The Mostly Complete History of Christmas

Christmas stands as one of the most misunderstood amalgamations on the Western calendar. The season’s criss crossed collection of holiday traditions and religious beliefs teeters on the asinine when viewed at a distance. Why do we celebrate Christ’s birth on a day everyone knows he wasn’t born? What does a decorated evergreen tree have to do with Wise Men from the Middle East? And what’s with Santa?

Let’s untangle the knots that have tripped up countless parents, pastors, and unsuspecting relatives of inquisitive kids for decades.

Why December 25th?
December 25th has absolutely no historical or Biblical tie to the birth of Christ. Not only does everything in the Bible (and the Quran if you’ll take it) point to a summer birth*, but the only holidays the early church celebrated that directly revolved around Christ’s life were the Epiphany (which marked Christ being revealed to the Magi) on January 6th and Easter. So why did the 25th become Christmas? Convenience, and frankly…it sounded really nice in a sermon.

The December date comes to us via the Roman Empire, and their pagan holiday Saturnalia. This festival celebrated the Roman god Saturn, their agricultural deity, during the Winter Solstice. While the Winter Solstice (December 21st) stands as the darkest day of the year, it also marks the coming of the light. So the ancients saw it as a time of reborn hope and promise of good fortune from the gods. Saturnalia was filled with public feasting, sacrifices, goodwill towards the poor, the decorating of homes, the exchanging of gifts, and the lighting of candles. The feasting, drinking, decorating, and merriment rose throughout the celebration, leading one Roman historian to call it “the best of times.” The three day festival began on December 17th leading up to the Solstice on the 21st, but was extended throughout Rome’s history to last a full week, taking us up to December 24th.

It made sense for early Roman Christians to co-opt the popular holiday of Saturnalia to mark the birth of their coming hope and promise, and the 25th date was quickly adopted. Augustine wrote in the early 400’s AD “Hence it is that He was born on the day which is the shortest in our earthly reckoning and from which subsequent days begin to increase in length. He, therefore, who bent low and lifted us up chose the shortest day, yet the one whence light begins to increase.” You see, the cliche Christmas ::cough::Winter Solstice::cough:: sermon writes itself, and the church has been using it since the fourth century.

What’s with the Christmas trees, wreaths, mistletoe and…Yule?
While there are a lot of possible entry points for the Christmas tree ranging from Egyptians bringing palm frowns into their homes during winter, or the Saturnalia tradition of decorating (most likely fruiting) trees to thank Saturn for the harvest and to request a bountiful coming year. The truth is we can best trace the Christmas tree back through Martin Luther and Reformation era propaganda.

Let’s rewind a few centuries back from the Reformation, and head a few hundred miles north to Scandinavia where King Olaf I Tryggvason of Norway became a Christian. King Olaf lived between 960 and 1000 AD, and is known as Norway’s first Christian king. Norway held their own winter festivals celebrating the coming of the light and the father god Odin who they believed visited their homes during the Winter Solstice—a time of year they called Jul. This being a time when most animals had just been slaughtered, and beer or mead had finished their fermentation, the Jul festival was filled with abundant feasting and drinking. The Jul festival started on December 21st and would last…12 days.

While Christian King Olaf was known to spread christendom thorough his country with force, he did not banish the Jul festival. Instead he did as Roman Emperor Constantine did centuries earlier, and simply encouraged the merging of the existing pagan celebrations and Christian belief. You know most of these nordic pagan traditions, since the English spelling of the word Jul is…Yule.

One such Yule time practice was to bring evergreen trees into the home and decorate them with candles and small carved figurines of gods. These trees represented undying life, thus bringing them into your home and adorning them was an attempt to bring blessings to help survive the harsh winter and bring favor for the following year. Other traditions were to hang or place offerings around or under trees in an attempt to entice the forest’s spirits back to life, thus bringing about early Spring.

Fast forward back to the 1600’s and Martin Luther makes up a story about being inspired to bring a candle covered tree into his home to showcase the glory of God to his family in the dead of winter. Normally, it took the church centuries to absorb pagan practices into their accepted traditions…Luther pulled it off in one story. His propaganda clearly struck a cord, as his fellow German countrymen continued the tradition (most were already doing); eventually bringing the Christmas Tree to Pennsylvania as early as the 1740’s. The Puritan settlers viewed this practice as pagan in nature (because frankly it was…no matter what Luther said), with records of condemnation lasting until the 1840’s. The only acceptable winter decoration at the time were holly and ivy, as English churches had been decorating with them in lieu of flowers during the winter since the 1600’s.

Mistletoe was viewed by Celtic pagans as a symbol of vivacity and fertility, as it could sprout and survive even in the harshest winter. Druids, ancient shaman, often gave the plant to people or animals who were struggling with fertility. Simultaneously in Scandinavia a similar mythology arose where Frigg, the norse goddess of love, named mistletoe a symbol of love; vowing to bestow a kiss and her favor on all who walked beneath. These beliefs launched a lot of lip-puckering traditions throughout the Middle Ages, and the fact that Mistletoe sprouts during the winter eventually planted it firmly in the holiday season.

The Christmas Wreath is also directly connected to paganism. In Rome a wreath was a symbol of victory, and wreaths were commonly hung on doors during Saturnalia. But the evergreen wreath as we recognize it today can be traced back to Yule, again as a reminder that life returns as the wheel of the world turns from winter to spring. Similarly, the lighting of the Yule Log served multiple purposes for Nordic and Germanic pagans. This extra large, extra special log would be decorated with offerings to the gods. These burnt offerings were meant to ask the gods to help keep the home’s hearth lit and warm throughout the cold winter, and also acted as a fortune telling device; with each spark the log spat out representing an extra head of livestock being born or harvest bounty in the coming year.

Why does Santa Claus…do what he does?
Saint Nicholas was born to a wealthy family in 270 AD in what is modern day Turkey. When his parents passed he joined the church, quickly becoming a bishop, and was said to have distributed his immense inheritance to those in need. The earliest of such stories tells us that he saved a man’s three daughters from prostitution by dropping three satchels of money into their window— using the cover of night — to pay for their missing dowries. Later on his journeys Saint Nicholas was given a dream that brought him to the location of three missing boys. Where did he find them? In the cellar of an evil man’s inn…butchered and stuffed into a pickling barrel. Saint Nicholas not only found the boys, but raised them back to life from their pickled fates with prayer. Lastly, Saint Nicholas was said to have saved three convicted soldiers from execution thanks to a dream he received from God that revealed their innocence. Saint Nicholas convinced their captor to free them, thus giving us the idea that Santa “knows if you’ve been bad or good.”

These stories merged to give us the all knowing, gift giving Saint of Children (and prostitutes) Saint Nicholas. So no, his generosity has nothing to do with the Magi from the East that gave Jesus gifts in Matthew 2…no matter what your Sunday School teacher told you.

It has to be noted that originally Santa Claus didn’t place gifts under the Christmas tree, he was solely in charge of filling children’s shoes and stockings (more on that soon). His stinginess continued as late as 1823, where in Clement Clarke Moore’s The Night Before Christmas we read that Santa’s work was to fill the stockings. The act of placing presents under the tree is omitted.

Wait…so what does Santa Claus have to do with Christmas?
Ironically, Jolly Saint Nick has a more concrete connection to a different church holiday. Some ancient texts place the real life Saint Nicholas at the Council of Nicaea where church leaders discussed important topics, notably the decision to make Easter an official church celebration.

While much of central Europe’s Catholic communities celebrate the Feast of Saint Nicholas on December 6th to honor the day of his death, the religious celebration overflowed into the secular world in the Netherlands. On the evening of December 5th Dutch children lay out their shoes (traditionally wooden clogs) filled with carrots and hay on their doorstep or windowsill to feed Saint Nicholas’ horse. In turn, Nicholas would refill their shoes with sweets, and small toys.

This tradition followed Dutch immigrants to New York, where a local paper reported groups of Dutch families celebrating Saint Nicholas, or as they called him in Dutch “Sint Nikolaas” (or the shortened version…“Sinterklass”) in 1773. Sinterklaas’ prominence grew in America, evolving into the name Santa Claus, but remained separate from Christmas until the 1820’s when stores began to use his image in their Christmas shopping newspaper advertisements. His Christmas connection was finally cemented in 1823 when The Night Before Christmas was penned by American author Clement Clarke Moore. In 1841 the Big Man made his first appearance in a Philadelphia shop, bringing in thousands of children eager to see Santa in real life.

Why does Santa Claus come down the chimney?
It was common belief in medieval Europe that spirits, fairies, witches, and other magical beings could enter homes at will through walls, closed doors and windows. But, in the 15th century the French scholar Petrus Mamoris decided that gave too much power to beings not-of-God, and so he concluded that beings could only enter a closed home via its chimney. This theory spread throughout the Renaissance, relegating every magical entity in folklore to the chimney (or an opened door). It was during this time that depictions in art of Saint Nicholas saving the three daughters from prostitution began to switch from Nicholas dropping satchels of money through the window to dropping them down the home’s chimney.

Santa Claus wouldn’t make his first recorded trip down the chimney himself until Washington Irving, the author of Sleepy Hallow, wrote about it in his A Complete History of New York in 1812. America seems like an odd place for European medieval folklore to emerge, but the country was filled with immigrants who brought stories of their own benevolent chimney-traveling beings such as Italy’s La Befana, Scotland’s Brownie or Slovania’s Skrat. You can see how an author who loved folklore as much as Irving would love connecting the magic of Santa with the folklore of the old country.

Why does Santa wear red and white?
There is a theory swirling around the internet that Santa’s color palate originates from the colors of the hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria magic mushroom that sprouts up in Nordic countries during early winter. You’ve seen these mushrooms before; the Amanita muscaria have white stems, and a bright Christmas red cap covered in white dots. While this mushroom appears all over Christmas decorations, sketches, and paintings to this day, and as entertaining as this connection would be, the truth is far more tame. Saint Nicholas wears the traditional colors of a Catholic bishop…red and white.

Why does Santa Claus fly?
This is actually a very odd piece to the puzzle, as it showcases just how malleable folklore is across space and time. For the answer we’ll have to rewind the clock back to Norse mythology. The Vikings believed that Odin, the father god, rode across the night sky to visit their homes on the longest night of the year—the Winter Solstice. Viking children would even leave hay out for Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir in exchange for treats.

Without question the religious beliefs of Saint Nicholas’ deeds and remnants of Norse mythology merged as Christianity spread into norse lands—bestowing the gift giving saint with his horse drawn sleigh—it appears that the flying portion was omitted until the 1800’s, when once again we turn to Washington Irving’s A Complete History of New York. Washington wrote of Santa’s travels, “riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children”.

Oddly Clement Clarke Moore has a very different and often overlooked take on Santa’s sleigh in The Night Before Christmas. Clement’s version of Santa’s sleigh travels on the ground as any sleigh would, only taking flight to mount the rooftop after Santa calls his reindeer by name and commands them to do so. The poem goes:

“As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew”

While we’re on the topic of reindeer, The Night Before Christmas is the first time they are mentioned pulling Santa’s sleigh. Moore was simply using a far less common and far more magical sounding animal to add an additional level of fantasy to the “jolly old elf”. Also, Clement Clarke Moore could very well have taken Odin’s eight-legged horse and transformed it into the eight reindeer that now pull Santa’s sleigh.

What about Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer?
Rudolph is purely a result of capitalism. Not really, but really. He was invented whole cloth in 1939 to sell coloring books. The Chicago based department store Montgomery Ward had been buying coloring books for years, and decided they could make more profit by creating their own. So they commissioned Robert L. May to create a coloring book story for the holiday shopping season.

May’s young daughter loved reindeer, and while working late one night in downtown Chicago, May looked out over Lake Michigan and saw a red light cutting through the lake’s fog. He was instantly inspired, and penned the story in the same meter as The Night Before Christmas. May’s friend David Gillen illustrated the first version of the “cute reindeer” with a bright red nose, and the rest is (recent) history.

Why is Santa fat?
It doesn’t make much sense for a saint known for his generosity, and giving to have a stomach that points more towards gluttony; and you’d be right. Up until the middle of the 1800’s, it was very common to draw or paint Santa Claus as a rather thin, tall man with a long pointy beard that complimented his pointy bishop’s hat. This image continued even after The Night Before Christmas was written and we read about his “little round belly that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly.”

We actually owe the fat man’s enlarged coat size to the same cartoonist who gave us the iconic Republican’s Elephant and the Democrat’s Donkey cartoons, Thomas Nast. The American cartoonist was commissioned during the Civil War to draw an image of Santa delivering presents to the troops. He realized that the classic tall, thin bearded Santa looked far too similar to Uncle Sam propaganda. So he decided to round off all of Santa’s pointy edges, and plump him up a bit to differentiate him from the America’s wartime uncle.

What’s with the Most Wonderful Time of the Year lyric “tales of ghost stories of Christmases long long ago”?
This comes to us from…you guessed it…pagans; in particular Celtic pagans from Scotland and Ireland. As laid out above, Yule was the pagan’s winter season. The time before that on the calendar was known as Samhain (pronounced “saw” “win”) which means “End of Summer”. The ancient celt kicked off Samhain with a huge harvest festival where they asked the gods to protect them from all of the spirits and fairy folk they believed wandered the earth during Samhain and Yule. Today we known this Samhain festival as Halloween.

No longer having to work the fields, or tend to the folks, the ancient Celts finally had time to gather around the fire to share a drink, and a story. Winter being a time filled with the year’s longest nights, and death from the cold, it was only natural for the stories to lean towards the mystical. This tradition continued, permeating culture across the United Kingdom, coming to a fever pitch during the Victorian Era when the entire Western world was captivated by the macabre and the spiritual realm. So when Charles Dickens penned his ghost filled A Christmas Carol in 1843, he was simply using the common practice as the template for his tale.

On that note, did Charles Dickens invent or save Christmas?
No, that’s just what Anglophiles want you to believe. Oh and ancient Romans and Greeks didn’t speak with an English accent as they do in every movie either.

In the middle of the 1600’s, England was being dragged through a Civil War. During this time the rising Puritan movement took over Parliament with the help of Parliamentarian and staunch Puritan Oliver Cromwell. Among other completely boring, and baseless “biblical” beliefs, Puritans didn’t practice holidays. They took extra offense to Christmas, as the holiday in England revolved more around drinking, feasting and a more conscious connection to Celtic practices than it does today. The Puritans believed this distracted people from their work, and the Lord; so they banned it completely in 1647, calling it a “popish festival with no biblical justification.” America, which was filled with a large amount of Puritans, also saw its own animosity towards Christmas, with the holiday being banned in Boston in 1659.

During this time a piece was written in 1652 in England titled The Vindication of Christmas, in which the author laid out all the English Christmas traditions of the time: banquets, roasting apples over the fire, card games, dances, the singing of carols, and Father Christmas himself. Father Christmas was not yet a synonym for Santa Claus, he was rather an embodiment of Christmas itself similar to the concept of Father Time or Jack Frost.

The ban on Christmas was lifted in England in 1660, and 1681 in Boston.

While the ban simply cleaned the holiday’s slate in America, clearing the way for the incoming Dutch and German traditions, it hobbled Christmas as it was about to meet its greatest foe. The Industrial Revolution rolled through England the following century squashing whatever connection the English had to old time holiday. Their lives now filled with never ending factory work, there was no time, energy or reason for the common man to celebrate. In the end the machine did to England what the Puritans never could. Christmas celebrations became mostly an ironic aristocratic affair leading into the Victorian Era; with punch bowls, dessert filled banquets, parlor games, and the like.

It was in this time that Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843. With America already two decades into its obsession with Christmas, and Santa having made his public appearance two years prior, A Christmas Carol became a viral sensation in England and America. While it can’t be said that Dickens invented or saved Christmas any more than J.K. Rowling invented or saved magic, he did popularize the spirit of the holiday that had been missing from since Cromwell. His story also acted as a bridge between the Christmas melting-pot that had been stewing in America and the revitalized English traditions; thus turning England’s Father Christmas into Santa Claus, and replacing much of the holiday’s original Dutch and Germanic feel with that of Victorian Era Britain here in America.

Closing thoughts
None of this is intended to dissuade you from celebrating Christmas as you have been. If anything it should encourage you to lean into your favorite traditions or start some of your own. We celebrate Christmas the way we do today thanks to people holding fast to their family traditions, and random bursts of creative liberty. Who knows what Christmas will look like in 80 years or 800, but we get to help decide in the here-and-now. Lean in, celebrate, and be merry in the face of whatever modern day Cromwell stands in your way!

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Note
*How can we discern the time of year Jesus was born? Luke 2:8 says “And there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night”. This tells us it was warm enough at night for the sheep to still be out in the fields, which would have been between spring and late summer. This aligns perfectly with the timeframe we are given earlier in Luke not of Christ’s birth, but of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist. John’s father Zacharias was in the priestly order of Abijah. Jewish priests served the temple on a cycle throughout the year, as is laid out in 1 Chronicles 24:6–19. The Abijah would have served from mid-May through mid-June. We are told in Luke 1:24–28 that the angel Gabriel visited Mary in the sixth month (November or December) of Elizabeth’s pregnancy to tell her that she was with child, thus placing the birth of Christ (40 weeks later) in late August or September. This is also corroborated by the Quran, yes that Quran.

In the Islamic telling of the birth of Christ, Quran 19:22–23, the story says that Mary’s birthing pains sent her to clutch to a palm tree, and the yet-to-be-born Jesus told her to shake the tree so fresh dates would fall to her for nourishment. Dates come into season in late summer and runs through September.