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Year 0, a baby is born. It probably cries, since it is in a crib in a lousy barn with a bunch of animals. Some three men hallucinate angels and come with expensive gifts to the parents of this child, who must be quite pleased with themselves. Christmas Eve, the birth of Jesus Christ.
Year 2022, “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart…” is the motto of this month. It is almost impossible to imagine the size of this celebration. A three-week break from school, Christmas music blaring from every radio station, candy in the shape of Santa Clauses, huge pine trees in public, decorated to the brim with lights and glitter. Christmas comes quicker and quicker every year. Barely have we finished Halloween before it is time for St. Nicholas and Christmas lights. How could this possibly have blown up the way it has?
After this there is the new year. It is curious to me that it isn’t a bigger celebration than Christmas, the year changes! It’s time to think of the past year and what might be in store for the next year! Why isn’t it as much of a deal as Christmas? Easter hardly has the same effect, how isn’t the Easter bunny as lucrative as Santa Claus?
I mean, it can hardly be called a Christian holiday anymore. Sure, there’s the nativity scene and Christmas church, but in general there isn’t a lot of Christian imagery around Christmas these days.
If this was presented to someone who had never heard of Christmas before I’m sure they would either assume that this was a religious celebration of Santa claus or that Jesus and St. Nicholas was the same guy.
It can't alway have been like this, something changed at some point. But where exactly did Christmas become a tradition of eating ham and giving gifts, what was it even supposed to be in the first place?
The first recorded celebration of Christmas was in 336 AD in Rome. It is theorized that Constantine, who had established christianity as the state religion, chose December 25th as the Christmas date to weaken other established pagan celebrations that were being enacted at the same time. These included traditions such as the rebirth of the unconquered sun (sol Invictus) and the birth of Mithra, an Indo-European deity. Otherwise the date was arbitrary, since they had no way of knowing when Christ was born.
Although this popularized the date known today, in the east Jesus’ birth is celebrated on January 6th, as it is the Orthodox tradition because they follow the Julian calender, which is behind the Gregorian calender that is commonly used.
There is no real definite date for Christ’s birth. These two dates were just the ones that were widely accepted in the 4th century and as such have remained till this day.
The reason why Christmas is sometimes celebrated on the 24th is because of the consensus that Jesus was born in the middle of the night, so celebrating his birth on the evening of the 24th or the morning of the 25th are both equally correct according to Christian tradition.
As far as christianity goes, there seemed to be a bigger emphasis on celebrating Easter, Christ’s death. The date is even specified in the bible, unlike his birth date.
Now, the actual meat of Christmas. the tree, the gifts, calenders, lights and of course Santa Claus, what this whole celebration is today about. This jolly figure was born around the third century in modern day Turkey. He was kind to children and subsequently became a patron saint for them. The worship of him persisted in Europe, even after the protestant reform, when saint worship was discouraged. This saint was then brought to America, where he was endlessly commercialized and as a consequence lives on till this day.
Although decorated evergreen trees have been used in other religious celebrations, like winter solstice (Yule), the Christian Christmas tree is said to have come from Germany in the 16th century.
Martin Luther is the one said to have first put lighted candles on his tree. The legend goes that he wanted to demonstrate the stars he saw between the branches of pine trees to his family. These lights were the beginning for Christmas lights. The bloated industry of awfully sized Santa Clauses that light up the whole neighborhood and such grandiose spectacles.
The Advent calenders came into the picture quite late, somewhere in Austria or Germany between the early 20th century and late 19th century. The early way of counting down the days was that a candle was lit every day before Christmas day. Gerhard Lang is credited for the modern day calender with doors to open for each day leading up to Christmas.
These are some general festivities, and of course we do have some quirky local ones of our own; Lucia’s day, which is celebrated mainly in scandinavia and Italy. Where a virgin martyr who was martyred by a stab in the throat is celebrated. Then there’s joulutorttu. It has a mysterious origin, but likely came from Sweden first before it spread to Finland, from where it hasn’t spread further.
The pagan rituals interpreted into modern Christmas tradition is the gift giving, mistletoes and the oldest of the Christmas carols.
Then there’s gingerbread, mistletoes, socks above the fireplace, milk and cookies for santa, Christmas wreaths, rice porridge… I could go on forever, there is simply a lot of traditions and acts that are associated with Christmas. It would be a chore trying to research every one of them and try to glean their origin.
But what I do know is that there is a whole ton of Christmas activity, that this Frankenstein's monster of traditions, history, religion, family gathering, paganism and the simple want to escape the winter months coldness for a second is of monstrous proportions.
Are you even aware of Santacon? It is a huge pub crawl that is enacted every year in New York City. People go there, dressed up as santa claus or such and drink alcohol. Thousands of people attend, apparently vomiting, throwing trash around and in general making New Yorkers lives harder.
Maybe one of the reasons why Christmas has persisted as well as it has is because of its quilt blanket history. The collection of traditions where everyone can pick and choose their favorites, join the celebration for no other reason than wanting to be a part of it. I’m not sure what Christmas will look like in a 100 years, I’m not even confident about the next 10. But as it stands I’m sure we will never stop hearing “Give it to someone special…”.
Happy holidays!
A.R.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/summary/Christmas
https://www.britannica.com/story/why-is-christmas-in-december
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Telesphorus
https://didyouknow.org/christmas/history/
https://www.history.com/topics/christmas/santa-claus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lucy%27s_Day
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Lucy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SantaCon
https://doinghistoryinpublic.org/1-advent-calendars/
https://www.almanac.com/plants-winter-solstice
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