- The reinvention of Christmas
- Most modern anglophone Christmas customs are inherited from Lutheran Germany, and attempts to ‘de-catholicise’ in the 1500s. That is to say, they’re not just firmly Christian, they’re specifically Protestant. They were introduced to England in a wave of nostalgia at the beginning of the Victorian era. As Hutton puts it, by the 1830s in England there was an awareness that Christmas as a festive season had declined very sharply over the previous 40 years:
- [T]he perception of decline was firmly anchored in reality. Between 1790 and 1840 employers, led by the government, carried out a ruthless pruning of the Christmas holidays without encountering any resistance. In 1797 the Customs and Excise Office, for example, closed between 21 December (St Thomas’s Day) and 6 January (the Epiphany) on all of the seven dates specified by the Edwardian and Elizabethan Protestant calendars. In 1838 it was open on all except Christmas Day itself. The Factory Act of 1833 put the seal upon this process by declaring that Christmas and Good Friday were the only two days of the year, excepting Sundays, upon which workers had a statutory right to be absent from their duties. … In twenty of the years between 1790 and 1835 The Times did not mention the festival, and it never referred to it with enthusiasm. To the fashionable world it was increasingly an anachronism, and a bore.
- A bunch of Christmas customs were introduced to England in the space of five years (this is because of numerous poents such as Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem ‘A visit from St Nicholas’ and Charles Dickens:
- The decorated Christmas tree, which originated in 16th century Germany, was famously introduced by Prince Albert in 1840; a previous attempt to introduce it had been made by Queen Charlotte in 1800, but it didn’t take off at the time.
- The Advent wreath, another Lutheran custom, began to be popularised in England in 1839.
- Dickens’ A Christmas carol came out in 1843, and his other Christmas books in subsequent years.
- The first Christmas cards date to 1843
- Another key symbol of course is Santa, who was derived from St Nicholas, whose Saint’s Day was 6 December, and who was already associated with gift-bringing. The early 19th century is key to Santa’s popularisation as a symbol too. In the 1520s Luther, to discourage the Catholic cult of the saints, introduced the Christkind and so displaced gift-giving to Christmas. The combination of Christkind and St Nicholas created a whole new figure, the Weihnachtsmann (‘Christmas man’), who is sometimes depicted as accompanying the Christkind. The Christkind didn’t take off outside Germany; but the Weihnachtsmann sure did, with an awareness of his origins reflected in local names like Sinterklaas and Santa Claus.
- Greenery:
- holly and ivy. In ch. 4 Hutton reports, ‘By the time that parish accounts became available, from the late Middle Ages, virtually all those of urban churches show payments for the purchase of holly and ivy as decorations at Christmastide. Their absence from rural accounts is almost certainly due to the fact that they were to be found in the parish.’ So the link with Christmas could in principle be older than the 1400s; we don’t know how much earlier.
- mistletoe. In ch. 1 Hutton rejects any link to Christmas based on Pliny the Elder: ‘[Pliny] recorded that the plant was regarded by the tribes of Gaul (modern France) as an antidote to poison and a giver of fertility to animals. He added that it was treated by their Druids, or magical specialists, as especially sacred when it was found growing on an oak (which it rarely does). … A brief glance at this passage is sufficient to demonstrate that it does not describe a seasonal custom, but an ad hoc one prompted by a rare botanical event, and linked to the phases of the moon and not a solar calendar. Furthermore, Pliny specifically locates it in Gaul and not in Britain.’ In ch. 4 he reports finding no reference to the use of mistletoe in Christmas celebrations in the Tudor period or earlier.
Christmas traditions
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