Christmas: A Biography

Christmas is a season of traditions and unique customs for each family, for the Christian church and for the celebrating public as well. In my own family there are certain cookies and casseroles that we only make around this time of year, and in addition the same videos of embarrassing Christmas school and church performances tend to make the rounds as well. It’s these traditions and the overall themes of family, generosity and hope for the new year that make this season, for me, and for Andy Williams, the “most wonderful time of the year.”

For history enthusiasts Christmas is also often a time where we start to wonder where and how all these traditions began. This includes personal questions like “who was the first person to make the Weller family casserole”, and more general questions like, “where did Santa come from”, or “why do we bring dying pine trees into our houses every year to decorate”. Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography is the perfect book for the history enthusiast looking for comprehensive answers to these kinds of questions, a way to get into the Christmas season, and a lot of fun facts and corrections about assumed knowledge of the season to annoy relatives with. Throughout this book Flanders traces the origin of Christmas season from its share of religious and pagan origins in the first few centuries to the practices and celebrations of the Middle Ages up to the formation of more contemporary legends and traditions like Santa, Rudolph, wrapping paper and Christmas cards. Being written by a Brit, the book does tend to go a little bit more in depth on English traditions, though the traditions of Germany, Scandinavia, other parts of Europe and even Japan are well represented, with the final portions of the book being especially devoted to the transfusion and mixing of traditions from the old world to the new regarding uniquely American innovations in the celebration of the holiday.

Throughout the book Flanders consistently demonstrates that the Christmas season has always been more than a festival of the Christian Church, and that people have also always complained about others trying to take the Christian elements out of the season. From its earliest days Christmas’ status as a wintertime holiday has naturally lended itself to themes of harvest, charity, family, community overeating and merriment. One of Flanders’ strongest arguments for this multifaceted vision of Christmas comes from her description of Christmas in the time of the English Civil War, where the entire holiday was outlawed by Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth government on the basis that the feasts, and resulting rowdy and sometimes lewd behavior that resulted from them, were hardly befitting of a holy day celebrating the birth of Christ. The decision of Cromwell’s government was to abolish the celebration of the holiday altogether, leaving stores, businesses and even Parliament open on that day, and some years going one step further and proposing a fast on those days, though not for the purposes of celebrating or remembering Christ’s birth. This practice of outlawing the celebration of Christmas would also be followed in Puritan New England, though eventually celebration of the holiday was resumed once the non-Puritan residents of the colony vastly outnumbered the Puritan ones. Through this and other examples Flanders makes it clear that Christmas has always been celebrated as a festive season that incorporated and mixed the best parts of secular traditions and a non-religious emphasis on family, love and charity with a more overtly Christian celebration of the birth of a Savior and the promise of God’s continued presence in the lives of those on earth. Sometimes one element is emphasized to the detriment of the other but the subtle balance of secular and sacred in the holiday has always been an element of the season.

Another one of the main insights I gained through Flanders’ book about the holiday is how Christmas has shifted throughout time as a grand communal and adult-centric celebration to one that focuses on the family and particularly on children. One great way Flanders demonstrates this evolution is by exploring how the tradition of gift giving has changed throughout the history of the celebration of Christmas. Some sort of gift giving has historically been a custom of the season, though the social direction of those gifts has often changed throughout the years. In the Middle Ages some practiced a tradition of gift giving to their superiors, whether that be a landlord or king, while later those in positions of power were expected to provide large feasts for their tenants, serfs or workers on the day. Because of these practices Christmas was celebrated more as a large communal festival for an entire town than as an intimate family occasion, and other traditions such as Wassailing, where groups of people went house to house singing bawdy songs and asking for gifts of food and drink, added to this image of a public, communal holiday. Additionally, the pervasiveness of gambling and drinking on Christmas lent to its image as a celebration for adults.

As Flanders explains, the emphasis that we see on gifts to children and family members, as well as that stronger focus on the private family home as the center of the Christmas celebration, grew out of the societal changes of the Industrial Revolution. One of the contributing factors of this change was the sharp decrease in child mortality rates during this time, which led to families having less children and focusing more attention on the children they did have. In addition, urbanization led to a more transitory and alienating experience for people, shrinking the social circle from a village that one rarely if ever left in their life to the closer familial unit of mother, father, children and a few relatives. The cheaper manufacturing costs for commercial goods also led to gift giving being a cheaper practice to participate in as well. All these factors created by the Industrial Revolution led to a more family focused holiday, with an especial emphasis on gift giving for children.

The other key understanding of the history of Christmas that Flanders seems to want us to take away from her book is that nostalgia has always been an element of the season. From the first centuries of its practice to the nineteenth century, and even into present day, Christmas has been a time when people participate in celebrations and traditions that transport us back to a simpler, more wholesome time. What Flanders argues is that in many cases throughout history the versions of Christmas that people have nostalgically pined for have never actually existed, they remain much more an ideal of the perfect Christmas than what really went on in those olden times. The greatest example of this is the way Charles Dickens himself wrote about the holiday in A Christmas Carol. As Flanders explains it, Dickens’ largest inspiration for A Christmas Carol  was a book by Washington Irving entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. Irving, who made his own contributions to the Christmas tradition, was an American living in London in the early 1800’s. He wrote The Sketch Book as a fictionalized travelogue of an American visitor discovering the history of an idealized past England, recounting old English Christmas traditions such as the Lord of Misrule, mince pies and parlour games, with a fair amount of embellishment, making the book far from a reliable historical record. As Flanders describes it “because the book was written as a travelogue, the knowledge that it was fiction vanished….British readers understood that it did not describe their own Christmases, but typically thought that it was an accurate description of Christmases past, while American reviewers took the book as straightforward reportage.” So Dickens, in using The Sketch Book as his reference material for the world of A Christmas Carol, took an idealized fictional vision of the Christmas of the past and popularized it, whether intentional or not, as a fact, creating a nostalgia for Christmases past that were in fact, not part of the past we know to be true.

The other example Flanders gives of the importance of nostalgia in Christmas is the role the small town of Bedford Falls plays in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, a film which was itself a loose adaptation of the storyline of A Christmas Carol. Bedford Falls serves as a talisman for the wholesome American small town where everyone knows everyone and family traditions are cherished and valued, even though when it premiered in 1946 and during each subsequent Christmas season it aired to an increasingly urbanized America whose own experience of Christmas was quite different. The nostalgia for something we haven’t quite experienced is part of what makes that film a classic of the season, just as much as the themes of love of family and charity towards one’s community.

Ultimately though what Flanders wants to leave us with is the realization that Christmas has always been a season and holiday of transformation and transition, becoming what our cultures need at the time. While its traditions can be traced they have all changed through the ages to reflect where we are and what we value. This is evident in the shift from communal to more familial celebrations and in the nostalgia the season creates. Christmas is a celebration that brings up feelings of nostalgia for an idealized past that never really completely existed, where familial and social relations were on firm foundations and all traditions were cherished and preserved instead of continuing to be transformed by present circumstances. In a way the Christmas season conversely draws us forward towards what we hope our lives to be, by nostalgically looking back to past ideals of family, charity and tradition. This kind of hope is similar to the hope present in Advent, and that comes to fruition in the Christmas Eve service, where Christians celebrate the hope and promise of God coming into the world so long ago, and look forward to the promise of new life to come. Returning to that ever present complaint of taking the Christ out of Christmas, I think this shows the merit of both parts of the season. At its best in both its secular and religious celebrations Christmas reminds us to hope for better times, and to celebrate the love that we have for each other here and now.

Fun Facts from Christmas: A Biography

• Thomas Nast was the first cartoonist to draw something like the Santa Claus we see now. He was a political cartoonist for Harpers Weekly during the Civil War and he drew a lot of inspiration from the Christmas stories of Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore. His original drawings had Santa especially short, wearing dark fur hats. The red suit wouldn’t appear until Nast’s drawings in the 1880s.
• In the 19th century as it became more and more common to buy commercially manufactured gifts rather than to make them oneself, wrapping gifts emerged as a method of bringing back a personal touch into the gift giving experience.
• The Advent wreath was a decidedly Lutheran tradition started in 1833 by a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, who told stories of the nativity each week as he lit each candle. The idea came out of the tradition of laying evergreen branches in churches on Christmas.
• “Shooting in Christmas” was a tradition of firing guns (in the air, presumably) in front of a neighbor’s house to wake them up on Christmas morning and then running away before being discovered. The tradition was brought to the United States by Swedish and German immigrants.
• The first department store to have a parade featuring Santa wasn’t Macy’s, but was rather Eaton’s in Toronto, Canada, which held a ceremonial procession from Santa’s arrival on the train to the Eaton’s store in the city. The first Eaton’s parade was in 1905.
• The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was in 1924, when Macy’s employees paraded from 145th Street to the Macy’s on 34th Street to create publicity for the reveal of Macy’s storefront windows for the Christmas season. The parade slowly took on more significance than the window reveal, especially after the addition of giant balloon puppets.
• The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was rescheduled for a time to the afternoon to allow for people to attend church services, but once football games started being played on Thanksgiving the Parade moved back to the morning time slot.
• While Santa’s other eight reindeer were named in the 1823 Clement Clarke Moore poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, Rudolph would not come to be until a 1939 campaign in Montgomery Ward department stores. His real fame would begin, however, when his poem was put to song by Gene Autry in 1949.
• The first official Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center was in 1933, though when the building was under construction in 1931 workers had an informal Christmas tree in the Center.

Suggestions for Further Reading and Entertainment

• Flanders actually recommends several books on Christmas in the back of her book, including Mark Connelly’s Christmas: A History. Others that sounded interesting on this list included Charles W. Jones’ Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend, which she claims is the definitive book on the history of Santa Claus, and Daniel Miller’s Unwrapping Christmas, which is a sociological study on Christmas traditions.
• Another book I’ve read on the history of Christmas is Bruce David Forbes’ Christmas: A Candid History. This book contains a little more about the development of Christmas within the confines of church history, but also has plenty of interesting information on traditions pertaining to fruitcakes, reindeer and a jolly old elf in a red and white suit.
• In light of the season I’m just going to list my favorite Christmas movies and specials here. Regarding movies my favorite of all time is certainly The Muppet Christmas Carol followed shortly by The Santa Clause, It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, Elf and Santa Claus: The Movie. Another movie we’ve liked that’s come out more recently is Arthur Christmas. In regards to Christmas specials (of the half hour or hour long variety) A Muppet Family Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas are probably tied for my favorite with Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town and The Year Without a Santa Claus, all Rankin/Bass classics, followed shortly behind. Other perennial watches in the Weller family homestead are The Grinch, I Want a Dog For Christmas Charlie Brown! and all of the animated Frosty the Snowman specials. Nestor the Long-Eared Donkey and The Little Drummer Boy are also good, but more of a watch it if it’s on situation. I’m sure I’m missing a few other greats so feel free to shout out your favorites in the comments or on Twitter.