, Tully brazenly (and in capital letters) named Christmas and the Anglican saints’ days.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)
    Mather returned to the same topic in 1713, in a treatise titled
Advice from the Watch-Tower
. This new treatise cut a broader swath than
Grace Defended
. It dealt with a whole battery of practices that were threatening to subvert New England culture from