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What many of us might say we know about the history of Christmas is that it was an ancient pagan festival that got taken over by Christians, and that the Puritans banned it in the 17th Century.
And as I heard the historian Ronal Hutton say in a talk on the subject once: “There’s a lot of truth in all that, but it’s a little more complicated.”
Because, in fact, most of what we do at Christmas today is a product of the 19th Century.
Hutton said: “Christmas gets reinvented every 200-300 years, and the Victorians made the makeover of it that’s with us today.”
Let’s start with some of the core elements which have been around since ancient times and survive, albeit in slightly different forms.
It’s midwinter, it’s cold and dark, it’s a fallow period in the agricultural cycle. And so, to stave off depression and boredom (it’s the original self-care!), people would come together, bring their best food out of store and binge for a day or two (see: a). They’d light a fire with an extra big (yule) log or light big candles to keep the darkness at bay. And they’d bring in greenery (holly and ivy being most abundant at that time of year) as decoration and to remind themselves that better, more fertile and prosperous days were ahead.
The ‘fairy’ style string lights (see: b) we use today first came about in Victorian times. And the greenery was replaced by paper decorations from the 19th Century and commercially made Christmas decorations (see: c) by the early 20th Century.
Presents (see: d) are another tradition which has been around since the earliest midwinter festivities, except they were given slightly later, to celebrate the birth of a new year, rather than on 25 December to celebrate the birth of Christ. It wasn’t until the 19th Century, and the invention of ‘Santa’, that the custom moved to Christmas.
Interestingly, Hutton said – despite inspiring at least one of the key traditions we still observe today – Queen Victoria insisted on keeping the practice of new year present giving right up until her death in 1901.
And so, onto the Christmas tree (see: e). It’s a German custom from the 17th Century. Queen Charlotte (the German wife of George III) was the first to introduce the Christmas tree as we know it to the British royal family and the nobility, from 1800. But it was images of Queen Victoria and her German husband Prince Albert’s elaborately decorated trees in the periodicals of the day, in the 1840s and 1850s, that popularised the custom with a broader audience.
Santa Claus was a 19th Century invention, too. Though based on the mediaeval St Nicholas – the patron saint of children, who had a feast day on 6 December, and gave presents to well behaved kids – it was a New Yorker named Clement Clarke Moore who turned him into a reindeer-drawn-sleigh-riding, chimney-descending (see: f), present-giving man in a fur-trimmed outfit. He did so with his poem (first published in 1823), ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’, which you will know from its opening words: “‘Twas the night before Christmas…”. The poem, and the details and imagery it described, reached England in the 1880s and has been with us ever since. (St Nicholas was amalgamated with the English character Father Christmas, who was invented in 1616 by playwright Ben Jonson in ‘Christmas, His Masque’, and was originally a representation of the adult fun and feasting of Christmas.)
Christmas carols (see: g) have their origin in the circular, hand-holding dancing and singing to the glory of the Christian religion of the 14th Century. The dancing was dropped by the 16th Century. And while once sung all year round, by the 19th Century, the carols were performed at Christmas rather than any other time.
Christmas cards (see: h) were invented in 1846 as a commercial enterprise.
And the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe? (see: i) Well, it starts with the scarcity of greenery in wintertime, making it a luxury item for wealthy households from the 18th Century onwards, and what Hutton described as the “unremembered genius among their servants who had the bright idea of kissing underneath it”. Instead of reprimanding their staff, the wealthy homeowners and their guests copied them, and a new tradition was born.
And in case you were wondering about the facts behind my opening statement, Hutton said:
Pagan festival: “There’s no absolutely guaranteed and established ancient pagan festival that we know was firmly held on the 25th of December. That tends to be a date in a gap between ancient pagan festivals.”
Christian celebration of the birth of Christ: “There’s nothing in the bible to say at what time of the year he was born. But if he was born when shepherds watched their flocks by night in Palestine, that’s probably going to be around May or September, rather than midwinter.”
Puritan banning: “What they banned was the religious observation of Christmas. They didn’t want it observed in churches, so they closed the churches on Christmas day. What they didn’t do was close down [everyone’s personal] celebrations. All that went on as usual.”