Christmas Traditions
Rae Bielakowski
Originally posted on 12/7/2009

In a sense, our Advent and Christmas traditions are works of recovery. Interpreting the feast of Christ’s Nativity as essentially pagan, seventeenth–century Puritans had rejected Christmas completely (along with other “Popish” holy days) and, on gaining influence in England and its American colonies, suppressed its celebration wherever possible. As Puritan fervor faded, however, nineteenth–century commercial and industrial revolutions revived Protestant interest in the holiday as an expression of communal benevolence and generosity within an increasingly impersonal and individualistic economic system. When Charles Dickens penned his famous novella A Christmas Carol in 1843, he addressed a very modern anxiety to “keep Christmas well”–which included borrowing and adapting holiday customs to replenish a lost heritage. For this reason, many, although not all, of the Christmas traditions that we encounter as Americans–the Christmas tree, the carols, the lights, the Advent wreaths–were popularized in the Victorian era.

Still, these Victorian customs have older and deeper significance. The feast of Christmas falls near the winter solstice, a tipping point between darkness and light that ancients experienced in a profound way. For pre–Christian cultures, the solstice represented the rebirth of the sun and the persistence of life, which they recalled through bonfires, evergreen boughs, and wreaths that symbolized the returning sun, its victory over darkness, and the fulfillment of the seasonal cycle. This imagery of light and life had relevance for Christians, too, who at Christmas celebrated the birth of the Son, the Light of the World, Who would triumph over sin and death in fulfillment of God’s promise.

When a German Lutheran minister constructed the first known Advent wreath in 1839, he incorporated ancient symbols into a modern expression of hope in the promised Messiah. The Advent wreath became popular among both Protestants and Catholics, who replaced its original red and white candles with liturgical colors of purple and rose. (The related Advent calendar is likewise a nineteenth–century German Lutheran innovation.) Similarly, in the late nineteenth century Christmas carolers in Boston popularized the Irish custom of placing candles in windows, a practice that later evolved into the stringing of electric lights on homes. Contrasting darkness with small pinpoints of light, these customs call to mind the illuminating witness of prophets who foretold the coming of Christ.

Also popularized in the 1800s, the German tradition of the Christmas tree evokes the narrative of Adam’s fall and the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, the “new Adam.” While today we consider December 24 as simply “Christmas Eve,” eleventh–century Germans knew it as the feast of Adam and Eve. On this day they performed mystery plays featuring a “Paradise tree,” an evergreen, laden with apples, that represented the central tree of Eden. When over the course of the 1400s abuses led the Church to gradually outlaw mystery plays, the people moved their commemoration of Adam and Eve into private homes. Thus on December 24 sixteenth–century German households decorated family “Paradise trees” with apples or shiny round ornaments (representing the forbidden fruit), cookies (representing the Eucharist), and candy (representing the sweetness of redemption). Further incorporating the household custom of the “Christmas Light”–a decorated triangular formation of candles evoking Christ, the Light of the World, often topped with a star–during the 1600s western Germans also began to add candles to their trees and to top them with representations of the Christmas star. The family’s Nativity scen–a popular tradition inaugurated by St. Francis of Assisi at Greccio, Italy in 1223–was placed at the base of the tree.

The feast of Adam and Eve forgotten, this “Christmas tree” custom spread throughout Germany and Eastern Europe in the early nineteenth century and, in the mid–1800s, entered France and England by means of royal marriages. Although Queen Victoria (of German background) had experienced the custom as a child, it was not until her 1840 union with Albert, her German cousin, that the Christmas tree became a prominent part of royal Christmas celebrations. Upper and middle–class Britons eagerly mimicked their royal family. Likewise, fashionable Americans adopted the custom after an influential women’s magazine, the Godey’s Lady’s Book, began to circulate illustrations of an ideal Victorian family gathered around its Christmas tree. Nineteenth–century German immigrants also introduced many American Catholics and Protestants to this Eastern European tradition. Expanding upon it, twentieth–century Americans brought the Christmas tree outside of the private home and into civic celebrations, a practice that later traveled back to Europe.

The figure of Santa Claus emerged in the nineteenth–century United States as a secularized version of St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra, who during the Advent season placed gifts in the shoes or stockings of Dutch and German children on his feast day of December 6. (The gifts opened on Christmas morning were left by the Christ Child.) Seventeenth–century Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam first introduced the St. Nicholas or Sinterklaas legend into North America, where in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries other American Protestants scrubbed it of its associations with sainthood and Church hierarchy. Santa Claus further gained a white beard and fur–lined coat from conflation with the English Father Christmas, an anti–Puritan symbol of the “old Christmas” spirit. The 1823 poem “The Night Before Christmas” and an 1863 sketch by cartoonist Thomas Nast definitively established Santa Claus’s American image. While unfortunately the legend of Santa Claus has retained almost no religious meaning, today many Catholics also choose to observe the older St. Nicholas Day custom.

Nineteenth and early twentieth–century Americans also revived Christmas caroling, another medieval tradition banned by seventeenth–century Puritans. While some older Advent and Christmas songs had survived the disruption–for example, the medieval “Veni, Veni Emmanuel” and “Adeste Fidelis”–most of our familiar carols are the recent work of Protestant denominations with strong traditions of congregational singing. Today religious carols such as “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” (Methodist, early 1800s), “Joy to the World” (Presbyterian, 1872), “Away in a Manger” (Lutheran, most likely from the 1880s), “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (Episcopalian, late 1800s), “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” (Unitarian, 1900), and “Silent Night” (Catholic, 1818) draw Christians together across denominational boundaries.

Today we celebrate Christmas in very “Victorian” ways. Nevertheless, our customs contain older images of light and life, of Adam’s fall and redemption, and of Christian unity that can enrich our prayer as we decorate, wrap, and sing our way through Advent.