There are certain Christmas traditions that seem like they’ve been with us forever, from putting aside December 25 to celebrate the birth of the sun, to our collective worship of the great god Woden.
On second though, maybe things have changed more than we like to admit.
“The History of Christmas,” a new e-book by Wyatt North, recounts the history of many of the Christmas traditions we take for granted, showing how so many of these customs are as amorphous as they are joyous.
Here are just some of the treasured beliefs North helps shed a bit of Christmas light upon.
CELEBRATING ON DECEMBER 25
North points out that early Christians in Europe “were part of an agrarian, pagan culture,” and that their early traditions included a post-harvest winter celebration called Saturnalia which “paid homage to the gods who ruled all aspects of sowing, planting and harvest.”
Consisting of “feasts, festivities and festivals” that included “conspicuous indulgence” and “raucous behavior,” Saturnalia took place in mid- to-late December to “honor the god of the sun, Saturn.”
Several other pagan celebrations — including one praising the birth of “the unconquerable sun” and another that worshipped “Mithra, the god of fertility, who was the son of the sun” — took place on the birth date of their gods, December 25.
Early Christian converts, writes North, were torn between the massive (and enjoyable) pagan feasts they had come to know and the life of relative moral austerity to which they were committing. As such, Christian celebrations often carried pagan elements over from their prior beliefs.
Understandably, this caused dissension between strictly religious Christians and those with a more lax and nostalgic approach, especially as some Christians continued worshipping the sun. North tells of how, in the 5th century, “Pope Leo lamented in a sermon that upon entering the basilica to celebrate Christ’s nativity, worshippers turned on the stairs to face the rising sun and bowed.”
When an 8th century English bishop was “horrified” by the “pagan debauchery” he saw over Christmastime in Rome, he wrote to Pope Zacharias, who in turn unleashed a barrage of cruelty and violence in order to curb the practice, establishing a tradition of Saturnalia horror that lasted for centuries.
But within this, the holiday also evolved, with 1103 seeing the introduction of the Old English phrase “Cristes-Maesse,” meaning the Mass of Christ. That phrase eventually morphed into the word we know today.
While the celebration itself remained controversial for centuries, so too was the date of this worship, as North reminds us that “the exact date of Christ’s birth is a controversial topic.” December 25 had been revered by early pagans, but Christians long settled on January 6 as their day of “epiphany, meaning God’s manifestation to humanity.”
Part of the confusion was due to the fact that at the time, the world was not settled on one calendar. Early Jews, Romans, and Egyptians all used different methods of keeping track of time, and with the addition of two more calendars — from Caesar in 45 BC, and then from monks who gave us the concept of BC and AD in the 6th century — agreement on the exact date of any earlier occurrence proved impossible.
These conflicts continued for ages, including within the American colonies, where Puritans, repulsed by the “idolatries” of the holiday, banned Christmas in Massachusetts from 1659 to 1681. Over time, though, the pagan and Christian rituals became permanently intertwined, including the use of December 25 as the day of Christ’s birth.
SANTA CLAUS
North describes Nicholas, the real life “4th century template” for our favorite jolly man in a red suit, as a “thin” and “serious” bishop who would “turn in his grave to see how he has morphed over time in looks and in purpose.”
Nicholas, who was born in what is now Turkey, was renowned for centuries due to his “miraculous interventions in desperate situations for children, for sailors, [and] for prostitutes, among others.”
One tale in particular, which spread around the 8th century, told of a man so poor that he couldn’t afford the dowry for his eldest daughter to marry. At the time, this would have led to such disgrace for his family that the father considered selling his next-oldest daughter into prostitution to raise the money.
As the story goes, an angel told Nicholas of the man’s predicament, and the saint tossed a bag of gold through the man’s window — a feat he later repeated for the marriages of the man’s next two daughters. After the third time, the man chased the saint down the street to learn the identity of his savior, and Nicholas made him promise not the reveal his secret until after Nicholas’ death. The man kept his word, and once he was able to tell his story, a legend was born.
By the 12th century, the tale of Saint Nicholas had grown throughout Europe such that his remains were moved to an Italian cathedral built and named in his honor. Subsequent centuries found Nicholas’ legend amended with both real-life elements and fantastical touches. The Germans and the Celts, for instance, morphed attributes from their god Woden onto him, including a long white beard and the ability to ride through the sky — though Woden did it on a horse, not in a reindeer-driven carriage.
Saint Nicholas’ full transformation into Santa Claus came about in the 19th century. Hebrew scholar Clement Clarke Moore wrote the infamous poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” originally titled “The Visit,” on Christmas Eve 1822 while shopping for a Christmas turkey. Moore, writes North, was familiar with both the saint and “the winter-solstice night ride of the god Woden, who blessed and punished with gifts, depending on the recipients’ behavior.”
But Moore was also influenced, he says, by the god Thor, who “rode on his goat-drawn chariot,” and by “a German sprite who came down chimneys at Christmastime.” The concept of reindeer, he says, was “borrowed” by Moore from “a popular children’s book written by a neighbor.”
It was Moore’s poem that almost fully changed the legend of Saint Nicholas into the Santa we know and love. The final piece of the puzzle — the name “Santa Claus” — was the creation of a cartoonist named Thomas Nast. Nast — also the inventor of the elephant and the donkey as the symbols for our two main political parties — drew the first-ever depiction of Santa for the Jan. 3, 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly. The image progressed over time, until a 1933 ad for Coca-Cola published the version of the man closest to the one we know today.
CHRISTMAS TREES
While the phrase “Christmas tree” was reportedly first used in 1835, legend has the custom itself dating back to Protestant reformer Martin Luther, when “on a moonlight walk in the snow he noticed a beautiful evergreen tree and the stars blinking between its branches.”
North tells how Luther cut the tree down, brought it home and “put candles on the branches, telling his family that the lights symbolized the light of Christ.”
The tradition of having a tree in one’s home spread over centuries both in people’s homes and within pop culture, including in a popular 1845 story called “Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree”; when President Calvin Coolidge lit a Christmas tree on the White House lawn in 1923; and in “a picture in a British newspaper of a tree erected at Windsor Castle [in 1948] with the British royal family gathered around.”
GIVING GIFTS
The first signs of Christmas commercialization began around 1824, when “elaborately bound and illustrated . . . literary compilations” known as “gift books” were created for “a secret admirer [to give] to a lady at Christmas.” Kicked off in Germany, the custom became an American craze in the 1840s, and between this and the popularity of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” other family members decided that young ladies shouldn’t have all the fun and began requesting presents as well.
CHRISTMAS CARDS
While the custom of sending gifts and written messages wishing loved ones a happy and prosperous New Year began before the birth of Christ, it shifted toward Christmas — and toward secularism — in the 1840s, when an Englishman named Henry Cole commissioned a card for the holiday that included no representation of Jesus Christ. Cards caught on in the US just after the Civil War, when a Boston printing press developer named Louis Prang used his new invention to create images for the season.
CHRISTMAS CAROLS
While music was “long a mainstay of celebrating Christ’s nativity,” it’s thought that more Christmas-specific carols emerged around the 12th century, possibly from the writing of the hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Often imbued early on with theological themes, a more populist approach took hold around the 15th and 16th centuries, when carolers began taking to the streets to share the gift of song with neighbors and fellow townsfolk.
It was around this time that many popular carols of today began to emerge, including “Deck the Halls” and “The First Noel.” Subsequent centuries saw the popular canon expanded with the likes of “Silent Night,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and “Joy to the World.”
North writes that “It Came Upon The Midnight Clear” was “the first American-composed carol,” when it was written in 1849, and was soon followed by “We Three Kings” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
THE GIFTS OF THE MAGI
North writes that where tales of the magi are concerned, the Gospel of Matthew omits enough details about their visit to the newborn king that it “left gaping holes for religious and artistic imaginations to flourish,” and that those details have been filled in over the centuries by “artists, poets and theologians.”
These include Bishop Ignatius, who proclaimed the magi “righteous men” who destroyed “every malignant spell” and “ended Satan’s reign.” Psalm 72 noted them as “kings,” and church elders from the 2nd century on reinforced this position while putting their own spin on the legend. Egypt’s Clement of Alexandria “insisted they came from Persia,” and the notion that there were three of them emerged from “an obscure teaching of the Alexandrian, origin [from the 3rd century].”
These tales gained a continually stronger foothold in popular folklore as artists made the magi two dimensional, portraying the three wise men presenting gifts to Joseph and Mary in popular paintings of the day.
The interpretation of the gifts themselves as part of a trinity was added by Saint Irenaeus in the 2nd century, as he “associat[ed] characteristics of the Christ child with each gift: myrrh symbolized Christ’s death and birth for humanity; gold because he was king whose realm has no end; frankincense because he was God.”
The magi themselves gained names in the 6th century, with the finding of an “Alexandrian document” (reinforced by a British document from the same time period) that referred to them as Balthasar, Melchior and Caspar (or Gaspar). As the tale of the magi gained greater exposure in the art of the Renaissance period and others, the legend was burned ever deeper into popular folklore.