How Christmas Became a Family Holiday

Last updated on: December 22, 2024 at 6:17 pm by Barbara O'Brien

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How Christmas Became a Family Holiday 2024-12-22T18:17:30-06:00 Barbara O'Brien

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Today, Christmas is a family holiday. It didn’t used to be. Through much of the history of Christianity, Christmas involved a raucous, multi-day festival of adult entertainment — drinking, dancing, gambling, indulgences and debauchery. The ribaldry got so out of hand that in the 17th century public observance of Christmas was banned in some places, notably England and its colony Massachusetts. (See “When Christmas Was Banned in Boston.”)

Today Christmas is the most wholesome of family holidays. The cultural expressions of Christmas — Christmas decorations, Christmas dinner, Christmas presents — are centered in family, especially children, and home. In popular songs and Hollywood films, Christmas often is wrapped in nostalgia for home and family. When did it change, and how did that happen?

Early Christmases

There is no record of a religious observance of the birth of Jesus in the very early Church. It doesn’t appear to have been important to early Christians. In the third century the Catholic Church in Rome fixed the date of Jesus’ birth as December 25. This was possibly to take attention away from the old pagan festival of Saturnalia, held around the same time. Saturnalia was a multi-day blowout that by all accounts turned the streets of Rome into something like Mardi Gras on steroids. Even as the pagan gods faded from memory, Saturnalia remained stubbornly popular.

In other parts of Europe there were other pre-Christian mid-winter festivals, usually centered on the Winter Solstice, when days begin to grow longer again. For example, Germanic people observed Yule, a time of bonfires and feasting that honored Norse gods. The Winter Solstice must have been important to the ancient people of Britain also. About 5,000 years ago the architects of Stonehenge planned the great stones to align with the four solstices. And archeologists have found evidence that neolithic Britons also enjoyed community midwinter feasts.

During the early Medieval period, as Christianity spread through all of Europe, Christmas slowly grew in importance. By the 9th century the Church had developed a Christmas liturgy to sanctify the day, although it was still considered much less important than Easter. The pagan traditions of midwinter festivals continued, but by the 10th century or so they were being associated with Christmas. You may have noticed that the name Yule became a synonym for Christmas. For Medieval Christians the period before Christmas — the four (or so; it wasn’t always four) weeks of Advent — was a time of quiet reflection and modified fasting. For example, there are records of Christians in Medieval France fasting on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays of Advent. On Christmas day, of course, there was a church service. And then the partying began.

The Twelve Days of Christmas

In appears that in much of Europe the old pagan mid-winter festivals came to be packed into the 12-day period between December 25 and Epiphany, January 6, the observance of the visit of the Three Wise Men. In the Middle Ages, the Twelve Days of Christmas became a time of feasts, lots of drinking, dancing, entertainments, and general adult merriment, culminating on the evening of January 5, Twelfth Night. And for a few centuries the Twelve Days were an annual public event featuring much drunkenness and licentious behavior.

Probably no one outdid Tudor England for Twelve Days extravagance. King Henry VIII was said to have spent the equivalent of millions of pounds every year for twelve days of feasting, drinking, elaborate masquerading, and entertainment, usually at his enormous Hampton Court Palace. Along with enjoying massive amounts of food and drink, the King’s guests were entertained by jesters, minstrels, jugglers, and actors. If you can find “Lucy Worsley’s 12 Days of Tudor Christmas” streaming anywhere, do watch it. See also “The Twelve Days of Christmas: How the Tudors Celebrated Christmastide.”

But all this merriment had a dark side that went beyond all the public lewdness and drunkenness. For example, the English tradition of wassailing began in pagan times, when people would gather and sing to fruit trees to encourage a good harvest. Then in the Middle Ages wassailing involved common people going to the homes of the wealthy nobility during the Twelve Days and wishing the lords and ladies good health. In exchange, the nobles gave the wassailers food and drink. But by Tudor times the wassailers were gangs of young men, often in elaborate costumes, who barged into the homes of the wealthy to demand food and drink. And if the wassailers were refused, the home might be vandalized.

Time for a Change

So it was that for a time in the 17th century all public observance of Christmas was banned in England as well as Massachusetts, and anywhere the Puritan movement had enough authority. The Puritans, for good reason, believed that “Christmas” traditions were really just the old pagan solstice/Saturnalia festivals and had nothing to do with Christianity. There was a growing sentiment that all the drunkenness and mayhem of the Twelve Days had gotten out of hand. Yet that still wasn’t an end to it everywhere; see “Was Christmas in Revolutionary America a Drunken Bash?” by Thomas Kidd.

Even as the English were struggling with the Twelve Days gone out of control, in parts of Germany a change was underway. The feast day of Saint Nicholas, on December 6, was a time for giving small gifts and treats to children. In 1531 Martin Luther moved the gift-giving of Saint Nicholas Day to Christmas Day. Gift-giving hadn’t been a prominent part of Christmas before that. For a time this part of the Christmas tradition was confined to Germany and Lutheran countries. But by the end of the 18th century the practice of giving Christmas gifts to family members was widespread. And in 19th century America Saint Nicholas evolved into Santa Claus; see “The Commercialization of Christmas: A Short History.”

It was during the Victorian era that Christmas became what it is today. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901. She and her husband, Prince Albert, were huge influences on society and popular culture, and not just in Britain. The Victorian era emphasized family values, morality, social responsibility, and propriety. The excesses of the Twelve Days of Christmas were, finally, out of fashion. Victoria’s influence on Christmas was underscored by popular literature of the period. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (first published in 1843), in which ghosts of the season take on the reformation of Ebeneezer Scrooge, is just one example. Plus, Prince Albert introduced the German tradition of Christmas trees to Britain, just as German immigrants were introducing Christmas trees to North America.

Postscript

The Twelve Days of Christmas are still remembered in the traditional carol by that name. You can find articles online that explain how the Twelves Days really did have Christian significance. Don’t believe them; they didn’t. All such claims are strictly post hoc. And today it seems what’s left of the Twelves Days are compacted into New Year’s Eve. However, I notice some great estates in Britain do offer a re-creation of a Tudor-era Twelfth Night for paid guests. And however you observe it, Merry Christmas.

Charles Dickens gets the last word, from A Christmas Carol:

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”