The History of Christmas

Last night, the History Channel ran a great piece on the history of Christmas. Contemporary Americans tend to take a very short view of history, and it was interesting in light of all of the annual controversies surrounding Christmas.

Most know that the Church co-opted pagan celebrations around the Winter Solstice to create a Christian holiday. Most do not know that the pagan revelry continued throughout Western Europe and the United States until the mid-1800s. Throughout European history, Christmas was a bachannalian celebration more akin to Halloween or New Year's Eve. It included a trick-or-treat-type ritual as well as drunkenness and debauchery.

The Puritans hated Christmas and forbid its practice in Massachusetts ... but some still reveled that day. It was not until the young government realized it needed some cultural cohesion that holidays - which were not recognized the first 60 or so years of the republic - began to be incorporated into the calendar. One of those was Christmas. Much of the 18th Century view of Christmas came from Washington Irving. Not until Christmas has been accepted as a popular secular holiday did Protestant churches begin to recognize the holiday. It was not until Dickens' - a nominal Christian if not anti-Christian - A Christmas Carol in that people begin to formulate "a Christmas spirit."

Just like today, it was not the Church but commercialism that drove the adoption of Christmas. Retailers soon capitalized on gift-giving and the newly popular "Santa Claus" to promote winter sales. Even today, much of our Christmas traditions are not Christian but commercial. So next time one hears, "put Christ back in Christmas," one has to wonder if he ever was in it.