History of the holiday
What we often think of as good old-fashioned Christmas traditions — such as Christmas trees and holiday decorations — were once novel and, in some cases, banned by civil and ecclesiastical laws.
Even settling on a date to celebrate Christmas took some effort, as early Christian theologians struggled to determine a date for the birth of Jesus.
Some associated it with Passover and the Spring Equinox. Some traditions suggest that Dec. 25 is connected to the pagan tradition of celebrating the birthday of the sun, which falls immediately after the winter solstice, marking the return of longer days in the Northern Hemisphere.
For others, Jan. 6 — the date of Epiphany, associated with the arrival of the Magi at the Christ child’s crib — was more significant than the date of the nativity.
Over time, the ancient, seven-day Roman celebration of Saturnalia melded with Yule, a midwinter Germanic festival and early Christian traditions to mark the birth of Christ.
By 354 CE, the Philocalian calendar, an illuminated manuscript produced by a Roman calligrapher who served as the official engraver of Pope Damasus, provides the earliest known reference to Dec. 25 as the birth of Christ. The calendar indicates that the church in Rome began to observe Dec. 25 as Christmas as early as 336.
The word “Christmas” dates back to 1038 and originates from the Old English “Cristes maesse,” meaning Christ’s Mass, which was celebrated at midnight on Dec. 25. The liturgical observance spread in the fourth and fifth centuries, and by the ninth century, Christmas had become an established holy day observed by Christians.
Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century Catholic reformer and founder of the Franciscan Order, began the tradition of using the Nativity scene in 1223 to teach and commemorate the story of the birth of the Christ child.
The Christmas tree has its roots in Germany with Lutherans in the 16th century. Protestant reformer Martin Luther is credited with wiring candles on a tree in his home to replicate the look of stars twinkling through evergreen trees at night. As people began to incorporate the Christmas tree into their homes and churches, they decorated it with pinecones, berries, apples, nuts, and handmade ornaments.
The Protestant Reformation, which deemphasized Catholic traditions including the liturgical calendar with its holy days, gave rise to the Puritan movement.
In England, the celebration of Christmas was forbidden by an Act of Parliament in 1644, and in 1659, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Penalty for Keeping Christmas made it a crime to observe Christmas. The fine was five shillings.
As more and more Europeans migrated to North America, many traditions were also imported; however, the adoption of Christmas as a holiday was slow, in part due to Puritan sensibilities. In the mid-1700s, Germans in Pennsylvania had a community tree. Still, for many Christians, holiday decorations continued to be viewed as pagan symbols, and Christmas festivities were considered to be idolatrous and irreligious.
In the 1840s and 1850s, Queen Victoria of England popularized the celebration of Christmas and the use of Christmas trees. In 1843, Charles Dickens’ novella, “A Christmas Carol,” was first published in the wake of the Poor Laws, which were amended in 1834 and gave those desperate for aid no options but the workhouses. Dickens’ text served as a social commentary on the ever-widening gap between the poor and the wealthy in the industrialized world.
Between 1815 and 1915, as some 30 million immigrants arrived in the United States from Europe, especially Germany, Italy, and the British Isles, where Christmas traditions had become commonplace, America adopted Christmas customs in private homes and town squares, including the arrival of some variation of Father Christmas — a kindly gift-giver.
The names Santa Claus and St. Nick are derivations of Sint Nikolaas of Myra in Asia Minor, a fourth-century Christian bishop who was known for acts of charity and associated with miracles. Over the years, legends of Santa have evolved from culture to culture, and his name has morphed from Saint Nicholas into the Dutch Sinterklaas and the German Christkindl, meaning Christ Child, which became Kris Kringle.
In 1823, American Writer Clement Clark Moore, who wrote the classic poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which we know by its opening line as “The Night Before Christmas,” and caricaturist and editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast, who drew a picture of Santa Claus for Harper’s Weekly in 1863, gave us the image of Santa Claus as a jolly man with a beard from the North Pole.
Twentieth-century images of Santa evolved from the art of Norman Rockwell for Boys Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Haddon Sundblom, who created the Coca-Cola Santa beginning in the 1930s.
Decorating for Christmas
With Christmas celebrated during winter in the Northern Hemisphere, evergreens became a logical choice to add color when other florals were not available, and the symbolism of eternal life provided an easy explanation.
In 1931, two years after the Great Depression began, the first Christmas tree was erected in Rockefeller Center in New York by Italian-American construction workers building the famous plaza. The workers pooled their money to buy a 20-foot balsam fir tree, decorated with handmade garlands. Two years later, a tree was again erected, lights were added, and the tree lighting ceremony became an annual holiday tradition.
While the tree was not lit during the blackout sanctions of World War II, in the post-war 1950s, the tree became a New York City hallmark that required more than 20 workers and over nine days to decorate. The largest tree erected in the plaza was a 100-foot tree from Killingworth, Conn., in 1999.
Over the years, the tree has featured various decorations, including a 550-pound Swarovski Star in 2004, which measured 9.5 feet in diameter and was adorned with 25,000 crystals and 1 million facets. In 2005, LED lights were added that made the star appear to radiate light from its core to its tips.
The star was updated in 2018 to include LED backlighting and 3 million Swarovski crystals on 70 triangular spikes.
As the country emerged from the Great Depression and then World War II, Americans relished the availability of new luxury goods, from cars and household items to personal care products, and they leaned into celebrating and decorating for Christmas with a sense of mid-century excess.
Films such as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” released in 1946, and “White Christmas” in 1954, captured the secular role of Christmas in American culture: Christmas had become a holiday for families and friends to enjoy, but not necessarily a religious occasion. Merchants capitalized on shoppers buying Christmas gifts to boost year-end sales with elaborate window displays, as communities across the country began to follow the lead of larger cities by dressing their streets and town centers with holiday decorations.
Holiday greetings
England introduced the Penny Post, along with prepaid adhesive stamps in 1840. A letter weighing up to half an ounce could be sent for a penny, using prepaid adhesive stamps. This transformed communications and made it affordable for people to send messages.
Three years later, an arts patron, Henry Cole, founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, conceived the idea of sending a message to his many friends through the postal service. He asked an artist to design what is considered the first Christmas card and had 1,000 of the flat “postcards” printed. The fashion of sending postal greetings at Christmas was born.
In 1915, Joyce Hall, the founder of Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, took the idea of the Christmas postcard one step further. He introduced folded cards in envelopes. The tradition of sending Christmas greetings by post grew in popularity throughout the twentieth century across America. And while many people still send Christmas cards, the custom has waned as the internet has revolutionized the sending of electronic messages. Many people also find the cost of sending a Christmas card, at 78 cents for a first-class stamp, prohibitive.
Tomorrow, Part II of Holly Jolly Traditions and Decorations of the Season will take a look at traditions in Estes Park.
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