It is a twisted story, really. But in 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed Christmas. The Pilgrims, who are credited with the first Thanksgiving, were a radical faction of separatists within the Puritan movement in the Church of England (derisively referred to as the Puritans). The Pilgrims had the notion that holidays such as Christmas and Easter were superstitions promoted in other countries by the Church of Rome and its “Popery.” According to mass.gov, the state’s website, the Pilgrims compared these holidays to festivals and were a “great dishonor to God and offense to others.” The idea had come from the Puritans back in England.

All Christmas activities, including dancing, seasonal plays, games, singing carols, cheerful celebration and especially drinking were banned by the Puritan-dominated Parliament of England in 1644, with the Pilgrims of New England following suit, reports Remy Melina, for Live Science.

Christmas trees and decorations were considered to be unholy pagan rituals, Melina wrote in 2010, and the Puritans also banned traditional Christmas foods such as mince pies and pudding. Puritan laws required that stores and businesses remain open all day on Christmas, and town criers walked through the streets on Christmas Eve calling out “No Christmas, no Christmas!”

The ban on Christmas, which made celebrating it a crime, was eventually repealed in Boston in 1681, due to pressure from England, but the law had been in place long enough to break the tradition of the holiday, which was a popular tradition throughout Europe, as well as England, until the Calvinists overthrew the British Crown ending the Civil War. But not everyone in America was a Puritan or a Pilgrim, and few people in America really cared what the Christian radicals had to say on festive holidays, including the residents of the Copper Country. Here was the thing:

The Copper Country was a frontier far removed from New England and its oppressive laws. Work comprised the majority of life; twelve-hour days, six days a week for men, while women often toiled in the home much longer than 12 hours. Work was hard, life was hard. It was monotonous, and — well, mundane. People needed their religion and their churches for more than religious reasons. Religion was a foundation for collective identity with other community members, to be sure; it provided a sense of self in a foreign land in a foreign country. But the churches were important because they provided a common meeting place for others beyond the immediate household. Church activities were important if for no other reason than they created opportunities for community social interaction.

And so, holidays provided an occasion for festivals, or at least festivities. They were an absolute necessity on the frontier, because a festival, a celebration, a dance — they provided a source of joy and merriment in an otherwise gray and dull, often depressing, day-to-day life. And, in spite of what the Pilgrims and the Puritans claimed, Christmas did not dishonor God; it brought people closer to God.

“Christmas Eve was, with us, a season owned of God,” wrote Methodist Missionary to the Ojibwe, Rev. John H. Pitezel in 1846. “We had our house neatly trimmed with evergreens furnished to hand in such abundance, and well lighted.”

From the time that the region was opened by the government for mining in 1843, religion was important to the frontier pioneers, as were their holidays. Holidays were important, too, because the only days, besides Sunday, work stopped were Christmas, the Fourth of July, settling days at the mines, and Election Day.

For a time, though, Christmas seems to have been largely forgotten, at least in the Copper Country. Businesses were opened on Dec. 25, the newspapers printed, the mines operated — Christmas was just another day of the week. During the week preceding Christmas in 1885, there was not a mention of Christmas in the Portage Lake Mining Gazette. But something had happened elsewhere, some 50 years before, that slowly began to change things. It began as a whisper in New York. On Dec. 23, 1823, the New York Sentinel published an anonymous poem titled A Visit From St. Nick. It told the story of a father who caught a glimpse of St. Nicholas, as well as his sleigh and eight reindeer, while he was delivering toys to the children of the house while they slept. Years later, Clement Clarke Moore finally stepped forward as the poem’s author, which is now a Christmas classic titled The Night Before Christmas. Twenty years later, the poem was followed by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Dickens, as we talked about last week, had seen London in the early years of the Victorian Age as the center of British poverty, crime, pollution and unbridled capitalism. A Christmas Carol, a novella, was a bit of a social commentary containing the message that all human beings have an obligation to be kind and charitable toward one another in this life, or face the consequences in the next. It was followed a year later with his 1844 novella, The Chimes, the second of Dickens’ five Christmas books. In this book, the main character, a member of the poor working class, comes to see himself as worthless and that all working class people are wicked and evil. The theme is in keeping with Dickens’ feelings toward British society, thought, and culture of the time. Child labor was justified as a means of keeping children from becoming criminals; Dickens countered that crime was the result of poverty brought on by the Industrial Revolution. In the end of The Chimes, the main character, Like Ebenezer Scrooge, is shown by the spirits that people are not inherently wicked, but succumb to wickedness as a result of their circumstances, or when they no longer believe in, or value, themselves.

Men like Dickens and Moore used the Victorian Age and its corporate greed and tiered class system as a means to force society to look at itself for what it was becoming in its drive for the upper class to accumulate more wealth while the middle class sought to rise higher using the working class as the ladder to do it. On the bottom rung were the laboring children.

But, every cloud has a silver lining, and that was true of the Industrial Revolution. The revolution brought mass production, which lowered the cost of goods. Lower prices increased buying power; wages rose as society transitioned to consumerism. The U.K. and the U.S. began to see the wrongs they had committed against their own children and began to look to nurturing their children rather than exploiting them. Among the inexpensive, mass-produced items that began to appear on store shelves in thousands of stores were toys — and Christmas was the ideal time to present them to children, who, it was finally decided, deserved to be children after all.