The war on Christmas was joined in 1537, when, under the influence of John Calvin, Christmas passed without celebration. Unfortunately, Geneva’s allies, the Bernese insisted on celebrating Christmas, Circumcision, Annunciation and a few other holidays and demanded the Genevans do the same. Calvin, refusing to give into Bernese demands, was exiled from Geneva and the celebration of Christmas reinstated. When Calvin came back to Geneva in 1541 after a period of exile, he began militating for the abolition of the non-Biblical holidays. In 1545, he achieved limited success in seeing the feasts of the Circumcision and Annunciation suppressed, but the war on Christmas was a tougher fight. Finally, in 1550, Calvin managed to get the Genevan authorities to outlaw Christmas and to mandate that communion would be celebrated only on Sundays, and not on “superstitious” pagan dates like December 25. Indeed, on Devember 25, 1550, the city council sat for business as usual, the courts were in session and businesses were all open under penalty of fine. Calvin, as usual, gave his weekday sermon on a book of the Old Testament and noticed something that upset him: there were more people in church than on a typical weekday. A committed soldier in the war on Christmas, Calvin boomed from the pulpit: "I see more people than usual at sermon today. And why? It’ s Christmas day. And who told you? It seems so [to be a holy day] to poor beasts. There’ s the fitting label for all who came to sermon today in honor of the feast… But if you think that Jesus Christ was born today, you are beasts, indeed, rabid beasts."
