In an interview on The Real Christmas Story

Some of our readers Tweeted in with questions. For example, ‘How did Christmas trees get their start?’ ‘What are the origins and differences between Santa Claus, St Nicholas and Father Christmas?’ I thought maybe your first book offered some answers to this.

Wow. Some of these questions end up being quite hard for me to answer, since my specialty is more in the New Testament and early Christian history than the overall history of Christmas, even though it’s something I’m certainly very interested in…

Tell me about the Bruce Forbes book, Christmas: A Candid History. I think it does offer some clues to the things we celebrate and associate with Christmas but are perhaps not quite sure where they come from, such as the idea that Santa Claus lives with elves at the North Pole?

Yes. So this book is relatively short, it’s less than 200 pages, and it is just a very helpful, accessible, overview of the history of Christmas. He is a scholar, and I believe his focus is on religion and American popular culture and those are the parts of the book that are strongest. He traces the 19th- and 20th-century evolution of Christmas, including the idea that Santa Claus is an elf. The thing that I don’t think many people realise about that poem [‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’] is how much that served to invent the mythology of Christmas, in the same way that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol did. It’s not that they were merely responding to practices and beliefs that were well-known at the time. A good analogy to this is from another holiday, the Charlie Brown Halloween special. If you look at it and see the trick or treating that the Peanuts kids are doing, you assume that this was reflecting American popular culture. In fact, in the 1960s, when this came out, trick or treating was still relatively rare. Forbes’s book is especially good for some of these more recent practices and it’s a really good reminder that the modern celebration of Christmas, as we know it today in the US, is relatively recent and very culturally specific.

Yes, my family is Dutch, and Sinterklaas or St Nicholas comes down the chimney as well, but from Spain on December 6.

Yes, different days get celebrated. And in Latin America the feast of Epiphany, the Feast of the Three Kings, is a much bigger deal than it is here. I think Americans tend to assume that Christmas has been celebrated the way it is today for quite some time, and that it is celebrated that way largely throughout the world. In fact neither of those things are true.

This brings to mind another reader question, from Mark Dowe: ‘What date of the year was Christmas really meant to fall?’ Do you know that from your research?

So Christmas ends up being fixed as the celebration of Christ’s birth, but as far as I know, we don’t have much evidence before the fourth century that Christians were celebrating on that precise date. We’ve actually got some variation. There’s a second-century Christian author, for example, who says that Christmas was being celebrated sometime around April 20 or 21. And there’s no indication in the infancy narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that they’re envisioning this event happening in the middle of wintertime. In fact, one observation people often make about Luke’s infancy narrative is that the shepherds are said to be keeping watch over their flocks by night, and if you know a little bit about the shepherds, and the rhythms of their seasons, that is something they would have been doing in the spring. It’s not something they would have been doing in the dead of winter. So you’ll sometimes get people who look at that story in Luke and say, ‘Well, probably Jesus was born sometime in the spring.’ Speaking as an early Christian historian, I don’t think we have any idea whatsoever about what time of year Jesus was actually born. The infancy narratives are relatively late in terms of Christian tradition and they don’t agree very much, and they don’t really seem to have a lot of specific information about the circumstances of Jesus’s birth.

Let alone pin it on December 25.

Exactly. They don’t pin it on any specific date. Then, in the fourth century, it gets fixed on December 25.  I’m not a liturgical historian, but I believe that one of the reasons for this is that the 25th was right around the time of several other prominent pagan festivals, festivals for birthdays of gods. And, just to name two of them, one of them was a Persian god named Mithras who actually seems to have been born in cave, just as some traditions of Jesus have it. I believe his birth was celebrated right around that time. The other god or celebration is ‘Sol Invictus’, which is Latin for ‘Invincible Sun’ and seems to have been a solar deity that was worshipped by some Romans. In fact, well into the reign of Constantine – whom we view as the emperor who really brought Christianity to the Roman Empire and converted to Christianity – there are coins of his that bear the Sol Invictus. So it’s not entirely clear how the decision gets made to fix on December 25, but it probably has something to do with those other holidays and seeking to dampen the enthusiasm or Christianise them in some way. This is something the early church did in reference to other pagan holidays as well – the great example is the Celtic holiday of Samhain, which is the antecedent of our modern Halloween. This is celebrated on November 1, and originally All Saints Day was celebrated in April/May. But, in the sixth century, it was decided that All Saints Day would fall on November 1, as a way of co-opting this pagan holiday. This was standard operating procedure for the ancient church, to take these pagan holidays, and paint them over with Christian trappings. While on a superficial level that would certainly seem to be satisfying – that people are celebrating a Christian rather than a pagan holiday – the end result ends up being that, whether we’re talking about Christmas or Halloween or Easter, these holidays still end up, even today, having some vestiges of pagan celebrations.

What would you say was the main vestige in terms of Christmas?

The yule log. That’s a northern European practice in origin that involved building a bonfire or setting fire to a huge log as a way of warding off the extreme darkness of that time of year in northern Europe. I think the Christmas tree is also… but I don’t know exactly where that comes from.