Christmas Origins

Ever since I was a small boy, I have always loved Christmas. There is something about Christmas music, and in particular Christmas carols, that I find incredibly moving. In my opinion, the carols of Christmas constitute some of the most beautiful music ever written, their stirring yet tranquil melodies at times achingly, breath-takingly enrapturing, speaking to the heart and the deepest parts of the human psyche. Every year, reading the Christmas story aloud from the bible was a family tradition, as was reading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, his vibrant descriptions still emblazoned on my mind. I have many fond, happpy memories of Christmastime as a child. But where did Christmas begin?

Christmas is a Christian holiday. It is true that many elements that make up the current holiday come from other traditions, but these traditions are not Christmas. There is a difference. It is kind of like implying that C.S. Lewis’ apologetic writings on Christianity aren’t totally Christian because he was an atheist prior to his conversion. And while admittedly there are many elements to our modern observation of Christmas that are not particularly “religious,” Christmas as a holiday was intended to commemorate the Christ child.

So how did it come to be? This question is not as easy to answer as it might first appear. One soon finds that with a bit of research, sources are vague, sketchy, or contradictory, as is so often the case with a study of history. In my search of origins, I do not claim to have the final say in the matter, but have tried to present as balanced and objective an account as is possible with the available resources.

One of the first facts that comes up in a study of the origins of Christmas deals with a festival called Saturnalia. Beginning on December 15th, the Romans held this seven-day celebration in honor of Saturn, god of agriculture. The winter solstice often fell around December 25 on the Julian calendar—following these seven days of feasting, revelry, and merrymaking. To commemorate the lengthening of days marked by this solstice, many Romans also enacted rituals that glorified Mithra, the god of light from ancient Persia. But Mithra was of older origins yet than the Romans, who had integrated him into their mythos.

Mithra was a figure spoken of in the Zend-Avesta, or sacred Zoroastrian scriptures. In it, he was known as the chief spirit, the ruler of the world. Many modern scholars trace some of Christianity’s origins back to Zoroastrianism, and for good reason. There are indeed many similarities between the two. It would seem that this is the same land that the patriarch Abraham lived in, as did Daniel, and many other Biblical figures. While differing from the God of the Hebrews, there is little doubt that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did not influence and enter into the Babylonian cosmology. In fact, from the land of Zoroastrianism came the three Magi, or wise men—named Balthasar, Melchior, and Caspar (Gaspar) according to a mosaic from around 500 A.D. from a church in Ravenna, Italy—who came to visit the Christ child.

In time, after the 6th and 7th century Assyrian conquests, Mithra became known as the god of the sun. The Greeks identified him with Helios, proliferating the Cult of Mithra, and the Romans simultaneously adapted Mithra into their pantheon as they incorporated the Grecian Empire into their culture.

The Roman Catholic Church also had the habit of absorbing pagan traditions into Christendom, soon converting this holiday commemorating the birth of the sun god into Christ Mass, a ceremony honoring the birth of the Son of God, whose actual date of birth is uncertain. Despite this, according to the documentary “Christmas Unwrapped” hosted by Harry Smith on The History Channel, Christmastime celebrations before the 1800s among the commoners in England still featured much of the pagan revelry, at times little more than wild, licentious carousals. “Christmas Unwrapped” went on to describe how a peasant would be afforded his fifteen minutes of fame by being crowned the “lord of misrule” by his fellows, and they would go around as a miniature mob to the lords of the manors demanding to be let in and provided with treats, else they would threaten to cause harm, much like the origin of Halloween’s trick or treating. This drunken, post-pagan revelry, identified with Saturnalia and the Feast of Fools where master and slave traded places for a day, apparently had much to do with why Olivar Cromwell, devout Puritan and Lord Protector of England, outlawed the Christmas Holiday in the 17th century, forcing it underground for a time: until about 1656 in Canterbury.

Cromwell, like many other Protestants, saw many such remaining vestiges of the Roman Catholic Church in need of serious amendment. He was following in the footsteps of Martin Luther, who pioneered the Protestant Reformation a century before; Luther felt that the Church had become corrupt, straying from its original mission as an institute to advance the Gospel of Christ. To Cromwell’s mind, such revolting celebrations only further proved this point.

By 1659, Christmas was outlawed in many of the early North American colonies; violators were fined five shillings, rendering Christmas virtually obsolete in the “New World.” After the Revolution, Christmas was reinstated in America, but it still bore much of the raucous debauchery of its youth: a good opportunity to get drunk and procure sexual favors. As in England, some of the settlers would go from door to door asking for food and drink. In fact, that is where Christmas caroling began: groups of individuals would go around to the houses in the community singing songs in exchange for eggnog and drinks from the wassail bowl. (A wassail bowl is a mixture of ale, roasted apples, eggs, sugar, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger served hot; the word wassail comes from the Saxon drinker’s greeting Was haile, which means [to] your health.)

During this time, there were few holidays on the New World calendar and Christmas was just a regular workday. What celebrations there were did not revolve around the family, and gift giving mainly took place in the form of the wealthy giving money and small mementos to the poor, or masters giving modest tokens to their servants. Families, however, rarely ever gave gifts to one another.

The face of Christmas was to be deeply affected by the classic novel our family read every year: A Christmas Carol written by Charles Dickens in 1843. It was a sobering lesson to the middle class on charity and its message dealt with the spirit of Christmas as a benevolent holiday of giving, caring, and spending time with family and friends. It helped to clearly define and establish what Christmas was really all about. The Industrial Revolution had left little place for the doting of children, but in large part due to Dicken’s powerful prose, Christmas was increasingly seen as an opportunity to devote attention to one’s children: to lavish them with gifts and pay them special attention. Christmas became a time of joyful celebration.

Not only did this aspect of Christmas reverse the trend from an out of control, drunken tumult to a domestic holiday, it proved a brilliant marketing strategy for the capitalistic Americans. The onset of mass advertising and department stores shot holiday revenues through the roof, causing many to complain that Christmas was becoming too commercialized, a cry that grows louder each year in America as Christmas seems to be reduced more and more to a joyless, commercial frenzy.

But there is still more behind this secular aspect of Christmas than just profit made from gifts: Santa Claus. There is an entire history in itself of how Santa Claus came into conception. The origin of Santa Claus goes back to an altruistic bishop named Saint Nicholas who lived in Myra in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) during the fourth century. There is so much legend about this early Saint that little solid truth is known about him, so little in fact, that Pope Paul VI ordered his feast day on December 6th dropped from the liturgical calendar. However, among the many accounts told of the Saint are the two that tell of a bag of gold he allegedly threw through the window of a needy family’s house (wishing to give anonymously) and his secret gifts to three daughters of a poor man unable to pay for their dowries; had it not been for the Saint’s intervention, the girls would have been forced into prostitution.

He has become the patron saint of scholars, sailors, virgins, merchants—even thieves, but especially children, the latter to whom he was said to give gifts, arguably based on the legend of the poor man’s virgin daughters. In Germany, Holland, Rome, and other nearby countries, accounts began circulating that he rode a white horse through the sky, often accompanied by an elf named Black Peter who whipped the children who misbehaved. He had the long flowing robes of a bishop, wore a white beard, and was honored on December 6th, a holiday which eventually merged with December 25th in most countries. However, children in the The Netherlends, Belgium, and Luxembourg still leave a wooden shoe near the fireplace filled with straw for Saint Nicholas’ donkey. In the morning, the straw is gone and gifts are left in its place. In these countries, December 25th is purely a religious holiday.

The Dutch called Saint Nicholas Sinterklaas; indeed, the Dutch brought “Sinter Klaas” to America where he was to become Santa Claus. Washington Irving, writing under the pen name Deidrich Knickerbocker (see Knickerbocker Americana: Baseball and Washington Irving’s Deft Devices), churned out History of New York in 1809, making Santa Claus famous. As was his custom of borrowing liberally from the folklore of other countries, Irving describes St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra in Asia Minor, arriving on horseback every Saint Nicholas Eve, without Black Peter by his side. A few years later in 1823, Clement Clarke Moore, American minister, poet, and professor of Oriental and Greek literature at the Episcopal General Theological Seminary in New York City, wrote a fun, frivolous little poem for children entitled A Visit From Saint Nicholas, which most of us know better as ’Twas the Night Before Christmas. Moore described and named the reindeer, mentioning Santa’s wrinkles, laughs, winks, and nods, and included many other details common to our modern Santa. He even took a phrase directly from Irving’s story (“lays his finger aside his nose”), though he portrayed Santa as an elf instead of a saint.

It was to be Thomas Nast and the Coca-Cola bottling company that would turn Santa into the modern American invention. Nast was an illustrator for Harper’s magazine from the 1860s to the 1880s and he depicted Santa’s workshop at the North Pole and his list of good and bad children. Then in 1931, Coca-Cola ran a series of advertisements depicting Santa as a fully human giver of gifts, exactly as he appears today.

In 1939, Robert May, an advertising agent working for the Montgomery Ward department store, developed Rudolf, the ninth, red-nosed reindeer as a highly lucrative sales ploy. Santa Claus and his reindeer did much to advance the capitalistic interests of the commercial sector, and in-store displays featuring Santa became common place.

The Yule log came from Scandinavian mythology. The winter months were long and hard, so a huge tree was found, cut down, hauled into the house, and lit afire in honor of Thor, the Viking god of war. It was believed that Thor would bless them with prosperity during the following year in reward for this ceremony held during Yule, which is the Anglo-Saxon word for the months of December and January. The Anglo-Saxons called December “the former Yule” and January “the after Yule.” When most of the Scandinavians converted to Christianity, the burning of the Yule log became a part of the Christmas celebration, and the word Yule became synonymous with Christmas. The burning of the Yule log is still practiced today, though it is more prominent in European celebrations and has lost its Scandinavian meaning except with the handful of neopagans who seek to revive the old ways.

The Christmas tree, mistletoe, and holly have similar origins. All three are evergreens, and during the cold, hard months of winter were seen by the early Germans as being a sign of fertility, for their greenness did not go away even in winter. Poinsettias, on the other hand, with their bright red, white, or pink uppermost leaves, were a product of countries where Christmas came during the warm summer months.

As early as the 17th century, Germans had converted the Christmas tree into a Christian symbol of rebirth. Several legends try to account for the custom of the Christmas tree. According to one, an English missionary named Winfrid (also known as Boniface) who lived some 1,200 years ago, chanced upon a group of Druids encircling an oak tree. The Druids were about to sacrifice young Prince Asulf to Thor when Winfrid heroically stepped in and chopped the oak tree down. A young fir tree immediately sprouted up where the oak had stood and Winfrid told the Druids it was to be their new holy tree, a tree that would provide wood for their homes: a tree of peace, the tree of Christ. Much more likely is the legend that Martin Luther, walking through the woods late on Christmas Eve, was so moved by the starlit splendor of the fir trees, that he brought one indoors and decorated it with candles to remind his family and children of the magnificence of God’s creation.

Martin Luther or no, the Germans were probably the first to began decorating Christmas trees, perhaps even as early as the fifteenth century. They used apples and small white wafers, which eventually gave way to blown-glass ornaments, tin angels, paper chains, and other decorations. The custom firmly took hold when Prince Albert of Germany gave his wife, Queen Victoria of England, the gift of a Christmas tree in 1841. German immigrants carried this tradition with them to the New World and beyond and today the Christmas tree is seen as an endearing symbol of Christmas.

Christmas cards did not come into prominence until the 19th century, during the time that many of the more secular aspects of Christmas began to emerge. While the Europeans had distributed wood prints depicting Christian themes during the Middle Ages (5th to the 15th century), it was not until 1843 that English illustrator John Callcott Horsley designed the first modern Christmas card. On its cover were the words “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You,” with the scene of a family celebrating Christmas together. After his innovations in refining color lithography, German-born printer Louis Prang mass-produced a colorful Christmas card in the United States in 1875 that sold extremely well and sparked the tradition of exchanging cards.

Christmas was first known as The Feast of Nativity as early as 336. The word Christmas entered the English language by 1050, taken from the Old English phrase Christes maesse, meaning “festival of Christ.” The use of Xmas came into play as early at the 13th century; the “X” is the Greek letter chi which is an abbreviation of Christ (Khristos), and also represents the cross on which Jesus was crucified. The nativity scene was another 13rd century innovation by the famous and fascinating Christian mystic, Saint Francis of Assisi, one of my favorite Christian figures. Until his time, no one had ever thought to portray the birth of the infant Jesus.

While Christmas has become the major Christian holiday during the winter solstice in the Roman Catholic realm, the Eastern Orthodox Church still looks at Epiphany, celebrated on January 6th, as being the highlight of the solstice season. The Twelve Days of Christmas stretch from Christmas Day to Epiphany, which in the Eastern Churches is the alleged anniversary of Jesus’ baptism. In the Western Churches, it commemorates the revelation of Jesus to the Gentiles (in the form of the Three Wise Men—Matthew 2:1–12), and in both the Eastern and Western Churches is held in honor of Jesus’ first miracle at the marriage feast in Cana (John 2:1–11). Each of the twelve days is said to represent a different aspect of Christianity.

On the other end of Christmas is the celebration of Advent, from the Latin adventus which means “coming.” The Advent anticipates the coming of the Christmas season, each week representing a different way in which Christians perceive Christ: through the flesh, the Holy Spirit, death, and Christ’s judgment of the dead. The original length of time, still celebrated by the Orthodox church, started on November 11th on the Feast of Saint Martin as decreed by the earliest authentic record from 581 A.D. Near 600, Pope Gregory I changed the date to begin on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and this shorter time length is observed by the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Episcopal churches. The first Sunday of Advent is regarded as the beginning of the ecclesiastical year, and the season serves a dual symbolism in the anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ. The German Lutherans were responsible for the tradition of the Advent wreath, which has four candles anchored in a circle of evergreen branches, symbolic of Christ’s rebirth. Each Sunday before Christmas, believers light an Advent candle in anticipation of the coming Holiday, often saying a prayer as they do.

There is a great deal of diversity and folklore that enter into many year-end solstice celebrations around the globe. Some of the more interesting are the Italians, whose children await not Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, but a good witch named La Befana on the Eve of Epiphany who rides her broom into their houses to distribute gifts. It seems that she was too busy to accompany the Three Wise Men on their visit to see the baby Jesus, so now she must atone for her fiasco by giving treats to good children, while leaving lumps of coal and bags of ash for the naughty boys and girls.

In Spain, and countries colonized by the Spanish, children play “swing the sun” on Christmas, each child trying to swing higher than the next after an old tradition of trying to lead the sun farther north in order to lengthen the days. The Eve of Epiphany, popularly known as Noche de Reyes, or Twelfth Night, finds children lining up their shoes outside the front door. The children will first put in barley to feed the camels of the wise men who will be passing by on their way to visit baby Jesus. When the excited children tumble out of bed the next day, the camels have eaten their fill and the wise men have left presents and candy in its place.

In Jerusalem, thousands of Christians around the world have gathered every year in Bethlehem to watch the annual rituals at the Church of Nativity. (The last two years, however, have been an exception, as fear of terrorism has reduced tourism by more than 80%.) On Christmas Eve, a horse and rider gripping a large cross lead Christians into the church. From here, they are led down a steep flight of stairs to what is believed to be the actual birthplace of Christ, the Grotto of the Nativity, a long, narrow underground cavern. Here they wrap an ancient image of baby Jesus in swaddling clothes and tenderly lay the figure in the manger.

Incidentally, notice that the birth place of Christ was believed to be a cavern. Our modern tradition of a wooden stable is very improbable, as most barns were caves and not wooden structures. Even if it were a manmade structure, a casual glance around the Holy Lands will reveal almost no wooden buildings. Nearly everything was made out of carved stone. In fact, according to Ray Vander Laan, host of That the World May Know video series put out by Focus on the Family, the Greek word tekton we translate as “carpenter” actually is closer in meaning to “builder” or “craftsman.” While Jesus and his father Joseph no doubt did work with wood for furniture and other small commodities, it is likely they spent the greatest bulk of their time working with stone. Again, I would encourage the skeptic to do even the most casual research on the Holy Lands and see if virtually all of the ancient structures (and many of the modern ones) are not constructed of stone. One will find very little woodwork anywhere. Among other Biblical examples, this is why the cedars used in the construction of Solomon’s temple had to be imported from Lebanon (1 Kings 5:6–9).

Christmas is a holiday that is celebrated nearly the world over, though in Asian countries it has only recently begun to see broader popularity, and then only as a secular holiday with Santa Claus a prominent fixture. It is not widely celebrated or known in Africa or India, and has few religious connotations in most post communist countries, such as the former U.S.S.R. In many countries, though Christmas is still celebrated, New Years and/or Epiphany take precedence. For instance, in China, the New Year’s celebration stretches for a full fifteen days and includes many elaborate festivities. It is the most important holiday of the year; in fact, the human race is believed to have its annual birthday on the seventh day.

I hope you have enjoyed this article on the origins of Christmas. And so, even if I am a day late, to all of you, Zalig Kerstfeest from Belgium, Gledelig Jul from Norway, S Rozhdestvom Khristovym from Russia, Blijde Kerstdagen from the Netherlands, Felices Pascuas from Spain, Feliz Navidad from Mexico, Boas Festas from Portugal, Froehliche Weihnachten from Germany, Joyeux Noël from France, Sheng Tan Kuai Loh from China, Glædilig Jul from Denmark, Buon Natale from Italy, and Merry Christmas from Canada, here in the United States, and from all the other English speaking countries around the globe! God bless you all and to all a good night.