History of Christmas Traditions: some pre-Christian?

Holly plant. Image: Wikimedia

HISTORY OF CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS

Many of the customs we commonly associate with Christmas come from earlier pagan or pre-Christian European backgrounds.

Let’s look at some familiar traditions and their connections to other folklore elements with which we may be unfamiliar.

Christmas Traditions

• The word Yule comes from the Germanic jōl or the Anglo-Saxon geōl. It refers to a twelve-day celebration, starting on or around December 21, among Norse and Germanic peoples associated with the Winter Solstice. Yuletide later became associated with Christmastide.

• Yule logs were not sweet confections but a whole tree that would burn for twelve days on the hearth. The large end would be lit with the remnants of the previous year’s log, wine would be poured over it, and each person would take turns feeding the whole length of the log into the fire as it continued to burn. It was considered bad luck to let it go out.

• Evergreens can be traced back to ancient Egypt and Rome, and played an essential role among the Vikings, who would decorate evergreen trees with food and carvings.

• Mistletoe was prominent in the traditions of the Druids and the lore of Northern Europe. The plant had no roots, yet remained green. The Norse associated it with their goddess of love, Frigga, perhaps the origin of kissing under it, as I discuss in another article.

• The Wassail bowl was first known in Scandinavia as the Old Norse ves heil. We are familiar with it as the more modern Anglo-Saxon “toast” wassail, which means “be thou hale” or “be healthy,” and is traditionally celebrated on Twelfth Night.

• Holly was used for decoration during the twelve-day Roman holiday known as the Saturnalia, which ended on January 1, as discussed in my previous article on Advent.

• Tinsel was developed in Germany in 1610, spun from hammered-out real silver. In the early 1970s, the U.S. government banned tinsel made from poisonous lead foil. The Food and Drug Administration convinced manufacturers to instead make it from plastic, and it became an inexpensive tree-trimming item.

Saturnalia Traditions

In Somnium Scipionis and Saturnalia, by Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius. Image: Wikipedia

The Roman celebration of Saturnalia, to honor Saturn, the head of the Roman pantheon of Titans, occurred annually at the end of December. (Saturday is named after the Latin Saturni dies.) Scholars debate the extent to which Saturnalia traditions influenced Christmas, or vice versa.

Though we hear of the celebration of Saturnalia as “the best of days” in Catullus‘ poem Io Saturnalia as early as the 1st century B.C., it was not a major Roman holiday until it was promoted by Emperor Aurelian in AD 274, three centuries later. But we don’t learn the full description of its traditions until the work Saturnalia by Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, who lived in the early fifth century A.D., long after Christmas had been widely observed.

Saturnalia Trivia to impress your friends and family

The Temple of the Sun, built by Aurelian for his Saturnalia, was constructed of porphyry stone. It is the rarest form of “granite” on earth, available in antiquity only from a quarry in the eastern desert of Egypt, Mons Porphyrites, or “mountain of porphyry.” I’ve seen this rare “imperial” purple-red stone in the Roman Forum, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican Museum, Florence, and Venice, in temples, monuments, churches, and sarcophagi.

Roman statue of a man in a purple toga, rendered in porphyry, Boboli Gardens, Florence. Image: Ex Urbe

When used in statue togas, purple porphyry stood in for Tyrian purple, the dye used in garments prized by Roman nobility.

Hagia Sophia porphyry column, Istanbul. Image: World History

After the Temple of the Sun fell into disuse centuries later, eight of those columns were reused at Hagia Sophia (Church of Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople (Istanbul), the largest church in the world when it was built in 537 AD. It holds 140 of these porphyry columns.

Emperor Justinian built it as the primary church of his capital city. No church dome was larger until almost a millennium later, when Brunelleschi designed the dome atop the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (The Duomo) in Florence in the 15th century.

Florence Duomo. Image: Wikimedia

Xmas and Christmas

Chi Rho, the first two Greek letters of the word Christ: Χριστός. Image: Wikimedia

Contrary to popular belief, the “X” in Xmas, as in notes or decorations, is not an abbreviation for “cross.” Nor, as my mother believed, is it disrespectful, as if taking Christ out of Christmas. But it does require some knowledge of Greek.

Quite the opposite, it represents the Greek letter chi – which looks like our letter “X” – and is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ: Χριστός (Christos), which, like the Hebrew word מָשִׁיחַ (Messiah), means “the anointed one.”

You may be familiar with “XP,” the chi-rho, the first two letters of Christos, as an abbreviation for Christ. As early as 1021 the abbreviation “XPmass” was used to as a shorthand for the holiday, which was subsequently shortened to “Xmas.”

So Xmas really is shorthand for Christmas.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com

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