What's the history of Christmas?

Did you know the song “White Christmas” is the best-selling single of all time?

It might seem hard to believe. How could a Christmas song, of all genres, become the world’s most successful?

Christmas is a hugely popular holiday in North America, with over 90% of people reporting they celebrate.

But how did this holiday come to be? Where does the tradition of Santa Claus and the Christmas tree come from? Here is a quick rundown of the history of North America’s favorite holiday.

Christmas dates back to ancient European wintertime celebrations. If you live in a country that gets cold in the winter, you know how difficult winter can be.

The frigid air and lack of sunlight can be especially rough mentally, with some people suffering from seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a form of wintertime depression.

In ancient times, winter could be especially difficult, so people needed something to lift their spirits. Throughout Europe, midwinter celebrations gave people the hope they needed during this time. 

Northern Europe

The Germanic festival of Yule, for example, was popular in northern Europe. Taking place around the Winter Solstice (December 21), people celebrated the gradual return of the sun by feasting and burning a Yule log, a giant log that provided warmth and light.

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Italy

In Southern Europe, ancient Romans celebrated the Saturnalia festival from December 17 for up to a week. During Saturnalia, people gave each other gifts, feasted, and partied.

The Roman New Year's celebration, called the January Kalends, (where our word for “calendar” comes from), was yet another occasion to party and eat. Together, these festivals allowed Europeans to get through the coldest, darkest days of the year.

Around the year 40 AD, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, a popular preacher, established the Christian religion in the Middle East.

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At first, some Christians didn't love the idea of celebrating their leader's birthday. For them, his death and resurrection (Easter) were more important.

Others disagreed and really supported the idea. The only problem was that no one knew when the day was.

Choosing a Day

Eventually, Christians chose December 25 to celebrate Jesus’s birth, likely because it was in the middle of the pre-existing European winter festivities, making it easier for people to accept.

Sure enough, people continued their ancient traditions of Yule and Saturnalia, but now under the new name of Christmas: the festival of Jesus’s birthday. They also added new Christian traditions, like going to church and praying.

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Christmas, now a combination of ancient wintertime and Christian traditions, continued throughout Europe for hundreds of years. This began to change only in the 1600s in England.

Banning Christmas

Then, a religious group known as the Puritans, started to question the validity of Christmas, criticizing it for its ancient, pre-Christian roots. They wanted Christmas to be banned in England. 

By 1647, the English Parliament, itself influenced by Puritanism, decided to outlaw the celebration of Christmas. This lasted a whole 13 years, after which the holiday was allowed to happen again.

Still, the anti-Christmas campaign left a lasting mark on England. The festival was now less popular than before, and wouldn’t make a comeback for another couple hundred years.

The Christmas Tree

By the mid 1800s in England, a time known as the Victorian Era, Christmas was starting to make a comeback. The old traditions were returning, and new ones being made, like the Christmas tree.

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Queen Victoria, England’s queen at the time, was married to Prince Albert, who was from Germany. Albert had grown up seeing Christmas trees in his native country, where the practice was very old. Together, the couple helped to popularize the practice in England.

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Suddenly everyone in England wanted a Christmas tree! This soon spread to the U.S.

Charles Dickens

The Victorian Era also gave us Charles Dickens and his famous story, A Christmas Carol. You may know this as the Scrooge tale.

Ebenezer Scrooge, who hates Christmas, is visited by three ghosts on the night of the 24th.

They show him scenes from his past, present, and future, to warn him about continuing in his selfishness. Eventually, Scrooge has a change of heart, and at the end, becomes a generous, loving man. The story has influenced Christmas culture to the present day.

Finally, the U.S. — the place that gave us most of our current Christmas. Throughout the 17 and 1800s, millions of Europeans immigrated to the U.S., and they brought their Christmas traditions with them.

Santa Claus

One of them was the story of St. Nicholas — a bishop from Turkey, known for giving gifts to children — especially popular with the Dutch.

One day, an American named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem called, "A Visit from St. Nicholas". You may know this poem from its first line, "'Twas the night before Christmas."

In it, Moore told a story of St. Nicholas traveling on a sleigh with flying reindeer as he delivered presents to kids on Christmas Eve. With time, this developed into the modern figure of Santa Claus.

The Power of Hollywood

Many of our most beloved Christmas movies are also American, from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), to Elf (2003), and The Polar Express (2004).

American stories have defined what Christmas means for millions of people around the globe: love, family, giving, and good cheer.

Now that you've learned a little about the history of Christmas, do a little more digging: