Jehovah’s Witnesses—Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom, “Chapter 14: “They Are No Part of the World””
“This holiday was celebrated yearly even by members of the Watch Tower Society’s headquarters staff at the Bethel Home in Brooklyn, New York. … For years, Bible Students wore a cross and crown as a badge of identification, and this symbol was on the front cover of the “Watch Tower” from 1891 to 1931. … In their “Daily Manna” book, Bible Students kept a list of birthdays.”
The chapter says the headquarters staff and the British and Swiss branch staffs decided to stop sharing in Christmas festivities, ‘so no Christmas celebration was held there after 1926’. A box headed ‘Practices That Have Been Abandoned’ carries the cross-and-crown and birthday statements, together with a photograph captioned as the last Brooklyn Bethel Christmas celebration, in 1926.
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Provenance and verification note for Jehovah’s Witnesses—Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom, Chapter 14: “They Are No Part of the World”
Confidence note. Chapter opened on the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026. The Christmas sentence follows the page 199 marker; the box is labelled in the text itself as ‘[Box/Pictures on page 200, 201]’. The three quoted sentences come from those two places and are separated by ellipses.
Corroborated by. src-chg-p-kr-2014-ch10-refining
Notes. The same box also records the abandonment of the Great Pyramid teaching, which the site covers separately.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chg-p-jv-1993-ch14-abandoned