The Reformation and the 1800s

Santa Claus hands out gifts to Union soldiers during the US Civil War in Thomas Nast's first Santa Claus cartoon, Harper's Weekly, 1863.
During the Reformation, Protestants condemned Christmas celebration as "trappings of popery" and the "rags of the Beast". The Catholic Church responded by promoting the festival in a more religiously oriented form. When a Puritan parliament triumphed over the King, Charles I of England (1644), Christmas was officially banned (1647). Pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities. For several weeks, Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans.[19] The Restoration (1660) ended the ban, but Christmas celebration was still disapproved of by the Anglican clergy.
By the 1820s, sectarian tension had eased and British writers began to worry that Christmas was dying out. They imagined Tudor Christmas as a time of heartfelt celebration, and efforts were made to revive the holiday. The book A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens played a major role in reinventing Christmas as a holiday emphasizing family, goodwill, and compassion (as opposed to communal celebration and hedonistic excess).[20]
The Puritans of New England disapproved of Christmas and celebration was outlawed in Boston (1659-81). Meanwhile, Virginia and New York celebrated freely. Christmas fell out of favor in the U.S. after the American Revolution, when it was considered an "English custom".

Father Christmas persuades the jury of his innocence in The Examination and Tryal of Father Christmas (1686) by Josiah King
Interest was revived by several short stories by Washington Irving in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819) and by "Old Christmas" (1850) which depict harmonous warm-hearted holiday traditions Irving claimed to have observed in England. Although some argue that Irving invented the traditions he describes, they were imitated by his American readers.[21] German immigrants and the homecomings of the Civil War helped promote the holiday. Christmas was declared a federal holiday in the U.S. in 1870.
Irving writes of Saint Nicholas "riding over the tops of the trees, in that selfsame waggon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children."[22] The connection between Santa Claus and Christmas was popularized by the poem "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (1822) by Clement Clarke Moore, which depicts Santa driving a sleigh pulled by reindeer and distributing gifts to children. His image was created by German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902), who drew a new image annually beginning in 1863. By the 1880s, Nast's Santa had evolved into the form we now recognize. The image was standardized by advertisers in the 1920s.[23]

Modern times

In the midst of World War I, there was an unofficial Christmas truce between German and British troops in France (1914). Soldiers on both sides spontaneously began to sing Christmas carols and stopped fighting. The truce began on Christmas Day and continued for some time afterward.[24] (Although many stories about the truce include a soccer game between the trench lines (often reported as a 3-2 victory for the Germans) there is no evidence that this event actually occurred.)
In modern times, the United States has experienced some controversy over the nature of Christmas, and whether it is a religious or a secular holiday. Because the US government recognizes Christmas as an official holiday, some have thought that this violates separation of church and state. This has been brought to trial several times, including Lynch v. Donnelly (1984)[25] and Ganulin v. United States (1999).[1] On December 6, 1999, the verdict for Ganulin v. United States (1999). declared that "the establishment of Christmas Day as a legal public holiday does not violate the Establishment Clause because it has a valid secular purpose." This decision was appealed, and upheld by the Supreme Court on December 19, 2000.
More recently, some Christians have protested against what is seen as a secularization of Christmas, leading some to believe that the holiday is under attack from a general secular trend or from persons and organizations with a deliberate or unconscious anti-Christian agenda; the attack on Christmas has also been blamed on political correctness.