( CNN ) -- In 1834 , Illinois voted whether to adopt Christmas as a legal holiday . Among those voting `` nay '' was the young Abraham Lincoln . In 1834 , Lincoln had not yet grown out of his atheist phase , but the young Lincoln 's lack of faith in God -- and his lifelong disbelief in the divinity of Christ -- does not explain his vote . In 1834 , a vote against Christmas was a safe , even a conventional vote . Not a single state in the Union closed its offices for Christmas on December 25 in 1834 . Lincoln marked his first Christmas as President , in December 1861 , by holding a Cabinet meeting in the morning and a dinner party in the evening . The Lincoln family never had a White House tree and sent no Christmas cards . Nobody was much shocked by these omissions . The public Christmas as Americans know it today did not take form until late in the 19th century . George Washington issued a proclamation on Thanksgiving , but he never made any statement about Christmas ( or Easter for that matter ) . The first state to recognize Christmas as a holiday was Alabama , in 1836 , but the North and especially New England resisted . Not until 1856 did Massachusetts accept Christmas as a holiday . The federal government took until 1870 to follow . There 's debate on the point , but it seems that Benjamin Harrison was the first president to allow a Christmas tree inside the White House in 1889 . The tradition of lighting a tree on the White House grounds commenced with Calvin Coolidge in 1923 . Dwight Eisenhower sent the first White House Christmas cards . Eisenhower 's cards , however , were always determinedly `` seasonal . '' It waited until John F. Kennedy in 1963 to send a card that depicted a nativity scene . This late flowering of Christmas observance reflects two facts about Christmas that seldom get much attention in our public debates about the `` war on Christmas . '' In its first century , the national government practiced a separation of church and state far sharper than anything Americans would accept today . One example : From its founding in 1775 , the federal post office delivered mail on Sundays . As evangelical forms of Christianity spread after 1800 , the new denominations demanded an end to this desecration of the Sabbath . Some postmasters took it upon themselves to close operations . In response , Congress voted in 1810 to require all postmasters to work at least one hour on Sunday , on pain of losing their positions . The Americans of the founding generations insisted upon separation of church and state not because they were irreligious , but precisely because so many of them were so very intensely religious . Because religion mattered so much to early Americans , so did religious differences . Calvinists and Baptists , Methodists and Catholics , the grandest Boston rector and the rawest frontier preacher disagreed , sometimes to the point of outright violence . Anti-Catholic riots ripped apart Boston , Philadelphia and Bath , Maine , between the 1830s and 1850s . These contending denominations could , however , agree at least that they did not want a remote government in Washington favoring some religious practices over others . Better to deliver the mail on Sunday than debate who was right about the Sabbath . Better to issue no religious proclamations than let presidents pick and choose which holy days to mark and how to mark them . A second fact also explains the coolness of the early national government to Christianity : the keen awareness of many 19th century Christians of the non-Christian origins of many Christmas traditions . Christmas is celebrated near the date of the old Roman holiday of Saturnalia . Gift-giving on the day was also a Roman tradition . The Christmas tree , the hanging of wreaths and house-to-house caroling hark back to the pre-Christian German holiday of Yule . Calvinists had abandoned their outright ban on Christmas observance on the late 17th century . But many Protestant denominations retained a lingering suspicion of the holiday until deep into the 19th century . Two changes made possible the coalescing of an official Christmas holiday over the 40 years from Calvin Coolidge 's outdoor Christmas tree to John F. Kennedy 's sacral Christmas card : The fading of distinctions between Christians and the decline of theology within Christianity . The once all-crucial distinctions between Calvinists and Arminians ( whose beliefs came from Dutch reformist Jacobus Arminius ) and between even Protestants and Catholics have blurred . The once-vivid mistrust of trees and tinsel and burning logs has vanished , as American Christianity evolved away from a creed in which people believed and into a set of practices that people did . If Christians decorate trees , then tree decorating must be Christian -- no matter how or why the custom started and what the custom meant to the people who started it . Devout Christian believers can still be counted in the millions of course . Surrounding them , however , is a larger and more nebulous group for whom what was once a faith has become a folkway . For them , a Christmas tree or a nativity scene is less a declaration of individual belief than it is an expression of group identity . Many Americans feel this group identity to be under threat by changes in recent years . When they champion `` Christmas as it was , '' they do not mean `` Christmas as it was for George Washington or Abraham Lincoln '' and much less `` Christmas as it was for Martin Luther or Jonathan Edwards . '' They mean , `` Christmas as it was when I was young . '' That is why we have eruptions such as last week 's flap over the whiteness of Santa Claus . If your Christmas celebrates the appearance of God Himself in the form of a human baby , it wo n't have a lot of room for a gift-giving elf and flying reindeer . But if Santa is at most tangential to the Christmas of faith , he is utterly central to the Christmas of folkway . It is the Christmas of folkway that is the Christmas so passionately defended by those who talk about `` the war on Christmas . '' The Christmas of Santa and Rudolph , and trees and stockings , and candy canes and `` Merry Christmas '' greetings began to be most publicly celebrated in the United States only after -- and only because -- the religious impetus for the holiday had already dwindled away . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum .
David Frum : Lincoln , like many in America , did n't observe Christmas as an official holiday . He says in late 19th century , Americans began to observe Christmas as a public holiday . Early Americans kept a sharp separation of church and state , he says . Frum : ` ` ' on Christmas '' was a reaction to a perceived threat to folkway , not religion .