The Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center it's hard to imagine a Christmas in
New York without it but like many Christmas traditions the tree is a relative newcomer to the
Christmas story only since the
early 19th century as the decorated tree been an important part of the American Christmas celebration hello I'm Harry Smith welcome to the
history channel Christmas trees candy canes
even Santa Claus seem like they've been around forever but many of these Christmas traditions are surprisingly
recent join us as we look back at how a holiday
that started in pagan Rome became the centrepiece of the Christian year and why this season is known as
much for shopping as the birth of the Christ
child stay with us for Christmas
unwrapped yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it is a story everyone knows after a room refusal by
a local innkeeper Mary and Joseph bedded down
in a barn in Bethlehem next day
Mary gave birth to a son the son of god those are the biblical origins of Christmas but centuries
before Jesus walked the earth early Europeans
were celebrating light and birth in the darkest days of winter in the North Country this winter
celebration was known as you'll around December
twenty first the winter solstice fathers and sons would drag home the biggest log they could find
and set it on fire the Yule Log
warmed but it also looked ahead each
spark was said to represent a pig or calf to be born in the spring also dragged inside where evergreens the
one plant that could make it through a Norse winter
evergreens prove that life persisted in this dark time there's a natural attraction to that which lives through
the winter when one is struggling to survive
through the winter the evergreen
is that part of nature that seems impervious to the coming of winter and the and the diminishing of
the Sun and so it's absolutely natural symbol
one which I think he react to almost without thinking about for as long as the Yule Log burned about 12
days feasting and revelry reign
supreme in fact this was one of the few times that meat was abundant since cattle had
just been slaughtered for the long winter there
is a necessity to kill most of the cattle is called people alive over the winter weather is going to feed the
phone you keep a few alive for
breeding but there is an opportunity for a great blow out for a great feast type of party the party raged inside in defiance of
winters deadly how there is a spooky feel
about the northern you tied festivals you
may be all right there in the whole disappears of fires but outside there are demons there are spirits in
Germany the pagan god Odin lent his name to
this mid winter holiday early Germans were terrified Odin whose nocturnal flights decided
who would prosper or perish in the coming year
later we see another Christmas Sky rider Santa Claus but for now staying inside became the smartest choice at
this frightening time of the year yeah a thousand miles away in Rome winter
was less harrowing but the December festivals were just as elaborate one week
before the winter solstice Romans began
celebrating Saturnalia a month-long orgy of food and drink named for the god Saturn which meant plenty Rome's established order was turned on
its head during this wild delirious time the
Saturnalia celebrations were certainly times of revelry of turning the social order upside down of having
the master pretend to be the slave and the
slave pretend to be the master sort of a time out of time in which one could celebrate a kind of disorder in the
universe one of the holidays
important feasts was juvenilia would celebrated the children of Rome although these early festivals of
unnecessary about children particularly but
they are about fertility children did have that particular place the indulgence of trigger causes very much
a part of our body Christmas but it did have
a space even in these rivalled drunken festivals of the room at that among the upper classes in Rome
solstice celebrations were significantly more sober
many influential Romans worshipped Mithra the god of the unconquerable son to this small but powerful sect the
birthday of Mithra was the holiest day of
the year December twenty fifth
was the winter solstice in that part of the world and it was also understood to be the
birthday of the sun god Mithra and Mithra
was said to be born from a rock Shepherd's
came to worship him as he was an infant God borne out in that pastoral place in the fields and many of those
stories of course have come into Christian
tradition while Romans were
worshiping the Sun God a new religion was taking hold throughout the empire at first Christians
didn't celebrate the birth of Christ
His resurrection was the essential fact of the new religion by the 4th century however the question
of the holy birth became impossible to ignore for Christians the fact of his birth
was settled but the date remained a mystery the
Bible doesn't mention exactly when Christ was born but certain facts suggest it probably was not in
December if you're going to sort through the rooms
of the scriptures Jesus was
probably born in the spring if the Shepherd's are out in the fields watching their flock by night we're not talking about one of the
cold spells at the heart of winter if
pagan Rome was already celebrating the birth of Mithra on December twenty fifth it seemed natural to honor the birth
of the Christ child at the same time by the 4th
century the church made it official December
twenty fifth was declared the pièce de of the Nativity official step from the feast day of the reason son s
UN to the feast day as a reason son som
so in a sense it's a very good choice of the symbolism is there because some of the feast day of incompetent
son was about fertility about birth and so obviously
is the Christian Christmas the church knew it could not outlaw the pagan traditions of Christmas so it's set out to adopt them the evergreens
traditionally brought inside were
soon decorated with apples symbolizing the Garden of Eden these apples would eventually become
Christmas ornaments and Holly a
traditional midwinter decoration was recast to represent Christ crown of thorns people already
had their own agenda for this season and that
agenda was not one that was really radically changed when the names got changed from non-christian that to
Christian names the church pretty much had
a policy of live and let live if
people would call themselves Christians and do lip service to the birth of the Savior then let them do anything really
wanted to do with it but on the
other hand by signing the Nativity to that time of year the church really gave up the opportunity to
control the way that celebration took place the tension between piety and revelry
at Christmas would reach its logical and extreme
conclusion in Puritan England when the holiday would be considered so unchristian it was done away with
altogether more snack food tech
on modern marvels tonight at nine on the history channel now back to Christmas unwrapped year
on the history channel by the
middle ages Christianity had largely replaced the old pagan religions of Europe in December 25th the
faithful were called the Gothic cathedrals like no true dom and Salisbury Cathedral in
England for Christ's mass soon to be called
Christmas but out in the streets the
holiday was still more raucous than religious if you went to England around Christmas time any time before say 1800 you probably feel
pretty abilities you wouldn't think it
was Christmas at all what would
you think it was maybe Marty grab maybe new year’s eve maybe Halloween because Christmas and all time England was really a carnival the
houses of London were littered with brawling drunken
villagers and couples engaged in the most unholy activities and each Christmas a beggar or student was
temporarily put in charge after being crowned
the Lord of misrule the rest of the peasantry also got there once a year chance to grab power from the ruling
classes they would go around to
the houses of the rich they would banging on the doors and demand entry and once they were
let in the lord of the manor had to give them
the best stuff that he had he had to give them his best food he had to give them as best beer his best of
everything and a jolly but if he didn't they
would threaten or actually perform a trick but come on surviving Christmas song
says if you don't give us what we want then dan
will come Butler bowl and all of all the small and down about the rules of Christmas would soon change however as
a wave of religious reform swept through England
in the early 17th century led by Oliver Cromwell the Puritans overthrew the Kings forces in 1645 and vowed to
read England of all that was decadent high
on their list was English Christmas and in 1652 they outlawed it all together shops
were ordered to stay open churches
were forced to stay closed the
Puritans were always I think deeply attracted to those things that they were most opposed to they had a fear that
they might have too good of a time I don't
mean to trivialize them but there was a deep fear that if these things were legalized they themselves might
enjoy them and their souls will be lost the Puritans may have said good
riddance to Christmas but the people never really stopped celebrating the holiday merely
went underground if Christmas pie
was illegal it began to be known as mince pie instead which was just as delicious the deeper need for Christmas in the
human heart the need for celebration at a
time of darkness those needs made
the battle against a Christmas that he gave it a few of temporary wins but it
couldn't possibly secure final victory in
1656 the men of canton Canterbury passed a resolution saying that if they could not have their Christmas day
they would have the King back on his throne they
soon got their wish the monarchy was restored with Charles the second and Christmas was restored with him it seems the English could live
without a king but not without Christmas it
has been . the one reason for the restoration of the monarchy is because by restoring with Moloch you also
restored peace was restored the proper English
Christmas with its its rituals and traditions with its carousing Christmas is
brought back if you like by popular acclaim yeah the fight against Christmas may have
been lost in England but the Puritans had
high hopes for the new colonies in America in 1620 a small group of separatist came ashore at Plymouth
Massachusetts even more orthodox than their
English cousins these men and
women hope to rid themselves once and for all of the Christmas scourge in 1659 Puritans in
Boston followed their English brethren in
outlying Christmas anyone caught
exhibiting the Christmas spirit was fined five shillings like in England however Christmas
remained impossible to contain the 17-19 Boston
Almanac doesn't list a Christmas holiday but it does recommend that in late December you not let your
children and servants run too much abroad at night not all the colonies had such trouble
with Christmas Captain John Smith
leader of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia wrote that their first new world Christmas
was kept with plenty of good oysters wild fowl
and good bread Jamestown settlers
were also the first to drink eggnog as a Christmas drink the nog coming from the word grog which means any drink made with rum
after independence however all things English
fell out of favor in America Christmas included in fact on December 25th 1789 the United States Congress
sat in session and continue to stay open on Christmas
day for most of the next sixty seven years at the same time there are people who are writing in their
diaries that isn't it too bad we don't have any holidays so after the Revolution here is an
entire nation that works hard has forsaken
many holidays has given up many holidays because they were there were holidays were mandated by the crown
and it is time to start thinking about how to
populate the calendar as the 19th
century dawned Christmas would be one holiday that would pull the new nation
together but it wouldn't be the carnival Christmas of Old England nor would it be particularly religious
America would invent its very own Christmas
and in the process reinvented for
the whole world yeah New York City 1820 within the space of
a generation New York had gone from a backwater
port town to the center of American commerce great wealth came to a few during these years and moderate
livings to the burgeoning middle class but
the Industrial Revolution had also created a class of the unemployed and unconnected whose very existence
threatened the cozy world of New York's middle wrong this was never more clear than at
Christmastime class conflict was emerging
with the earliest stages of industrial capitalism and so what had previously just had an edge of Menace
a little bit of trick but much more goodwill
much more treat now changed and the Menace became increasingly obvious and increasingly serious so that by the eighteen twenties the
Christmas season and cities like New York was really a time of game rioting are
really very nasty scene so nasty
in fact that in the year 1828 the New York City Council for the first time institute of the professional police
force for the city as a direct result of a
particularly savage Christmas season riot the year before New York's upper class was worried so
worried that a few of them set out to change
the way the holiday was celebrated Washington Irving was America’s best-selling novelist and in
1819 he used his expertise to write Bracebridge
hall an enormously popular series of stories about Christmas at an imaginary English manor house here the
class is mingled effortlessly as Squires welcome
friendly and grateful peasants into their homes and in 1843 England's most popular writer Charles Dickens
tackled the Christmas problem with a Christmas
carol it was a best-seller in London and America and the lessons of the story struck a powerful cord on
both sides of the Atlantic Christmas carol i think
showed the Victorians what could be the use in the meaning of Christmas in a society which was quite pleased
with itself it away but which nevertheless
had fears about inequality about too much materialism about that's just too rapid change there have been countless treatments
of this Christmas classic some in print and someone
screen this television version is from nineteen fifty eight but the themes are straight out of the 19th
century Europe you want or need a
mile a supposed question I
convenient huh it's not convenient but it's only one day in the years poor excuse to pick the pocket of your
employer every twenty-fifth of December i
think the character of Ebenezer Scrooge sort of very important lesson to middle-class people Chris mish not
ashamed about because the Christmas season
presented them with real problem what
do we owe to the different people in our world what do we owe to our families what do
we owe to our employees what we
owe to the what do we owe to the anonymous poor at first Ebenezer Scrooge refuses to face those
problems but after his visions of Christmas
past present and future screws learns that family and charity cannot be ignored at Christmastime screw
scratching it for you good idea
actually are you really as conversion story and it's a story about this hard-hearted man being born to
Christmas observance and I’m going to raise
your salary and help your large family in every way possible that conversion story is important for
Victorians be thinking about their own conversion
to the holiday because it is very much that they are being reconverted so many of them had given
up on the holiday so now they
have to come to terms with their own reconnection with that and screws a way of doing that this is the historian Dickens going
around America and one of his famous reading
tours and this American Factory on they're going to a reading of Christmas
carol and on the way home saying to his life next
year we shall close the factory on Christmas Day 19th century Americans were discovering Christmas after a 200
year drought of Puritan disapproval but
the holiday would never have taken hold if society wasn't ready for it one important shift was occurring
right inside the family itself before
the 19th century the family existed as what we might think of as an engine of discipline designed to Train
children to work hard after 18-20 1832 family
was very quickly and perceptibly becoming in an agency that was designed to provide the emotional nursery for
children so that they could grow up being
sensitive little people who took a lot of pleasure in the family and in the world itself Christmas was tailor-made for this
transition now there was a holiday where attention
could be lavished on children without seeming to spoil them the moment of Christmas where parents
started to pay attention to their children
I sometimes come to think of this is the invention of quality time with in the family parents would
discover the joy that they could take out
of watching the joy in their children's faces when they gave their children presence Americans now knew
why they were celebrating Christmas but they didn't
know exactly how to go about it the old pagan revelry was clearly inappropriate for a Victorian home but
some ancient traditions were perfect for reviving the Christmas tree has its roots in
Germany where decorated evergreens had always
been a part of the winter celebrations but
the tree might have stay there if not for the royal marriage in 1840 of Victoria the Queen of England to her
cousin Prince Albert of Germany Albert
brought his German ways to Winter Palace including the annual Christmas tree in 1848 the London Illustrated
news published this engraving of the royal family
standing by the first Christmas tree most
English had ever seen in just a few years a decorated fur could be found in nearly every English home at Christmas
was in a few years if you look at victorian
diaries are that as people are saying we had a Christmas tree as is customary or we had a Christmas
tree tasbeeh of always had that always happen
at all it is that a custom which started in the 1840s the other dating fifties people believe that the
Christmas tree was part of the English Christmas
Americans embrace the Christmas tree just as quickly as the English had in fact its connection to
the old world was one of its strongest selling
points for a lot of Americans
these are going to be new holiday traditions not something your parents and especially
in the case of the more austere Protestants so
they're looking for a reason for what they're doing and one of the most convenient reasons they can have they
can say well this is the way the dawn in Germany
where this is the way to dawn in England all
of a sudden Christmas traditions were popping up everywhere in 1828 Joel are . set America's minister to
Mexico brought back a green and red plant
that seemed perfect for the new holiday and in 1843 the English firm of JC hoarsely printed the first
Christmas card a newly efficient
postal service in England and America help to make Christmas cards and overnight
sensation it seemed as though
every vestige of the old back an alien Christmas was gone but even the Victorians couldn't clean up
Christmas completely Victorians what secretary this'll tell because you could
actually kiss the lady already because a man that normally in the normal course of
events should not be allowed to kiss so
in a society which was very strict one message of that my sections Christmas from earlier times it's
pretty little till new Victorian Christmas gathering
was without it oh my mid century
Christmas was everywhere in America in the streets in the homes in the marketplace the one place you could not find
Christmas was in church most
Americans were Protestant and the Protestants church had ignored Christmas for years but Protestant Victorians
long for official religion on this sacred day when
a number of them do initially is say well we can't find a Christmas service are Baptist church are Presbyterian
church let's go see what the
Catholics are doing here let's go see what the fiscal plans are doing and increasingly that
puts pressure on these latter day Puritans
to have Christmas services because there's a way in which lay people began to expect it church services mistletoe and
Christmas trees America's new
holiday now seemed firmly in place but Victorian America had one last contribution to the Christmas
season a jolly elf who shimmy down the chimney
would soon personify Christmas for generations to come now back to Christmas unwrapped year
on the history channel we
borrowed the Christmas tree from Germany and the Christmas card from England but one Christmas icon was
developed right here in America Santa Claus long before Santa however there was a
saint Nicholas a Greek Orthodox Bishop who
became one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages in December six St. Nicholas Day good children
woke to gifts from the kindly st. bad children
salt away with nothing in Holland he was known as center Klaus and when the Dutch came to this country
they brought tales of their gift giving Nicholas
with them this quaint custom
caught the imagination of Clement Clarke Moore a well-heeled Episcopal minister in New York
City in 1822 more wrote a poem for his
children about a good-natured saint who came down the chimney on Christmas Evet was the night before Christmas and all through the house not a
creature was stirring not even a mouse the
stockings were hung by the chimney with care in hopes that St. Nicholas would soon be there more dreamed up
Dasher dancer and the rest of the reindeer
along with sansas entrance through the chimney but at first he was embarrassed by the poem he worried it
was too frivolous for a man of the church
cloud more was a minister here a minister who should be on the other side is promoting a secular Christmas with
reindeer and all the rest of it but it was
no mention in the poem read a religious and that that's why he didn't reveal who he was the beginning didn't really audition
more soon owned up to the palm when it became
clear that every child in America was scanning the horizon for reindeer on Christmas Eve less clear was what
exactly this Santa Claus looked like oh at
first Santa came in all shapes and sizes a pagan sorcerer a frightening known even a drunkard on a turkey
driven sleigh then in 1863 Thomas
Nast a cartoonist for Harper's Weekly settle the matter once and for all with his version of
the Christmas St. NASA Santa was round her and
jollier than his austere Catholic cousin he looked in fact like a man of his times a man who would fit right in
with the wrote on be whiskered robber barons
of the late 19th century but Santa was a robber baron in Reverse instead of taking from the less
fortunate he gave to the less fortunate he
gave to people regardless of whether they done something or not in other words he gave two children
instead of gathering together wealth he gets
rid of wealth he does it yearly a
captain of industry with a heart of gold it's no wonder that by the 1840s Santa Claus was an irresistible image
to America's retailers he was a
guy who could sell anything at Christmas but make it seem like you were not buying gifts at all Santa Claus provided a way for both
children and parents to pretend that Christmas
presence or not in the realm of the commercial marketplace that Christmas presence existed in the
realm of pure domestic affection so Santa Claus
played a very important role for both parents and children he took presence out of the realm of
Commerce if the image of Santa could sell
merchandise retailer soon figured that a real-life Santa would boost sales even further Santa has been showing up in
department stores since the mid eighteen hundreds it makes perfect sense for us to have
our national St. in the department store that's
commercial sense for US dollars and cents author
and humorist gene Shepard immortalized this rite of passage in A Christmas Story an autobiographical
account of one boys Christmas you
know I've been thinking for weeks what I wanted for Christmas affected the best thing to do is to tell Santa
Claus about that and I looked up with that Santa
Claus here these big watery blue eyes the huge beard on he's looking at me right now and he was so impressive
that my mind went blank Oh what's more day it's like if all of a
sudden this you're sitting on the
president's lab ethics that's what would you like me to pass legislation study I mean your mind is going to go black
you can't remember any of this stuff and so
at that point Santa Claus looked at me and he says all right up how about a football kid all about nice football and football I wanted a BB gun so he pushed me off
his lap and this elf grabbed me and throw
me down a slide that went down into the snow and I played there for a minute and I knew that I was not a fit
person to talk to the great Santa Claus is
obviously a star a celebrity of
this magnitude obviously needed a sidekick in 1939 Robert may a copywriter at the Montgomery Ward
department store dashed off a promotional
children's book to lure Christmas shoppers in to the store may story told of an ostracized reindeer
with a big red nose where most
trained ears noses are brownish and tiny rudolph
was read very large and quite shiny this
physical which I say disability turns
out to be an asset because it's a foggy Christmas Eve this fog will be hard to get through and this light ,
notes enables poor old stumbling Santa Claus
to get through and Sean arms the
red-nosed reindeer you'll go now mr. so you have this handicap sort of
child finger helping the United parent figure make
Christmas castle food off brought Christmas full circle it was now the children who really
made Christmas possible only they understood the
meaning of this enchanted day from Washington Irving to Montgomery Ward a battle for Christmas had been fought
and won by kids by the nineteen twenties few vestiges
of the carnival Christmas for left in America one exception was this Christmas parade in new york city
where a glimpse of Santa Claus was work the
all-day way but by the nineteen
fifties Christmas were strictly a family affair with eggnog by the fire being on the hifi and a load of
presence under the tree not
throat thing on an open fire I were there are is all of the land fine and
it's hard to do not the joy of
opening up gifts is one of the things that makes Christmas what it is he's
loaded lots of its the mystery of all these packages I think that's why we wrap them it's exciting to have a package lying
there with silver paper on it you
don't know what's in it and the open about them and there it is it something that's really great that you really
want it but to give presence you
have to shop for them and shopping has long been at the heart of the Christmas critics say this yearly buying frenzy
obscures the real reason for Christmas to
celebrate the birth of the Christ child celebrate the birth of Christ give the guy gave it as much as the
gifts we give our children a first step though
she wants all the toys could be right i think a lot of it is more commercialized
and when i was younger i remember going to church and having family dinners being more of an
important aspect of it it's
difficult because the children don't grow up realizing what the real meaning is
it people say that Christ has
been lost in Christmas implicit in that is the idea that Christ had ever been totally the
center of Christmas and as Christmas has been
celebrated ever since it was instituted as a feast of the Nativity there's always been other ritual other
ceremony other activity associated with Christmas in addition to Christ at the all souls church in new york
city Christmas eve services give the secular side
of the holiday some stiff competition at all souls think Carol's we bring in choir and orchestra who do
great music from the Christmas tradition certainly
today most churches revel in the celebrations as completely as do the corporate malls that's not a bad thing it actually
goes back to the sources of this kind of holiday
where we recognize that people have deep needs at this time of year to connect
with that which is very important but also to celebrate I think it's fifty sixty percent of
the population going to one kind of Christmas
religious service or another so clearly a lot of people have a lost sight of
the religious meaning but what seems to be the concern here is that there's a struggle a competition of
what the real meaning is and a sense that the religious
is not competing effectively with all these other competitors but perhaps Christmas in America is more a
combination of the sacred and the secular
and less a competition between the two I
think that if people had Christmas with just Christ in it it would not be a holiday that would come out into the
streets the way that it does because the trees
the carrels the shopping all of that becomes the cultural material that holds the religion in place this cultural material is everywhere certain songs and movies have become
as much a part of Christmas as the tree I
don't want to get married anybody you understand I want to do what I want to do and you movies such as it's a wonderful life
our hunger for the mart our delight in them reflects
a deep potential goodness in the human soul these
are good movies they have people do good things and they get rewarded for them to my big brother George the richest man in town someone might say that this was a
trivialization of Christmas I
think it probably is coming a little closer than many of the things we do to tapping the true Christmas spirit and
then the broadest sense of that word as a
Christmas present for your dear friend that's
right let's ride yeah not
the point nowadays kids watch new
films and new TV shows why Mr.
Scrooge up merry Christmas and they will grow up thinking that that was the way Christmas always used to be you leave me no alternative but to
give you this toys no no I'm
giving you all a's we always reinvent and every time we reinvent we think that what we're
reinventing is something that has no beginning
you can reinvent Christmas or celebrated the way your great grandparents did the only thing you
cannot do is ignore Christmas to not catch
a glimpse of a Christmas tree or hear a note of jingle bells would be nearly impossible and since ninety-eight percent of Americans
celebrate Christmas in some form it
looks like that won't change for quite some time something touches America somewhere
down deep in his belly button about Christmas he
can't really explain what it is about Christmas it he enjoy so much hey he just knows
when all those red and green lights go up you know
on the street and you see Santa Clauses walking around with their bells and something happens to you enjoy it now you can be cynical all you want
but you still enjoy yeah Charles dickens and Washington Irving
may have invented our idea of nostalgic Christmas
but the images worked somehow holiday that celebrates the domestic pleasures of children and family was
just what we wanted he says
though the spirit of Christmas has always been with us.
