The Origins Of Our Christmas Traditions

Reposted from Dec. 25, 2011:

On Dec. 25, we celebrate Christmas. There are presents beneath a Christmas tree, along with holiday food and drink. Christmas carols are sung while Santa Claus and his reindeer play across the television.

 How we celebrate Christmas today involves an amalgam of far flung traditions, only some of which arise purely from Christianity. Much of how we celebrate has to do with pagan traditions redirected to celebrating the birth of Christ.

I find it fascinating that some radical secularists and atheists repeatedly point this out, citing it as proof that the celebration of Christmas is somehow false or hypocritical. That is a non-sequitur. It is that which is celebrated that matters, not the trappings or method of celebration, nor the date on which it occurs.

That said, the trappings and methods are fascinating, and date back, in many cases, to antiquity. Thus do we have everything from Christmas on December 25th to Santa Claus, the yule log, and caroling to name but a few of our modern Christmas traditions.

Syncretism

Scratch most any Christian holiday and you'll find all sorts of pagan customs caught up in it.  As Christianity spread into pagan lands, the Catholic Church embraced the policy of syncretism - adopting the forms, trappings and traditions of pagan religions, as part and parcel of converting the pagans to Christianity.  Probably the most famous memorialization of a papal order to use the process of syncretism comes from the writings of the Venerable Bede, who notes that in 601 A.D., Pope Gregory sent a letter to his missionaries instructing them to adapt local customs and places of worship as part of the conversion process whenever possible.

 Christmas on Dec. 25

The earliest Christians celebrated the death and resurrection of Jesus, they didn't celebrate his birth - probably because the bible doesn't tell us the day on which Christ was born. Modern historians and theologians put the birth of Jesus as occurring somewhere between April and September. Nonetheless, in 337 A.D., Pope Saint Julius I directed that Dec. 25th should be the day on which we celebrate the birth of Christ.

Why he did that, we can only make an educated guess.  In 337 A.D., the ancient Roman Empire was the world's superpower. Christianity had only two decades earlier emerged as a legitimate religion in the empire.  For the 300 preceding years, Christians had been intermittently and brutally persecuted, with the worst having had occurred under Diocletian starting in 303 A.D. and not fully ending until 313 A.D. with Edict of Milan signed by Constantine I.

By 337 A.D., Christianity was in competition for supremacy in the Roman Empire.  Pagan Romans prayed to many Gods, but the most important of these was Saturn.  The major celebration of this God was Saturnalia, beginning on the day of the winter solstice and ending about a week later.  It was a week of celebrations, gift giving, and of kind treatment of slaves.  When the Julian Calendar was first promulgated in 46 B.C., it set the date of the Winter solstice as Dec. 25.

In addition to Rome's Saturnalia, most pagan religions had major celebrations centered around the Winter solstice. So when Pope St. Julius I chose Dec. 25, he placed Christianity's second most important celebration, the birth of Christ, squarely over top the pagan midwinter celebrations and Saturnalia, continuing the traditions of feasts and gaiety, but turning them to a celebration of the birth of Jesus for Christians.

Gift Giving -

The giving of gifts at Christmas time seems to have been a continuation of such acts common throughout the pagan midwinter celebrations, including Saturnalia.  Near a millennium later, some leaders of the medieval Church, in a true humbug moment, tried to suppress gift giving because of its pagan roots.  What were they thinking?  Fortunately, saner heads prevailed and the Church finally came to conclude that gift giving at Christmas was justified on the basis of the gifts rendered to Jesus by the magi at the Epiphany, in addition to the tradition of gift giving for which Saint Nicholas became famous in 4th century Asia Minor.

Santa Claus, Yuletide, and stockings hung by the chimney with care -

Saint Nicholas, the man who forms much of the foundation for our modern Santa Claus, lived in 4th century Asia Minor, where he served the Church as the Bishop of Myra.

Saint Nicholas, a deeply pious man with a great love for children, began the habit of gift giving in the Christian tradition. He often would go about at night and leave gold coins in the shoes of his parishioners. Nicholas is credited with several miracles, but perhaps his most famous exploit involved simple charity to help a poor family:

. . . a poor man had three daughters but could not afford a proper dowry for them. This meant that they would remain unmarried and probably, in absence of any other possible employment would have to become prostitutes. Hearing of the poor man's plight, Nicholas decided to help him but being too modest to help the man in public (or to save the man the humiliation of accepting charity), he went to his house under the cover of night and threw three purses (one for each daughter) filled with gold coins through the window opening into the man's house.

You can find a detailed description of his life and the many legends surrounding this most famous of Saints here and here.

But St. Nicholaus is not the whole foundation for Santa Claus.  How we get from Saint Nicholas to Santa Claus is the story of a syncretic melding that occurred in antiquity of Saint Nicholas with the Norse God Odin. Odin, a God of War, was also a gift giver to children. During the pagan midwinter celebration of Yule, Odin would ride his flying horse onto the roof of each house.  Children would place carrots and straws in their shoes and set them near the chimney.  Odin's horse would consume the goodies while Odin rewarded the children with Gifts.  

So thorough was the conversion of the Germanic peoples that even the name of their ancient celebration, Yule, was re-defined to refer to Christmas.  And as the Norse converted, they melded St. Nicholas with Odin, creating a figure known as Sinter Claes who made his home in the frozen northern lands.  When Sinter Claes came to America with the first Dutch settlers, his name was anglicized to Santa Claus.  It was in America that Santa was given reindeer instead of a horse, and it was in the famous Clement Moore poem, T'was the Night Before Christmas," that our modern Santa Claus was given description.

Odin was usually shown in green robes, representing "the Celto-Germanic idea of evergreens surviving through the winter and representing the renewal of life."  Likewise, Santa Claus was, for many centuries, shown as dressed in green robes.

My research isn't turning up a definitive answer on how the color red came to be associated with Santa and Christmas in general.  One theory is that the association of red with Christmas comes from the color of St. Nichalous's vestments.  A second, more cynical theory is that Coca Cola corporation pushed red - the same red as the color of their cans - in their early marketing campaigns centered around Santa Claus.

Christmas Carols and Caroling -

A "carol" is a song devoted to Christmas.  The first hymns to Christmas date all the way back to 4th century Rome, not long after Pope St. Julius I set the date for the birth of Jesus.  Indeed, one of those early carols, "Of The Father's Love Begotten," written at the turn of the 4th century, is still sung by choirs today.

While Christmas Carols have always been with us, the act of "caroling" - visiting homes to sing carols - has roots in the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon tradition of "wassailing."  By the Middle Ages, the wassailing tradition had been absorbed into Christianity, and it became customary on 12th night (see The 12 Days of Christmas) for groups of wassailers to sing songs at their lord's manor.  As set out in the ancient carol, still popular today, "Here We Come A Wassailing" the peasants ask for ale and food and in return bestow their blessings and good will upon the lord.

Christmas Trees -

The modern Christmas Tree has its origins in one particular "mystery play" commonly staged during the Middle Ages on Christmas Eve.  The play told the masses the story of Adam and Eve using as a prop a "Paradise Tree" - an evergreen tree adorned with apples and wafers.  At some point, it became common among West Germans to set up such a tree in their homes, with the dedication becoming associated with Christmas rather than the Creation story.  Candles and other decorations were added and this German tradition gradually spread beyond its borders.  The tradition was brought to Britain in the early 19th century by Queen Charlotte when she married King George III.  And while such trees were common amongst German immigrants to America, it was an 1848 photo of Britain's King and Queen posed next to a Christmas tree that set the tradition alight throughout all of the U.S.

And in conclusion, let me wish a Merry Christmas to one and all.

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On The Seventh Day Of The Twelve Days of Christmas

And you thought Christmas was over? You obviously don't know your Medieval history. Fortunately, we have a historian on the net who blogs on nothing else - Got Medieval. It is one of the most interesting of history blogs on the net . . . and do be sure to check out the Medieval personals on the side of his blog for any lonely hearts out there:

. . . The Nativity is celebrated on December 25, a date set in 337 by Pope St. Julius I. So, Merry 1672th Christmas, everybody! For most of the Middle Ages, Christmas was not, as it is today, the culmination of the holiday season, but rather its beginning. The twelve days of Christmas begin on Christmas, after all, and stretch until January 5th, also known as Twelfth Night, the day before Epiphany, the day the Magi arrived.

As an aside, scratch most any Christian holiday and you'll find all sorts of pagan customs caught up in it. That does not detract from the religious meaning of the holiday, but merely goes to show how early Christianity followed a policy of "syncretism" during the process of conversion. They adapted as much as possible of the local pagan customs into the overlay of Christianity. Indeed, our recent "1672nd" celebration of Christmas is itself very much a creature of syncretism, adapting the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia into a celebration of the birth of Christ. And the Celtic Cross, with its overlay of a sun symbol, is yet another result of syncretism.

Probably the most famous memorialization of a papal order to use the process of syncretism comes from the writings of the Venerable Bede, who notes that in 601 A.D., Pope Gregory sent a letter to his missionaries instructing them to adapt local customs and places of worship as part of the conversion process whenever possible. If you want to learn more about the history of Christmas, by the way, there are a series of good videos I posted here. But none of that includes the additional information provided by the proprietor of Got Medieval, so to continue with his erudition:

December 26 marks the Feast of St. Stephen the Protomartyr of all Christianity. You may remember him as the guy that Saul helps to stone in Acts. And if you're American, you probably spent at least part of your childhood wondering why "Good King Wenceslas" looked out on the feast of Stephen instead of Christmas, since you sing the song at Christmastime. . . .

The Feast of St. John the Evangelist--not to be confused with St. John the Baptist--comes the next day, on December 27. St. John has the distinction of being the only one of the original twelve apostles to live to be an old man, rather than dying as a young martyr. According to one story, John was almost martyred, however, when someone tried to poison his wine, but he was saved because it was his habit to bless his wine before he drank it. John's blessing didn't just passively purify the wine--according to the story, the poison rose up magically from the chalice and formed into the shape of a servant that then slithered off. Thus, St. John often appears in medieval iconography as a man holding a chailce with what looks like steam coming out of it.*** In recognition of this near miss, traditional Catholics celebrate St. John's with lots of wine. I guess magic snakes are as good an excuse as any.

If you look closely at the image from the medieval calendar above, you can see that December 28 is illustrated by two midgets impaled on a spear that's being propped up by someone's decapitated head. That's because December 28th is The Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the children massacred by Herod in his failed attempt to kill off Christ. . . .

St. Thomas Becket, Henry II's "turbulent priest" is commemorated with a feast on December 29. (He's the one pictured above near the end with a dagger sticking out of his head.) As a Chaucerian, I'm pretty tired of Thomas Becket. I mean, what's the big deal? He's just a bishop who got killed by some overzealous royal sycophants. Sure, he's known for curative powers, but what saint isn't? . . .

Rounding out the year, The Feast of Pope St. Sylvester is celebrated on December 31. Sylvester is chiefly notable for being the pope that Emperor Constantine was said to have given all his lands to, thus granting the papacy superiority to all temporal monarchs--at least, that's the story the popes told. They even had a document forged, the so-called Donation of Constantine, to back them up. Lorenzo Valla, the Renaissance scholar, eventually pointed out the many problems with it, including the fact that nobody seems to have mentioned the Donation in print until about four hundred years after it was supposed to have been written. Oh, silly medieval popes, your pitiful forgeries can only fool people for six hundred years or so. Why do you even try?

Lol. Hmmm, just as a person is the sum of their choices in life, so are we, in a collective sense, the sum of our history. It pays to know it. And besides, it's always interesting and often humorous. Do pay Got Medieval a visit for his additional commentary on the Saints above.

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May 27 - This Day In History

1328 – Philip VI is crowned King of France. He started the 100 Years War with England, only to see the French army all but annihilated by a much smaller English army incorporating the longbow at the Battle of Crécy.

1703 – Czar Peter the Great founded the city of Saint Petersburg, built by slave labor and prisoners of war. The city was later renamed Leningrad, reverting back to its original name after the fall of the Soviet Union.

1895 – Irish author and wit Oscar Wilde is imprisoned for sodomy.

1941 – British warships caught up with the German battleship Bismarck, sinking it after a three hour battle. .

Births

1837 – Wild Bill Hickok, American gunfighter (d. 1876)

1911 – Vincent Price, American actor (d. 1993)

1912 - Slammin' Sammie Snead, American golfer (d. 2002)

Deaths

735 – The Venerable Bede, monk and the "Father of English History." Much of our knowledge of his era dates from his many writings, the most famous of which is Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People).

1564 – John Calvin, the French theologian who founded Calvinism. "The Presbyterian and other Reformed churches, which look to Calvin as a chief expositor of their beliefs, have spread throughout the world. Calvin's thought exerted considerable influence over major religious figures and entire religious movements, such as Puritanism, and his ideas have been cited as contributing to the rise of capitalism, individualism, and representative democracy in the West.

1949 – Robert Ripley, showman and student of the bizarre. He has gifted/cursed us with Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Holidays and Feasts:

In Nigeria, its Children's Day. Bolivia is celebrating Mother's Day. And today is the feast day for the Roman soldier and Christian martyr, Saint Julius the Veteran.

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An Irony Rich Krauthammer Ponders the Spread of Democracy

Today, we have the brilliant Jewish columnist, Charles Krauthammer, turning to syncretism, the modern label for ancient Catholicism's method to convert Jews and pagans to Christianisty, and suggesting it for use as a strategy to convert Islamic and other countries to secular democracy. There is an elegant historical symmetry to that thought.

Syncretism was the early Church's custom, during the process of conversion, of initially adapting, as much as possible of the local pagan customs into the overlay of Christianity. Indeed, our recent celebration of Christmas is itself very much a creature of syncretism, adapting the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia into a celebraton of the birth of Christ. And the Celtic Cross, with its overlay of a sun symbol, is yet another result of syncretism.

Probably the most famous memorialization of a papal order to use the process of syncretism comes from the writings of the Venerable Bede, who notes that in 601 A.D., Pope Gregory sent a letter to his missionaries instructing them to adapt local customs and places of worship as part of the conversion process whenever possible:

For there is no doubt that it is impossible to efface every thing at once from [the pagan's] obdurate minds., because he who endeavors to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees or steps and not by leaps. This the Lord made himself known to the people of Israel in Egypt: and yet he allowed them to use the sacrifices which they were wont to offer to the devil in his own worship, commanding them in his sacrifice to kill beasts to the end that, changing their hearts they mad lay aside one part of the sacrifice whilst retained another: that whilest they offered the same beasts which they were wont to offer, they should offer them to God, and not to idols, and thus they would no longer be the same sacrifices.

Now it is Krauthammer's turn to suggest to Americans that we use this proven process as we attempt to spread Democracy throughout the world:

"My mother always said, democracy is the best revenge."

-- Bilawal Bhutto Zardari,

son of the late Benazir Bhutto

Of all the understandings of the democratic idea, none could be more wrong than this one. Democracy at its very core is an antidote to the kind of dynastic revenge young Bhutto was suggesting.

For the Bhuttos, elections are a means for the family to regain power. . .

Democracy was meant to be the antithesis of feudalism. Popular sovereignty was to supplant divine right; free elections to supplant dynastic succession (a progression Americans have not completely mastered either). It is clear that Bilawal meant to put the best gloss on his mother's dictum. He, like she, would avenge the political murder of a parent not with violence but through the ballot box. Nonetheless, his unmistakable assumption of aristocratic entitlement clangs against his professed fealty to democratic means.

His mother was the same. In more than one journalistic profile, she was characterized as "a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties." Part of the reason for the precariousness of Pakistan's democracy is precisely that it remains a largely feudal society practicing democratic forms.

But Pakistan is hardly alone. The very same week Pakistan nearly imploded, a close and disputed election sent Kenya, heretofore one of the more stable democracies in Africa, into a convulsion of tribal violence. These bloody eruptions come against a background of less dramatic but equally important defeats for the democratic idea. Russia acquiesces cravenly as its nascent democracy is systematically dismantled in return for a bit of great-power posturing and a measure of oil-fueled pottage doled out by Czar Vladimir. China even more apathetically continues to concede stewardship of its market economy and modernizing society to a Leninist dictatorship. How many decades will it take before we acknowledge that the axiom that economic liberalization leads to political liberalization may not be axiomatic?

This comes after the Palestinians, in their first post-Arafat parliamentary election, give the mandate to a terrorist group. And as Lebanon, the leader of the Arab Spring of 2005, watches Syrian proxies systematically kill one member of parliament after another to deny the democrats the quorum they need to elect a like-minded president.

These defeats, marking the cresting of the 30-year democratic wave that had swept through Latin America, Eastern Europe, East Asia and even parts of Africa, raise more than theoretical questions. They challenge the core Bush notion that American foreign policy should be predicated on trying to spread democracy. Six years after Sept. 11 there still is no remotely plausible alternative to the Bush Doctrine for ultimately changing the culture from which jihadism arises. But while spreading democracy may be necessary, can it, in fact, be done?

We know that it can, of course, as demonstrated by our success in turning Germany, Japan and South Korea into important democratic allies. But there we had the rare advantage of the near total control that came with uncontested postwar occupation.

What is required in conditions of far less control? A healthy respect for the enduring power of local political primitivism and a willingness to adapt to it.

In Afghanistan, that means accepting radical decentralization and the power of warlords. In Iraq, that means letting centralized, top-down governance give way, at least temporarily, to provincial and tribal autonomy as the best means of producing effective representative institutions.

And in Pakistan, that means accepting both the enduring presence of feudal politics and the preeminent role of the military, Pakistan's one functioning national institution, as a guarantor of the state -- even (as in another secular Islamic country, Turkey) at the cost of giving it extra-constitutional authority. It also means accepting the reality that Pervez Musharraf, however dubious his democratic credentials, is not to be abandoned because his fall would unleash the deluge.

These are hard days for democracy. That is not a reason for giving up on it. It is a reason for the prudent acceptance and nurturing of local variants, however imperfect.

The Roman Church learned that spreading the creed required tolerance for the incorporation of certain pre-Christian practices as a way of strengthening the new faith and giving it local roots. For the spread of democracy today, we need to practice our own brand of syncretism and learn not to abandon the field when forced to settle for regional adaptations that fall short of the Jeffersonian ideal.

Read the entire article here. I think Krauthammer is hitting the nail on the head, though it may appear as heresy to the utopian perfectionists on the left. At any rate, if one likes a bit of historical irony with their political opinions and coffee in the morning, here it is.

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