Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes
Shepherds at the grange, Where the Babe was born, Sang with many a change, Christmas carols until morn.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. "A Christmas Carol." The Seaside and the Fireside, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850, p. 138.
This is the first state to make Christmas a legal holiday. The reason that this is important is when there were many legal battles of public schools and municipalities celebrating Christmas and exhibiting crèches and Christmas trees, several of the proponents argued the doctrine of originalism—namely that we should not declare unconstitutional anything that was common and accepted at the time of the Constitution’s writing, debating, and ratification. They argued that the First Amendment was not intended to cover celebrations of Christmas as the founding fathers would not have made unconstitutional that which was common. While the principle of originalism has advocates and critics, the originalism theory does not hold regarding Christmas because Christmas was not commonly celebrated in early America. See {629845} and {629843} for more evidence on this point.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the Fireside Poets from New England.