In 350 AD Pope Julius I ordained that the feast celebrating for the birth of Christ would be held on December 25th. This feast day coincided with the feast of Saturnalia which was a holiday of the pagan Romans celebrating the winter solstices, the longest night of the year. No one had any real idea when Jesus was born. The early apostles had not considered the exact date of his birthday to be really important, only that his birth fulfilled biblical prophecy. However, by the fourth century many Christian sects in the Empire were celebrating the birth of the Messiah, but there was no specified date. Julius most likely chose the solstice because it was already being celebrated by many citizens of the Roman Empire for their different pagan festivals and it was symbolic. In the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, the birth of Jesus had brought the world from darkness into the light and the longest night of the year symbolized this. It was first called the Feast of the Nativity. By the sixth century AD, the mass for the birth of the Christ was being celebrated all over Europe and the Middle East.
By the Middle Ages, the Christmas feast had become as wild and hedonistic as the old Saturnalia had been much similar to today’s Mardi Gras, than what we today think of as Christmas. With the Protestant Reformation, Christmas was one of the many Catholic celebrations Martin Luther questioned the authenticity of. Many Protestant sect changed Christmas day from a feast day to a day of piety and fasting. The feeling was that using the birth of the Savior as an excuse to drink, over indulge and engage in riotous behavior was blasphemous to His name — still others forbade the Christmas celebration at all. In England during protectorate of Oliver Cromwell a person could be pillared for appearing to celebrate the day. In Bavaria in the 17th century jail and a fine was the punishment for conducting a pagan ritual on December 25. The Pilgrims were no less severe in their disdain for the Christmas Holiday. In Boston one could be fined and even caned for appearing to celebrate this Roman blasphemy. The Jamestown colony did recognize the Christmas celebration. The first full time police force in the city of New York was formed because of a Christmas riot. By the Revolutionary War the celebration of Christmas had fallen out of favor in the United States and England. It took Victorian England and Prince Albert to bring the Christmas celebration back to the public conscience. When he married Queen Victoria, Prince Albert brought many of the Holiday observances of his native Germany to England, including the Christmas Tree. Albert and Victoria stressed the holiday as a time for family and friends rather then the carnival like atmospherics the past centuries celebrations. In the United States it was the Civil War that brought back the Christmas celebration to both the North and the South as people looked for some bit of joy in those tragic years. Christmas became a Federal Holiday in 1870. It was Indiana’s Benjamin Harrison who as president put up the first White House Christmas Tree the Christmas of 1889. Apparently, there was great concern about the possibility of a fire from all the lite candles on the tree so there were many buckets of water on hand. Calvin Coolidge was the first president to light what would become known as the National Christmas Tree in 1923.
Christmas as an economic opportunity for merchants was recognized as early as the turn of the twentieth century, but it was after World War I that things really got going. The day after Thanksgiving became the official start of the holiday shopping season. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade started in 1924 and the arrival of Santa Claus marked the beginning of the Shopping. The term “Black Friday” came from the Philadelphia Police Dept. in the early 1950; because they had to hire so many temporary black coated security police to help with crowd control in the downtown shopping district. By the 1970’s it came to mean the single shopping day when a stores profits could go from red to black. Television of course is the single greatest cause for the development of what we know as Christmas. As a media it has brought all of the Christmas traditions both good and bad into the American zeitgeist. But don’t blame TV. look into your own heart for that is where Christmas is really celebrated!
So Merry Christmas, In Zulu: UKhisimusi omuhle. In Albainian: Gezuar Krishtlindjen. In Dutch: Vrolijk Kirstfeest.In French:Joyeux Noel.In Cantonese Chinese:Seng Dan Fai Lok. In Danish: Glaedelig Jul.In German:: Frohe Weihnachten. In Scots Galic: Blithe Yule.In Turkish:Mutlu Noeller. In Apache: Gozhqq Kehmish. finally as tiny Tim observered” God bless us, everyone.
