Christmas

Christmas, the annual festival celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Christmas Day falls on December 25 and celebrates the birth of Christ in Bethlehem as recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is, after Easter, the most important feast in the Church's year. Since the Gospels make no mention of dates, it is not certain that Christ was born on this day. In fact, Christmas Day did not officially come into being until c. 350 when Pope Julius I proclaimed December 25 as the date of the Nativity. In doing so, he was following the early Church's policy of absorbing rather than repressing existing pagan rites which, since early times, had celebrated the winter solstice and the coming of spring.

The pagan festival most closely associated with the new Christmas was the Roman Saturnalia, which honoured the god of the harvest, Saturn, on December 19 and was marked by seven days of riotous merrymaking and feasting. At the same time in northern Europe a similar winter festival known as Yule was celebrated in which giant logs, trimmed with greenery and ribbons, were burnt in honour of the gods and to encourage the sun to shine more brightly.

Having incorporated these elements, the Christian Church subsequently added, in the Middle Ages, the Nativity crib and Christmas carols to its customs. By this time lavish feasting was the highlight of the festivities with large quantities of food, including a decorated boar's head, ceremoniously consumed over eight or nine hours by rich and poor alike. All this came to an abrupt end in Britain at least when in 1652 the Puritans banned Christmas, a move followed in Massachusetts seven years later. Although Christmas returned to England in 1660 with Charles II and the Restoration, the rituals all but died out until revived in Victorian times.

Christmas as we know it today is thus a 19th-century invention. The decorated Christmas tree, common in German countries for centuries, was introduced to Britain by Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria. Carols were revived and many new ones written, often to traditional melodies. The custom of carol-singing, although with ancient origins, dates mainly from the 19th century. Christmas crackers were invented in the late 19th century by an enterprising English baker, Tom Smith, who, by 1900, was selling 13 million worldwide each year, and Christmas cards only became commonplace in the 1870s, although the first one was produced in London in 1846. The familiar image of Santa Claus, complete with sleigh, reindeers, and sack of toys, is an American invention which first appeared in a drawing by Thomas Nast in Harper's Magazine in 1868, although the legend of Father Christmas is ancient and complex, being partly derived from St Nicholas and a jovial medieval figure, the “spirit of Christmas”. In Russia, he traditionally carries a pink piglet under his arm.

Today, Christmas is as much a secular festival as a religious one. It is a time of great commercial activity and for present-giving, family reunions and, in English-speaking countries, a “traditional” Christmas meal of turkey or goose, Christmas pudding, and mince pies. Midnight mass is celebrated in churches and cathedrals in the West. In many countries the custom of lighting the tree, singing carols around it, and opening presents is celebrated on December 24, Christmas Eve.