Christmas is our nation’s first federal holiday.

Christmas was first declared as a national holiday back in 1789. Since this time there has been an unbroken history of official acknowledgement of the holiday by all three branches of our federal government. So, when the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island was sued for displaying a nativity scene, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Lynch v. Donelly (1985) that the Constitution does not require a complete separation of church and state. Instead, the high court ruled that “It affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolera...