The History of Christmas Traditions
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This festive season, Literary and Cultural Historian in our Department of English, Professor Sarah Peverley tells us about where our Christmas traditions originated and how some parts of Christmas might be a bit older than we think.
Christmas traditions are often a mixture of things that borrow from different time periods and cultures – with parts of dating back to Medieval times and perhaps beyond! Here’s a run down of some traditions and the history behind them.
Christmas trees
The origins of the Christmas tree as we know it aren’t entirely clear. There was a longstanding tradition in Germany of decorating a tree with fruits and nuts. In England this was popularised by Queen Victoria during her reign, although Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III also had a tree at Windsor in 1800. Yet the practice of bringing evergreens into the house goes back at least as far as medieval times, when churches would be decorated with holly and ivy in celebration of the mid-winter fertility associated with Christ’s birth. A medieval play about Christ’s nativity likewise features a fruitful cherry tree that miraculously bows to the Virgin Mary to allow her to eat its fruits on her way to Bethlehem. The tree helps to highlight Christ’s role as redeemer because Adam and Eve caused original sin by eating the forbidden fruit of a tree in paradise. Greenery and fruitful trees in winter provided a visual reminder that Christ’s birth through Mary was a salve to that sin.
Food
Eating and drinking a lot at Christmas is a longstanding feature! If you were very wealthy in the past you could afford to celebrate with a massive feast every evening for two weeks over Christmas. Richard II (1377-1399) threw a spectacular Christmas feast that was so extravagant it got recorded in the medieval chronicles at the time. Turkey wasn’t on the menu (that came in later) but the king had 28 oxen and 300 sheep cooked every day just to keep up with the main meat courses and across the festive period he was thought to have entertained 10,000 people. There could be 12-15 courses for a meal: imagine doing the dishes afterwards!
There was a lot of religious fasting in the lead up to Christmas, so for less extravagant households indulging in a good meal was still something to look forward to. Christmas was one of the rarer times when the lower ranks of society got to eat meat and a typical Christmas menu would include pies, cheese and puddings. A cookbook from the time of Richard II even contains recipes for rectangular pastries called ‘chewetes’. Crammed with meat, spices and fruit, they were a precursor of the mince pie we know today!
Christmas Holidays
Back in the Middle Ages workers would have had at least 12 days off to celebrate the various holy days that congregated around Christmas. This is where the 12 days of Christmas comes from (covering Christmas to 6 January or the Feast of the Epiphany). Across the 12 days there would be revelry, music, entertainment, and even jousting in royal households. Agriculturally there was not much to do in the dark winter days, but the whole of Advent (from early December) was nevertheless a period of preparation for the Christmas festivities. People didn’t go Christmas shopping as we might today, instead they ensured that chores were completed before the holidays, such as slaughtering and salting animals in preparation for Christmas and the winter months. There was a lot more time to celebrate and contemplate the year ahead before Plough Monday came around (the day of returning to work in January), so the festive atmosphere could get very raucous. If people had used an ‘Out of Office’ in Medieval and Tudor times it would have been set for at least those 12 days!
Presents
Giving gifts on 25 December wasn’t always tradition. Gift giving mainly occurred on the Feast of St Nicholas (6 December) or at New Year. St Nicholas, the fourth-century Bishop of Myra (modern-day Demre in Turkey) was said to have saved three girls from hardship by gifting them doweries. He was the patron saint of children and in the Medieval and early Tudor eras in England, a 'Boy Bishop' was chosen on 6 December to parody the real bishop. Dressed in fine robes, the child led processions around villages, gave alms to the poor, collected money for the church, and even performed religious services (except mass) during the festive season. Songs and music were a big part of the Boy Bishop processions, as well as during Christmas celebrations more generally. By contrast, gift giving at New Year was largely an adult affair, with wealthy patrons rewarding servants with clothes, firewood, meat, and other practical presents.
After the Protestant Reformation, individual countries in northern Europe responded differently to gift giving during the Christmas period. In England St Nicholas was set aside and gifts (which remained adult-focused) were centred on 25 December to coincide with the birth of Jesus. Modern day Santa Claus (derived from the Dutch name for St Nicholas – Sinterklass) developed out of continued reverence for St Nicholas in the Netherlands and his transportation to North America by Dutch settlers. During the late nineteenth century, American writers helped to popularise Sinterklass and turn him into the sleigh riding, old Santa Claus who leaves gifts on Christmas Eve.
The Father Christmas we know in England is now synonymous with Santa Claus, but his origins belong in a separate tradition. Originally a medieval personification of the Christmas season known as ‘Sir Christmas’ and ‘Lord Christmas’, the earliest known reference to him survives in a fifteenth-century English carol, where he encourages people to drink and celebrate, rather than exchange gifts. In the Early Modern period wealthy households developed this tradition by employing a Lord of Misrule called ‘Captain Christmas’ or ‘Lord Christmas’ to oversee seasonal entertainments. Seventeenth-century defences against Puritan attacks on the season’s unruliness popularised the notion of a jolly ‘Old Father Christmas’ further, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that this personification of the Christmas spirit merged with Santa Claus to become the much-loved figure who delivers gifts on Christmas Eve.