A Brief History Of Christmas

For Christians, it is a celebration of the birth of the leader of their religion, Jesus Christ. He and his teachings are at the very core of the Christian belief system. Church attendance on Christmas is also much higher than average. Not only due to the religious implications of the holiday, but attending church on Christmas has become a part of the cultural mythos that surrounds the holiday as well.

This cultural side of the Christmas holiday has grown out of proportion with the religious side of the holiday. Today many even take the religious connotation completely out of the holiday by calling it Xmas. This somehow gives those who are non-Christian the ability to feel like they are part of the celebration without invoking any religious names. Regardless of who is celebrating it, however, there is now doubt that it is firmly implanted in the western ideology. We do things like eating together with family and friends. Often these Christmas meals will be one of the largest we eat in that year, rivaling such food centric holidays as thanksgiving. We also typically will decorate a Christmas tree with lights and ornaments. Many take this practice a step further and decorate their homes or even their entire yards with Christmas based ornamentation. This practice has grown into an obsession with many and the competition for the most brightly lit home is often a bitter one. People have been known to install extra circuits in their home just for the extra electricity they use during this time.

We can’t forget the number one icon of Christmas. For better or worse, it’s not Christ himself, but Santa Claus. That jolly, fat man of German decent who rewards the good children with presents while teasing the misbehaving with a lump of coal is said to do his work on Christmas Eve. Santa has himself been revered, with people telling the stories of his coming and children getting to bed early so they don’t accidently see him when he is delivering toys. Many children are sure they can hear Santa on the roof along with his magical flying reindeer. Santa is said to visit every good boy and girl in the world on Christmas eve, further taking the need to be Christian out of the picture and instead making it a holiday about goodness to one another.

History of Christmas

With the commercialization of the modern Christmas, it’s sometimes hard to believe that it was more than stockings and Christmas cards at one point. However, the history of Christmas dates back at least as far as its namesake, with the time of year being celebrated even before that.

Ancient

The ancient Romans celebrated Christmas. They did so even before Christ was born. They didn’t call it Christmas, but the date of December 25th was a day of great feasting and celebration. The Romans were actually celebrating Mithra, a sun god. As with many holidays, it is likely that the date of Christmas was used intentionally on the same day as this famous pagan holiday to reduce the importance of the old holiday. Modern scholars find it very unlikely that this was actually the day of Jesus’ birth. Christmas wasn’t always celebrated even in the East, however. When Oliver Cromwell’s forces took control of England in the 1645, he declared that they would not be celebrating Christmas. This however, did not last for long and Christmas was soon returned to England. The pilgrims did not celebrate Christmas either; it went against the puritanical nature of many of the colonists. Jamestown however embraced the holiday. Boston actually made it illegal to celebrate the holiday and would fine those who were caught observing it. Christmas was further sidelined after the revolutionary war as there was a huge backlash against any customs or traditions that were considered to be English.

Modern

Much of the early Christmas celebration had been a wild party atmosphere, but like Mardi Gras. In the 19th century Americans decided to reinvent this party holiday into something more wholesome and controlled. In fact, the first police force in New York City was instituted just to fight back against a Christmas riot in the city. The upper class was not comfortable with such revelry among the masses and took that opportunity to start reinventing the way Americans look at Christmas. It wasn’t until Charles Dickens classic the Christmas Carol was written that the majority of people started to see the holiday in a new light. The ideas of giving to the more unfortunate and coming together with friends and family were both central ideas of the novel. People quickly adopted the book’s concept of what it meant to be Christmas until that was the norm. It was interesting that while most Americans believed they were now celebrating Christmas the way it had been done in the past, this was a completely new and American made version of the Christmas celebration.

How Has Christmas changed?

Today’s Christmas celebrations would be completely foreign to anyone even a couple of hundred years ago. Gone were the strict religious observances of the holiday. Also gone were the out of control parties that Christmas was once celebrated with. Now we have the commercial Christmas, where we harvest thirty five million live trees every year and then throw them out a couple of weeks later. We also have millions of parents rushing to the stores to buy the one toy that has been labeled as the “must have” for that Christmas.  

Where To Find More Information Online?

History.com

As with many things historic, this site is one of the first places to find information and can be found at http://www.history.com/topics/christmas.

History of Christmas.com

Another excellent and in depth site about the history of Christmas can be found at http://www.thehistoryofchristmas.com/.

History of Christmas.org

Another site with many interesting write-ups about the role Christmas has played throughout history can be found at http://www.historyofchristmas.org/.