The newer as well as the older Christmas practices involve powerful traditions of excess, when people flout the rules of ordinary behavior with impunity. And what about New Year’s Eve, to which the boisterous old-time Christmas revels have been mostly relegated? (So, in a way, does the occasional presence of the “naughty” Santa.) Then there are the office Christmas parties, with their whiff of alcohol and flirtation. Christmas lights, wassail songs and mistletoe hark back to those traditions. Vestiges of the older mid-winter traditions remain. Indeed, from the very beginning, the family-focused Christmas and the commercial Christmas have worked in tandem to reinforce each other. Even before 1830, shopkeepers were using Santa Claus to tout their wares, and the first Christmas-tree vendors appeared in the streets during the 1840s. At the same time, Christmas also became a commercial holiday. Nicholas” and, two decades later, by the proliferation of Christmas trees in the United States. The transformation was both marked and abetted by the 1823 publication of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit From St. ![]() In the 1800s, Christmas was transformed into the familiar domestic and child-centered ritual it remains to this day, centered on the magical figure of Santa Claus. From 1659 to 1682 it was actually illegal to celebrate the holiday in Massachusetts. All that helps explain why, as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, Puritans in both Old and New England tried to suppress Christmas as a vestige of paganism. Later, in the American South, slaves were occasionally granted temporary freedom, encouraged to get drunk and, yes, treated by their masters to lavish banquets. In England, bands of young men roamed from house to house, singing as they begged for alcohol and money. In fact, the festivities that for centuries would mark its celebration resembled those of Saturnalia and other mid-winter rituals. But by placing it at such a time, they all but gave up the ability to define it as a purely religious one: Christmas was not easy to Christianize. The holiday was observed with feasting, drinking, gambling and sexual abandon.Īs the church fathers hoped, Christmas became an important holiday. Slaves were granted temporary freedom and were treated by their masters to lavish banquets. Everyone took time off from ordinary labor. Finally, the Saturnalia was a time of role reversals and seasonal license. But Saturn was the god of agricultural abundance, so his festival also marked the bounty of the completed harvest. 23, was partly a holiday of lights that celebrated the winter solstice. For the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the holiday was called Saturnalia. The church fathers decided to place the new holiday in late December, virtually guaranteeing that it would be widely adopted because this was already a season of mid-winter revels, a holdover from pagan times. (Neither Luke nor Matthew, the two gospel writers who included stories of Jesus’s Nativity in their narratives, had indicated the date, or even the season, of the event.) What better way to convince Christians that Jesus was human than to commemorate his physical birth? The problem was that there was no evidence of when Jesus’s birth took place. They did so in part because many Christians were arguing that Jesus had not been an actual human being but rather a divine spirit - a belief the church fathers considered heretical. ![]() Christianity had been around for more than 350 years before the church fathers in Rome decided to add that event to the Christian calendar. A similar set of changes has affected the development of other seasonal holidays, like Hanukkah.Įarly Christians did not celebrate the Nativity. Yet that is largely an accident, stemming from a series of improbable changes spanning two millennia. For most Americans, Christmas is the most important holiday of the year.
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