Origins: "The Holidays", Christmas and New Year's

 

If you were a Catholic during the first two centuries of Christianity and you wanted to celebrate the birth of Jesus, you would be committing a sin and would go straight to hell.

That's because the Church fathers were emphasizing Christ's divinity and not his humanity.  Besides, no one knew (or much cared) when that birth happened.  The Biblical accounts point to spring, but it was kind of so what.

Then by the late third century the Christian church was large and influential enough to challenge the Roman gods, competing with the contemporary cult of the sun god Mithras, imported from Persia and popular enough to be declared the official religion of the Roman Empire.  It celebrated the birth of Mithras, or Natalis Solis Invicti, with a good long festival centered on December 25.

 It just happened to be about then that the Church got interested in Christ's birth, and more or less arbitrarily declared it was--surprising coincidence!--on December 25.  It took awhile but Christmas began to be celebrated throughout the Empire by the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine was baptized a Christian.  

This December date is roughly that of the winter solstice, long a traditional time for ritual and celebration (including in surviving Indigenous cultures), as the days start to get longer, announcing the coming birth of spring.  In my life it was my Uncle Carl who explained the solstices and equinoxes to me--the nuns teaching me in school never mentioned them, possibly because such knowledge still seemed darkly pagan.

Like those of most holidays, Christmas customs are a mishmash of approximated traditions from many cultures in many eras, often shorn of their original meanings. But an impressive number of them are pretty recent--from the nineteenth century to the World War II era and beyond--especially the songs.  

When I was a child in the 1950s, we used to hear Gene Autry's original recording of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" on the radio--it was a poem devised as an advertisement for Montgomery Ward department stores that was set to music in 1949 and became a massive hit for him.  It has since sold more records that any song except Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," which itself was written in 1942 by Irving Berlin for the Crosby movie "Holiday Inn."

That's me in 1951, defending my sister
Kathy in my new Hopalong outfit

Crosby had another Christmas hit the next year with "I'll Be Home for Christmas," very definitely a World War II song. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...) is from 1945. 

Though Perry Como had a bigger hit with it in 1953, Gene Autry followed up his Rudolph bonanza with "Frosty the Snowman" in 1950, and I used to see the animated accompaniment to the song on WJAC-TV in Johnstown;  the station puts it on the air every Christmastime to this day. 

  "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas" is from 1951, with its specific reference to the first television star to generate product lines, the cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy.

Even the venerable "Jingle Bells" is from the mid-nineteenth century, but for years it was simply one of many songs of that era about sleigh rides, and was first performed in minstrel shows.  It took at least a decade or two before it became associated with Christmas.  Now it is perhaps the most familiar Christmas song in the world.

Rudolph's origin in advertising wasn't unique.  Advertisers were mighty drivers of Christmas imagery for obvious reasons.  They were also apparently responsible for changing the expression "the holidays" from referring to school vacations in the summer to the Christmas to New Years period (and conveniently so, for this was before the non-Christian holidays such as Hanukkah and Kwanza were widely included in general public perception.)  The earliest example of "Happy Holidays" imagery appears to be a 1937 ad for Camel cigarettes.

When I was a kid in the 50s, the holidays were really "the holidays"--they extended past New Years.  I notice here in Arcata these days that holiday decorations go up early (I saw Halloween decorations in late September), which is of course how retail stores and related businesses have done it for decades--get in the spirit (and the spending) early.  But Christmas decorations are often taken down even before New Years.  In my childhood we didn't decorate until the week before or even the week of Christmas.  In some families it was traditional to trim the tree on Christmas Eve or maybe the day before that.  

Christmas itself was for children, and the close family gathered on the Eve and the Day.  But after that it was more for the adults.  Certain pastries and other foods and certainly drinks came out that weren't around at other times of the year.  And then the visiting commenced.  Close family again sometimes, but mostly more distant relations and my parents' friends and their families would visit us or we would visit them, or both.  These could be my mother's old friends from high school (who were often related to us somehow anyway) or my father's current and past work colleagues, and then later those of my mother's when she started working in hospital administration.  They weren't the most fun times for me but they were memorable--my chance to observe adults in their natural environment.

This would go on past New Years, and the decorations would stay up until early January.  It was a long Christian tradition to take them down on Twelfth Night (which is what they called January 5 in England), the night before the feast of the Epiphany, or the visit of the Magi. We weren't that exact, but it usually was around then.  Maybe sooner, if the Christmas tree was drying out and shedding needles.  It's worth noting that commercial activity was at a low ebb after Christmas then, until perhaps the January White Sales.  So they really were the holidays.

Like Christmas, New Years traditions are a cultural hodgepodge.  But there are some revealing origins, mostly associated with the new year as celebrated in the spring. January 1 became the first of the new year with the introduction of the Julian calendar in Rome, but wasn't firmly established throughout the world until the universal adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which took centuries.

But because the new year had been celebrated nearer the March equinox, many traditions were associated with crops and their fertility.   Next to the Fourth of July, New Year's Eve is the holiday most associated with making noise, including explosions.  This tradition was originally to scare away the demons that destroyed crops, especially with diseases.  

On the other hand, some new year traditions were to encourage growth.  The tradition of wassail, a hot drink with alcoholic properties, was part of ancient Anglo-Dane and Anglo-Saxon holiday rites.  In some areas of England, the tradition was all about conviviality, and was associated with Christmas. But at least in one region it was part of another ritual.  Some sources say it was a Twelfth Night ritual, but Henry David Thoreau writes about it in detail (in his essay "Wild Apples") and associates one part of it with New Year's.

In Thoreau's account, the drink was an apple cider, and was used in a rite to encourage apple trees to be fruitful.  It would be shared with the trees on Christmas Eve, and people would dance around it and chant a particular song, to call for a bountiful harvest.  Then on New Year's Eve, in another ritual of noise, a group of boys would visit apple orchards and engage in what was called "apple howling" to encourage the trees, and once again perform a chant while circling them. They also rapped on the trees with sticks, which was called "wassailing," according to Thoreau.  

A New Year's tradition of the Iroquois in America, still existing when Europeans arrived, was to build a huge bonfire and throw their possessions into it, so it would literally be a new year.