College tenure committees are required to assess three parts of a faculty member’s job: teaching, publishing, and service. What counts as a publication for performance review purposes is sometimes the subject of heated debate. Among the questions the committee discusses are: Is the book or article required to be published in a peer-reviewed outlet? Does it need to be published in a highly-regarded outlet? Can it be co-authored and, if so, how many co-authors can there be? Can it be fictional storytelling of the sort made famous by Critical Race theorists?

Personally, I take a broad view of what constitutes a publication for the purposes of retention, promotion, and tenure. Indeed, I think op-eds should count, although a faculty member who relies solely or heavily upon op-eds would have a difficult time convincing me that op-eds are enough.

Op-eds serve other useful functions too.

For example, they bring attention to both the professor who wrote the op-ed and the institution at which he or she works. The provost at the university where I taught once told me that an op-ed in USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times is worth about $250,000 in free advertising for the school. Put simply, administrators love faculty speech when it doubles as marketing.

Op-eds also share a professor’s expertise with a broader audience than the typically small group of academics who specialize in, say, the legal history of colonial America—the professor as “public intellectual,” if you will. Related to that, op-eds can help promote a professor’s new book by utilizing the research in the book to address an issue that is currently in the news. I have published more than 130 op-eds, and almost all of mine used the research from my academic writing to comment on a current event. The same can be said for other professors who publish op-eds.

In that spirit, and in the spirit of the holiday season, what follows is an op-ed about why the Pilgrims celebrated Thanksgiving but not Christmas. This particular op-ed draws from my recent Cambridge University Press book, Law and Religion in Colonial America: The Dissenting Colonies.

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Why the Pilgrims Celebrated Thanksgiving but Not Christmas

The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, in what today is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, fled England as Separatists in the early seventeenth century: they denied the validity of the Church of England and wished to practice their faith in their own way. They believed the English government’s failure to fully purge the Church of England of Catholic ritual and practice was a sign of corruption that made it impossible to find salvation within that church.

The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in December 1620. Consistent with longstanding English custom, in autumn 1621, they celebrated a successful harvest, the “First Thanksgiving in Plymouth.”

Edward Winslow provided an eyewitness account. “[O]ur harvest being gotten in, our governour sent foure men on fowling, that so we might after a speciall manner rejoyce together,” he wrote in a December 1621 letter. “And although it be not always so plentifull, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so farre from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plentie.”

The Pilgrims’ attitude towards celebrating Christmas was different. On the first December 25 of the Pilgrims’ sojourn to English America, they went to the field and worked as if it were any other day.

William Bradford, who would become the longest-tenured governor of Plymouth Colony and the person whose journal would help to mythologize Plymouth’s history, chronicled what happened the following year: members of a “new company excused themselves and said it went against their consciences to worke on ye day.” Bradford then warned them that “it was against his conscience that they should play and others worke.” According to Bradford, after that “nothing hath been attempted that way, at least not openly.”

The question remains: why did the Pilgrims celebrate Thanksgiving but not Christmas? The answer traces to the reason the Pilgrims came to the New World in the first place: namely, their religious beliefs.

Indeed, before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, they resided among the Dutch beginning in or about 1607. But as merely one tolerated sect among many in the Netherlands, the Pilgrims not only began to fear they would lose their identity; they came to resent the licentiousness and temptations of that country.

Ecclesial considerations made matters worse.

The Pilgrims endorsed a system of independent congregations, whereas the Dutch church promoted a hierarchical structure with synods, assemblies, and other central governing bodies. John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrim church in the Netherlands, criticized the Dutch church for several of its practices. He thought ministers in the Dutch church were pretentious and had too much power. He rejected the idea that only ministers could preach because preaching was a lay function and it was the province of the entire eldership to teach as well as govern.

He also criticized the Dutch church’s use of set prayers, even the Lord’s Prayer. And most important for present purposes, the Dutch could not be true Christians, Robinson insisted, so long as they continued “benightedly celebrating Easter and Christmas, for which there was no warrant in Scripture.”

In short, the Pilgrims celebrated Thanksgiving because it was grounded in English custom, and they shunned Christmas because they believed it was inconsistent with the Bible. In the oft-quoted words of William Bradford, “[t]o keep a good conscience, and walk in such a way as God has prescribed in his Word, is a thing which I must prefer before you all, and above life itself.”