Christmas

• 1. Introduction

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  Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed on December 25 by billions of people across the world. Yet the word itself carries a surprising history: it was first recorded in writing as Crīstesmæsse in the year 1038, a compressed form of Christ's Mass. The holiday has been banned by governments, fought over in the streets of English cities, quietly sung about in secret, and transformed by novelists, cartoonists, and poets into something that looks almost unrecognizable beside its fourth-century origins.

  Why is it celebrated on December 25? Who decided, and when? How did a medieval feast notorious for drunkenness and gambling become the family-centered occasion known today? And what does a Dutch bishop from the fourth century have to do with a red-suited figure delivering toys around the world? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Date Under Debate

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  December 25 was the traditional date of the winter solstice in the Roman Empire, and a festival called Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the birthday of the god Sol Invictus, had been held on that day since AD 274. The earliest document to place the birth of Jesus on that specific date is the Chronograph of 354, also known as the Calendar of Filocalus. Liturgical historians generally agree that the relevant portion was written in Rome in AD 336.

  Two competing theories have long divided scholars. The substitution theory argues that church leaders chose December 25 to absorb the Roman solar festival. The calculation theory, first proposed by Louis Duchesne, is less dramatic: it suggests the date arose from Christian chronography. Some early Christians believed Jesus was conceived and died on the same calendar date. Several third-century sources placed his death at the spring equinox, March 25. Nine months later yields December 25. Duchesne himself admitted this belief is not attested in any early Christian text.

  In the East, the birth of Jesus was initially tied to the Epiphany on January 6, a feast focused primarily on his baptism rather than his birth. Christmas gained ground in the East after the pro-Arian Emperor Valens died at the Battle of Adrianople in 378. The feast was introduced in Constantinople in 379, brought to Antioch by John Chrysostom probably in 388, and reached Alexandria in the century that followed. The Armenian Apostolic Church continues to this day to celebrate the birth of Christ on January 6 alongside his baptism, making no distinction between the two events.

• 3. Medieval Carnival and Reform

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  Charlemagne was crowned Emperor on Christmas Day in 800, and that single event raised the holiday's political prominence across Europe. King Edmund the Martyr was anointed on Christmas in 855. King William I of England was crowned on Christmas Day 1066. The day had become a stage for power.

  By the High Middle Ages, the holiday had acquired a distinctly raucous character. At a Christmas feast in 1377, King Richard II of England reportedly had 28 oxen and 300 sheep consumed by his guests. Caroling was performed by groups of dancers, with a lead singer and a ring of performers providing the chorus. Writers of the era condemned it as lewd. The phenomenon scholars call misrule, meaning drunkenness, promiscuity, and gambling, was a central feature, not an embarrassing side effect.

  The Reformation shifted the holiday's character again. In 16th- and 17th-century Europe, many Protestants moved the date of gift-giving from December 6, the feast of Saint Nicholas, to Christmas Eve. They also changed the gift-bringer from Saint Nicholas to the Christ Child, known in German as Christkindl, a name that would eventually be corrupted in English to Kris Kringle. Martin Luther, according to professor Donald Heinz of California State University, Chico, inaugurated a period in which Germany would produce a Christmas culture that was widely copied in North America.

• 4. Bans, Riots, and Restoration

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  In 1647, England's Puritan rulers banned Christmas outright. Oliver Cromwell ordered his troops to confiscate any special meals prepared on Christmas Day. The response was immediate and physical: pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several English cities, and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by rioters who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans. When Puritans outlawed Christmas in December 1647, crowds brought out footballs as a symbol of festive defiance.

  A pamphlet called The Vindication of Christmas, published in London in 1652, argued the Puritan case was wrong and preserved a catalogue of Old English traditions: roast apples on the fire, card playing, dances with plow-boys and maidservants, old Father Christmas, and carol singing. Religious services marking Christ's birth continued in secret during the ban.

  Christmas was restored as a legal holiday in England with the return of King Charles II in 1660. Scotland followed a different path entirely. The Parliament of Scotland officially abolished Christmas in 1640, claiming the church had been purged of all superstitious observation of days. It was not until 1871 that Christmas Day became a bank holiday there.

  In Colonial America, Christmas observance was outlawed in Boston in 1659. The ban was revoked in 1681 by English governor Edmund Andros, but celebrating Christmas did not become fashionable in the Boston region until the mid-19th century. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims of New England had pointedly spent their first December 25 in the New World working as normal. The Pennsylvania Moravians took the opposite view: their settlement in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had both the first Christmas trees and the first Nativity scenes in America.

• 5. The Nineteenth-Century Reinvention

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  In 1822, Clement Clarke Moore wrote the poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, popularly known by its first line: 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. The poem helped spread the custom of exchanging gifts and set off a commercial dynamic that Harriet Beecher Stowe was already critiquing in her 1850 book The First Christmas in New England, where a character complains that the true meaning of Christmas was lost in a shopping spree.

  Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, the same year Sir Henry Cole produced the first commercial Christmas card in London. Dickens's novel achieved what his biographers have described as an ingenious pairing of seasonal fiction and seasonal book sales. Its influence extended well beyond publishing. Dickens sought to reconstruct Christmas as a family-centered festival linking worship and feasting within a context of social reconciliation. The phrase Merry Christmas was popularized following the story's appearance. The word Scrooge entered the English language as a synonym for miser, and the exclamation Bah! Humbug! became shorthand for hostility to festive feeling.

  The Christmas tree traveled a separate route into mainstream use. German Lutherans had placed one in the Cathedral of Strassburg in 1539, under Protestant reformer Martin Bucer. In Britain, the practice was introduced in the early 19th century by Queen Charlotte, who was born in Germany. The future Queen Victoria wrote about her delight at her Christmas tree in 1832. An image of the British royal family with their tree at Windsor Castle caused a sensation when published in the Illustrated London News in 1848. A modified version appeared in Godey's Lady's Book in Philadelphia in 1850, and by the 1870s the custom had become common across America.

  The modern image of Santa Claus was shaped significantly in New York. Washington Irving and the German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast, who lived from 1840 to 1902, were among the key figures who transformed the Dutch Sinterklaas tradition, rooted in the figure of a 4th-century Greek bishop of Myra named Nicholas, into the red-dressed figure known today. Louis Prang introduced the Christmas card to Americans in 1875 and earned the title father of the American Christmas card. On the 28th of June 1870, Christmas was formally declared a United States federal holiday.

• 6. State Suppression and the 20th Century

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  After the Soviet Union was founded in 1917, Christmas celebrations were prohibited in public along with other Christian holidays. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the League of Militant Atheists encouraged school pupils to campaign against Christmas traditions including the Christmas tree. The League established an antireligious holiday to be held on the 31st of each month as a replacement. At the height of this campaign, in 1929, children in Moscow were encouraged on Christmas Day to spit on crucifixes. Gift-giving and the Christmas tree were transferred instead to the New Year celebration. The persecution did not end until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Orthodox Christmas became a state holiday again in Russia for the first time in seven decades.

  In Nazi Germany, European History Professor Joseph Perry wrote that propagandists sought to deemphasize or eliminate altogether the Christian aspects of the holiday and promoted Nazified Christmas songs replacing Christian themes with the regime's racial ideology.

  During the First World War, a series of informal truces took place for Christmas in 1914 between opposing armies. Organized spontaneously by the soldiers themselves, these ranged from shouted promises not to shoot to gift exchanges and games of football between enemies. These incidents became a semi-mythologized part of popular memory and have since been used to illustrate to children the ideals of Christmas.

• 7. Commerce, Carols, and Custom

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  In 2004, figures from the US Census Bureau showed that expenditure in American department stores rose from $20.8 billion in November to $31.9 billion in December, a 54 percent increase. In bookstores the November-December buying surge was 100 percent; in jewelry stores it reached 170 percent. In the same year, employment in American retail stores rose from 1.6 million to 1.8 million in the two months leading up to Christmas. One economist's analysis estimated that Christmas resulted in a $4 billion deadweight loss in the US alone in 2001, calculated as the gap between what givers spent and what recipients would have paid for the same items.

  The music associated with the holiday has roots running back to fourth-century Rome. Latin hymns including Veni redemptor gentium, written by Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, were composed as theological arguments against Arianism. The carol Corde natus ex Parentis by the Spanish poet Prudentius, who died around 413, is still sung in some churches today. By the 12th century, the Parisian monk Adam of St. Victor was drawing on popular songs to create something closer to the carol form as it is now recognized. A 1426 work by John Awdlay lists twenty-five carols of Cristemas, likely sung by wassailers going from house to house.

  The Welsh melody for Deck the Halls dates from 1794, with English lyrics added by Scottish musician Thomas Oliphant in 1862. Jingle Bells was copyrighted in 1857. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing began as a text by Charles Wesley, the 18th-century founder of Methodism, originally titled Hark! How All the Welkin Rings. The carol revival in print was begun by William Sandys's Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern in 1833, which contained the first printed appearances of The First Noel, I Saw Three Ships, and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.

  The first Christmas grotto, a retail concept devised by entrepreneur David Lewis, opened in Lewis's department store in Liverpool in 1879. In the United Kingdom in 2010, up to £8 billion was expected to be spent online at Christmas, representing approximately a quarter of total retail festive sales.