12 Days of Christmas: A Christmas History
Away, in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.
The story of Christ’s birth is known all over the world. Immortalized in paintings, songs, sculptures and reenactments, the nativity shows the virgin Mary and Joseph kneeling beside the baby Jesus in a manger while three kings offer gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
This wasn’t always the scene that was imagined during Christmas, however. Before the 1200’s, everyone gathered in the manger scene were standing, said Christine Cooper Rompato, an associate professor of English.
The image known today was influenced in the 1400s by Saint Bridget of Sweden who had a vision of the manger scene with Mary and Joseph on their knees crouched over the baby in adoration, Rompato said.
“If you were to draw one and I were to draw a nativity scene, we would probably draw something very similar, but that’s something that has been developing for 800 years,” she said.
The holiday itself has been developing for even longer than that. For over 2000 years, Dec 25 has been a date for religious observance, celebrations, feasts, gifts and more. A rich and eventful history has helped create the Christmas celebrated today.
The first celebrated Christmas was recorded in 336 A.D. after the Roman emperor Constantine the Great came to the throne and recognized Christianity as a legal religion, said Dr. Robert J. Mueller, an associate professor of history. In fact, the date of Christ’s birth wasn’t set until the third century.
“Christ’s birth wasn’t important,” Mueller said. “Christ coming to earth to forgive the sins of all human kind, that was important.”
Before that time period, the Catholic liturgical calendar focused more on Easter, on the crucifixion and the resurrection, Rompato said. Important points in Christ’s life, such as the circumcision and the presentation, were celebrated with church ceremonies and mass, hence the name Christ mass, or Christmas.
Various dates were suggested by church leaders at the time, but the date finally settled on Dec 25. However, no one really knows when Jesus was actually born, Rompato said. Some scholars argue December couldn’t have been the date because of time the census would have occurred.
Christmas was set during the winter season due to multiple theoretical reasons, Mueller said. The first was the winter solstice, which on the Roman calendar was Dec 25. The solstice was a special time for a lot of cultures because it was the shortest day of the year. It meant that the days were getting longer, and that the worst of the winter was over.
“The Christian church believed this was a great symbolic day because Christ was supposed to be the light of the world,” he said.
As Christianity gained popularity around Europe, he said, the church tried to make sure that some of its feast days coincided with pagan holidays in order co-opt certain celebrations.
One such celebration was the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which was a tribute to Saturn, the god of agriculture. This holiday was held Dec 17-23 and had feasting, partying and even a complete role reversal, where the servants were served by their masters.
This was the only time where a master could be talked back to by his servants, Mueller said.
“Things happened on that day that weren’t supposed to happen any other time of the year, so it was a time for people to really let go,” he said. “We have a lot of Roman accounts of just how much people loved the holiday because there was feasting and drinking and games and singing and all, so it was a really, in Roman times it was a really joyous occasion.”
As the Catholic Church took over the Roman Empire, Saturnalia was adapted into the Christmas celebration, said Thomas Arnold, an associate professor of history. This technique of latching on to old traditions when imposing a new religion on people is an effective way to go about creating new celebrations. This way allows people to transition between religions easier.
It’s hard to know exactly what the reason was for celebrating Christmas during December, Rompato said. Practices that have been continued may have once originated in a pagan church, or they were celebrated for the same reason it was celebrated by pagan religions.
“Like it’s the same time perhaps because it’s the shortest day and it’s the height of winter and you’re going to kind of celebrate the cycle of the season returning,” she said. “Well is that pagan or is that Christian, too? It could be Christian as well.”
Another holiday that is celebrated during December is Saint Nicholas’ day. Held on Dec 6, this day was traditionally celebrated by giving gifts to children.
Known today as Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas was a bishop in fourth century Myra – modern-day Turkey. He is one of the patron saints of children and the patron saint of navigation and sailors, Rompato said. Saints are people who exemplify the grace of god and through that grace perform miracles.
There are a number of miracles associated with Saint Nick and the tradition of gift-giving, Mueller said. The first was a story about a poor man with three daughters. He didn’t have enough money to give his daughters dowries that would make them attractive for men to marry, which during that time period meant that they would have ended up working as prostitutes. As bishop of his area, Saint Nicholas brought three small bags of gold and threw them through the open window of the poor man’s house so the daughters would have dowries.
A second popular story about Saint Nicholas tells of three little boys who become lost in the woods. They were captured by an evil butcher who killed them cut them up and put them in a barrel to be cured. He was going to sell them as ham to the village. Nicholas heard this and prayed over the barrel, bringing all three boys back to life again.
These two stories show the saints connection to the idea of gift giving and children, Mueller said.
A lesser known mythological figure that developed in tandem to Saint Nicholas was Krampus, Arnold said. Where Saint Nick would reward children, Krampus, who is depicted as a half goat half demon, would punish them.
“People tend to forget that a lot of traditions, particularly in fairy tales and things like that, they always have a dark side to them,” he said, “if you actually read the original versions of Grimm’s fairy tales and you compare them to what Disney did to them, they’re fairly dark.”
Saint Nicholas and the tradition of gift-giving weren’t attached to the Christmas holiday until the Protestant reformation in the 16th century, Rompato said. In order to deemphasize the Catholic celebration of Saint Nicholas’ saints day the Protestant church moved the gift-giving from Dec 6 to a holiday that was recognized in the church, Christmas.
Instead of Saint Nicholas as the gift-bearer, it was the Christ child – or Christkindl – who brought gifts to the people.
“This is the origin of the name for Santa Claus which later becomes Kris Kringle,” Mueller said. “It’s actually a mispronunciation of Christkindl which became very important in Lutheran lands, so in northern Europe and up into Scandinavia.”
Christmas later became banned during the English civil war in the 1640s when Oliver Cromwell and his Protestants controlled England, Arnold said. Puritans saw the holiday as too frivolous and Catholic. In fact “there was a time in Boston where it was not allowed to celebrate Christmas,” Arnold said. “Again it was thought of as frivolity and you know, it was supposed to be a serious occasion.”
After its ban, Christmas kind of goes away, Mueller said. While it was still celebrated in upper class families, it wasn’t a popular holiday it wasn’t until the 19th century when it was revitalized.
There were a few things that helped make Christmas a big deal again, he said. The first was the release of a Christmas carol book, filled with old folk songs and carols from the middle ages that had been updated and published. There was a nostalgia movement at the beginning of the 19th century and the book became very popular.
The second thing was a poem in 1833 that became very popular called “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” and showed Santa as the gift-giving character known today. The third and most important work to come out of the early 19th century was Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” published in 1843, Mueller said.
“The story was so beloved that people began to really make Christmas a family-centered holiday,” he said, “the way that Dickens did in that story, especially the Cratchit family, and Bob Cratchit and his family, even though they didn’t have much, that they could celebrate Christmas.”
After that, Christmas became a holiday for the family, both rich and poor. The celebration of it caught on and spread throughout Europe, he said.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that Santa Claus became the jolly old man everyone knows today. All the way through the 19th century, Santa Claus was depicted in various ways; there was no iconic red suit and white beard until 1931 when the Coca Cola Company published a holiday ad for their drink, Rompato said.
Today, Christmas is the biggest commercial holiday for businesses all over the world, Mueller said. In addition to being a big religious and family holiday, Christmas has become a huge economic engine that encourages people to spend money they don’t have to buy gifts for friends and family. Businesses survive or fail based on holiday sales during the last quarter of the year.
“It’s really become a very universal and global holiday,” he said. “For Christians, it celebrates the life of Christ. For non-Christians, it’s also become an important day for gift-giving and family and every nation has developed it a little bit different, and everybody has their own traditions.”
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