Christmas is a holiday that seems to take the entire world by storm as soon as it reaches November every year. It’s a time of festivity, gift-giving, caroling, and many other fun activities. However, it wasn’t always about baking cookies for a man who gives gifts to children around the world. In fact, Christmas has gone through so many changes throughout the years that it’s virtually unrecognizable from its humble beginnings.
The first ever documented celebration of Christmas was in Rome in 336 AD. It’s unknown if the holiday was celebrated prior to this because of the lack of documentation. Christmas was originally an extremely religious holiday, as it celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ. While the true birth date of Jesus is unknown, Pope Julius I decided that it would be celebrated on December 25th, likely to overshadow previous pagan (non-Christian) holidays.
The next centuries following the first Christmas weren’t times of great innovation for the holiday. However, here we can see the beginnings of some of the most prominent Christmas traditions, such as the legend about 8th century Saint Boniface of modern day Germany finding a group of Pagans worshiping an oak tree. As the story goes, Saint Boniface, in a fit of rage, chopped down the tree, only for an evergreen to immediately sprout in its place, leading him to declare that the evergreen was the tree of Christianity. By the 16th century, the Christmas tree was commonplace in Germany, and would later spread to the rest of the world. However, it is worth noting that many cultures around the world, such as Egypt and Rome, also used evergreens as symbols of prosperity and life during the winter, and that the above story doesn’t have much proof surrounding it (though there was a group of people in Germany who worshiped a pillar made of oak that was later destroyed by the Christians).
Additionally, there’s the story of Saint Nicholas, who was born in the third century. He was born into a wealthy family, but when his parents died while he was young, he sold his entire inheritance and decided to dedicate his life to religion and charity. The most famous story about him is about the three daughters of a poor man being unable to marry without dowries. Dowries are possessions or payments that brides’ fathers give to future husbands and their families to secure marriages. Since their father was poor, the three women would likely be sold into slavery. However, on three occasions, bags of gold appeared overnight inside of stockings left by the fire, tossed into the house by Saint Nicholas through an open window. This story jumpstarted two modern day Christmas traditions: children putting up stockings for gifts, and the story of Santa Claus. In different countries, he went by many different names, such as Father Christmas or the Dutch’s Sinter Klaas, which after a large number of Dutch people immigrated to the United States, quickly evolved into Santa Claus.
Most of Christmas’ traditions have deep-rooted religious origins that took multiple centuries to attach themselves to the holiday, but the idea of Santa’s sleigh and reindeer took a mere three people and eleven years to develop. It all started with Washington Irving’s 1812 book A Complete History of New York, where he mentions Santa’s sleigh for the very first time. However, it wasn’t until 1821, when a booklet written by an anonymous author and published by William Gilly titled A New Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve Number III : The Children’s Friend was released, that the idea of reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh was mentioned for the very first time. Then, two years later in 1823, the original eight reindeer finally got their names in the poem The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore. Rudolph wouldn’t make his debut until 1949, when Johnny Marks wrote the song Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Christmas has come a long way since its first celebration in the fourth century, and it’s very interesting to see the changes that have occurred since then. Many central themes of the holiday are based on religious themes from over a thousand years ago that didn’t fully develop until the past four hundred years or so. Even then, there has been further evolution within the holiday in recent years. Setting out milk and cookies for Santa has only been in practice since the 1930’s, and December 23rd of this year marks the 100th anniversary of the original reindeer getting their names. Even in recent years, we’ve seen Christmas evolve even more as the internet becomes the main means of communication and shopping for many, and it’s clearly not done changing.
