Drive through the rolling snow-covered farmlands of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or Holmes County, Ohio, in mid-December, and the contrast between the modern world and the Old Order Amish community is striking. While neighboring towns glow with inflatable lawn ornaments, flashing LED roof lights, and crowded shopping mall parking lots, Amish farmhouses sit in serene, unlit stillness behind white fences, with horse-drawn buggies trotting quietly down the road. This visual absence of commercial glitz leads many outsiders to assume that the Amish do not celebrate Christmas at all. In reality, the Amish cherish Christmas deeply—observing a quiet, two-day sacred holiday anchored in humility, schoolhouse plays, homemade gifts, and massive multi-generational family feasts.
Why You Won’t See Christmas Trees, Lights, or Santa Claus
The Old Order Amish way of life is governed by the Ordnung—the unwritten code of community conduct rooted in the biblical principles of Gelassenheit (yieldedness to God, humility, and simplicity) and separation from the vanity of the outside world. Because most Old Order Amish homes remain disconnected from the public electrical grid, stringing flashing electric fairy lights across the porch is out of the question from the start.
More importantly, the Amish avoid three major pillars of mainstream commercial Christmas for specific theological reasons:
- No Cut Evergreen Trees Indoors: Most Old Order Amish districts prohibit bringing a cut fir tree inside the house and hanging glass ornaments on it, viewing it as a worldly decoration with pagan roots that distracts from the simplicity of Christ’s birth—though many Amish homemakers happily arrange fresh pine boughs with pine cones and candles along kitchen windowsills and mantels.
- No Santa Claus: The Amish do not tell their children stories about Santa Claus, flying reindeer, or North Pole elves. Amish parents believe that teaching children to believe in a magical gift-bringing figure mixes falsehood into a holy season and shifts a child’s gratitude away from Jesus and their parents.
- No Extravagant Debt: Rather than rushing out on Black Friday to buy expensive electronics, Amish gift-giving is modest, practical, and often handmade.
The One-Room Schoolhouse Christmas Program
If you want to see the joyful build-up to an Amish Christmas, look inside a rural one-room Amish schoolhouse during the final week of classes before December twenty-fifth. Taught by a young unmarried Amish woman up through the eighth grade, the thirty or so pupils spend weeks in December practicing for the annual Christmas Program, which parents, grandparents, and neighbors pack into the tiny wooden desks to watch.
Because the Amish do not play musical instruments (viewing instruments as worldly pride), the schoolchildren sing multi-part Christmas hymns and German carols entirely a cappella, recite long memorized Christmas poems, and perform moral and humorous skits about farm life and the Nativity in Bethlehem. At the end of the program, the students exchange names they drew weeks earlier and hand out treat bags stuffed with crisp apples, oranges, peanuts in the shell, candy canes, and homemade whoopie pies and cutout sugar cookies.
December 25 and “Second Christmas” on December 26
On Christmas morning, December twenty-fifth, the day begins with quiet family prayer, the reading of the Nativity account from the Gospel of Luke in High German and Pennsylvania Dutch, and the opening of modest gifts. Young children might receive a hand-carved wooden barn with toy farm animals, a faceless cloth Amish doll sewn by their mother, ice skates, or a colorful new storybook, while teenagers and adults exchange practical items they genuinely need: a warm woolen shawl, a cast-iron skillet, new buggy blankets, set of wrenches, or glass canning jars.
The rest of Christmas Day—along with December twenty-sixth, which the Amish universally celebrate as “Second Christmas” (Zweiter Christtag), an ancient European tradition brought over by their eighteenth-century Swiss-German ancestors—is dedicated to colossal family reunions and feasting. Because an average Amish couple has six or seven children, an elderly set of grandparents frequently hosts eighty to one hundred children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren under one roof:
- The Christmas Banquet: Long wooden trestle tables are set up end-to-end across the house, groaning under platters of stuffed roast turkey, glazed farm ham, mountains of mashed potatoes with browned butter and gravy, homemade bread filling, creamed corn, chow-chow (sweet and sour pickled vegetables), homemade applesauce, and dozens of pies—including shoofly pie, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie.
- Second Christmas Visiting: Since a married couple cannot visit both the husband’s large family and the wife’s large family on the same afternoon by horse-and-buggy, celebrating both December twenty-fifth and December twenty-sixth as full work-free holidays ensures that one day is spent feasting with the husband’s parents and the next day with the wife’s parents, followed by days of visiting aunts, uncles, and elderly widows until New Year’s Day.
