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The Birth of the Christmas Spirit

Origins of Popular Holiday Traditions


default article imageEvery year the holiday season kicks off around Thanksgiving. People gear up to begin their Christmas shopping through Black Friday sales, while others spend the weekend putting up their Christmas decorations. Lights go up on the outside of houses, Christmas music begins to be played on the radio, and trees get placed inside the living room where it will spend the next month until Christmas. It seems that every year we get ourselves into these Christmas routines, but most of us are not even aware of how they came about. The answers to where some of these Christmas traditions came from are about to be answered.

The crown figure of the Christmas season, who you see almost everywhere in the month of December, is jolly Santa Claus. The funny thing about Santa Claus is that his presence wasn’t always associated with Christmas nor was it always a happy perception in that case. Matthew O’Brien, History professor, said that the idea of Santa Claus as we know him today did not come about until Clement Moore’s classic holiday poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

“Originally, there was Father Christmas, who was this old figure to remind people of death. In the nineteenth century he got reinvented as a grandfatherly figure who was kind to children, but Christmas wasn’t about children in the medieval period,” said O’Brien. “Children had St. Nicholas day, which was celebrated in early December, and served as a religious reminder to children not to sin.”

Nowadays, Santa Claus has become the main figure associated with Christmas. The commercialization of the holiday began to be seen in the twentieth century, and many businesses over the years have begun to use Santa Claus while trying to support their product. A major example of this is seen in Coco-Cola. According to the official website of Coca-Cola, Coke began using St. Nicholas in ads back in 1931 in magazines. The depiction we all have of how Santa appears can actually be stemmed back to Coke. The original drawings were drawn by Haddon Sundblom, who showed a kind, jolly man in a red suit, drinking from a coke bottle. The image stuck in American pop culture and this idea of how Santa looks can still be seen today.

Even the way we celebrate Christmas today has evolved since the nineteenth century. In a way, everything changed with Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. At the time industrialization was going on and it was changing the fabric of society. According to O’Brien, Christmas at first was more of a communal celebration that revolved around feasting and the community coming together. It involved men and women dressing up in outlandish attire going from household to household, being boisterous, and receiving food and drink from these households. It was socialist Christian ideals which gave voice to how Christmas was being celebrated and it slowly began to become more a private family celebration. There has always been tension between secular celebration and religious observance, which still exists today.

Catholics focus more on religious ideals in terms of celebration. Gabriella Furmato, University minister, shared some of the traditions they carry out as a group.

“We light the advent wreath which is a visual reminder that Christmas is coming and we better prepare. By prepare, I mean, prepare our hearts. The advent wreath has four candles which represents the four weeks before Christmas. The candles are purple and pink; three purple, and one pink. Purple symbolizes repentance and pink symbolizes joy,” said Furmato.

Christmas trees also have an interesting origin. According to History.com, Christmas trees are modern inventions which were introduced to England by Prince Albert, who was a consort of Queen Victoria. Originally, Christmas trees were very small and were often placed on tables. Over time, the trees gradually got bigger and more decorations began to get added to them, like lights.

Speaking of lights, the idea of people decorating their houses with lights for Christmas was something else that has become associated with Christmas, even though it is not what their original purpose was for.

“The tradition of putting up lights actually began with the idea that people wanted to light the winter nights. People celebrated the idea of having light in the dark winter, but now lights are often put up before Thanksgiving and are associated with the holidays,” said O’Brien.

This time of year, people are always buying and receiving gifts for one another. The idea of getting gifts during the holiday season, used to only be applied to children, stated O’Brien. People began to have disposable incomes in the twentieth century, so they can spend money on gifts for everyone in the family. Before then, usually people who were well-off financially were the ones to exchange gifts with one another.

Starting on Thanksgiving, it is very likely that if you turn on the radio you will hear Christmas songs playing. Christmas music traces back to the nineteenth century as well. O’Brien pointed out that most Christmas music we hear nowadays, doesn’t even have a religious connotation to it.

“One of the most popular Christmas songs around is ‘White Christmas.’ The funny thing about this song is that it was a Christmas song written by Irving Berlin, who surprisingly is Jewish. This just goes to show that many of these holiday ideals are more secular than they are religious,” said O’Brien.

When Christianity was accepted in the Roman Empire, the origins of Christmas came about as a way to compete with Pagan Holiday. They wanted to Christianize the celebration of the winter solstice, so they centered the birth of Jesus on the time of December 25. O’Brien added that no one really knows if this was the actual month and day when Jesus was born.

The strongest point O’Brien drove home was the idea of nostalgia that all Americans seem to have and the idea of celebrating the holiday with the family. Over the centuries, celebrations have changed from communal to privatized within the family, which is how we found ourselves celebrating Christmas the way that we do today.

“I find it ironic about arguments you hear over and over again, like the idea of Christmas tree versus holiday tree. It’s always been more of a secular celebration than a religious one. Something you always hear today is that we don’t celebrate how we used to, when it has always been celebrated in a commercial way since the nineteenth century,” said O’Brien.