history of christmas ornaments
Christmas is a celebration that takes place every year on December 25th to honor the birth of Jesus Christ. It is significant because billions of people around the world celebrate it as a religious and cultural holiday. Christmas, which is a major event in the Christian calendar, comes after the Nativity Fast or the four Sundays leading up to Advent. Christmastide officially begins on this day and lasts for twelve days, ending on Twelfth Night. Christmas is a religious observance for most Christians and a cultural celebration for many non-Christians. It is observed as a public holiday in many countries and is a significant component of the holiday season.
The Nativity of Jesus, the traditional Christmas story found in the New Testament, narrates how Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem fulfilled messianic prophecies. When Joseph and Mary arrived in the city, the inn was full and they were given a stable where the Christ Child was born. Shepherds heard this news from angels, who then told others.
There are several theories regarding the date of Jesus’ birth, and the church established December 25 as the day in the early fourth century. This is exactly nine months after the Annunciation on March 25, which is also the spring equinox, and corresponds with the traditional date of the winter solstice on the Roman calendar. Although Christmas is observed on December 25 in the Gregorian calendar by most Christians, it is observed on December 25 in the older Julian calendar by some Eastern Christian churches, which is equivalent to January 7 in the Gregorian calendar. The main reason Christians celebrate Christmas is because they believe that God became a man in order to atone for humankind’s sins.
Many nations combine pre-Christian, christmas xxx, and secular themes and origins into their Christmas customs. Giving gifts, making Advent calendars or wreaths, listening to Christmas music and caroling, watching Christmas movies, going to Nativity plays, exchanging Christmas cards, going to church, having a special meal, and putting up decorations like trees, lights, nativity scenes, garlands, wreaths, mistletoe, and holly are all examples of contemporary holiday customs. There are also customs and legends specific to the figures like Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, and the Christkind, who are connected to giving gifts to children during the Christmas season.
Owing to the financial consequences, Christmas has grown in importance and is now a crucial time for sales for merchants and companies. Because people are giving gifts and enjoying other festive activities, the holiday has a higher economic impact. Christmas’s economic influence has grown over the last few centuries in many parts of the world.
In conclusion, Christmas is a complex holiday with elements of religion, culture, and the economy. Its foundation in the biblical story is enhanced by a rich tapestry of culturally diverse customs and traditions. For millions of people around the world, Christmas remains a time for introspection, giving, and communal happiness, regardless of whether it is celebrated as a secular or religious holiday.
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History of Christmas:
history of christmas ornaments
The earliest church documents from the second century show that Christians were already celebrating and remembering the birth of the Lord. Despite the lack of agreement on a set date for these celebrations, this observance is said to have naturally grown out of the sincere devotion of common believers. The Chronograph of 354 is the first source that links December 25 to the birth of Christ. Scholars agree that this portion of the text was written in Rome sometime in the year 336.
Christmas was not listed among the festivals mentioned by early Christian writers like Irenaeus and Tertullian, but by the end of the fourth century, the Church Fathers John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, and Jerome confirmed December 25 as the official date for Christmas. Although this passage is thought to be a later addition, Hippolytus of Rome states that December 25 is the date of Jesus’ birth in his Commentary on the Prophet Daniel (AD 204).
Jesus’ birth was first commemorated in the Eastern Christian tradition on January 6, coinciding with the Epiphany, with a greater emphasis on his baptism than his actual birth. Following the death of the pro-Arian Emperor Valens in 378, Christmas was promoted in the East as part of the Orthodox Christian rebirth. The feast was first observed in 379 in Constantinople, in 388 in Antioch by John Chrysostom, and in the following century in Alexandria. By the sixth century, Christmas was observed in Jerusalem, according to the Georgian Iadgari.
The exact date of Jesus’ birth was a topic of great interest in the third century, with early Christian writers putting forward a number of dates. About the year 200 AD, Clement of Alexandria proposed that Jesus was born on May 20, the 25th day of the Egyptian month Pachon, in the 28th year of Augustus. There are other suggested dates in Pharmuthi (April 20 or 21).
The decision to celebrate Christmas on December 25 was influenced by a number of factors. This date was associated with the winter solstice in the Roman Empire, where the majority of Christians lived. It is significant that Christmas emerged during the height of the empire’s official state-sponsored sun worship. Since AD 274 the 25th of December has been the date of the Roman festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, honoring the birthday of Sol Invictus, the “Invincible Sun.” The early Christians identified Jesus Christ as the Sun, calling him the “Sun of Righteousness” (Sol Justitiae) that Malachi had prophesied. For this reason, the direction of prayer toward the east—a symbol of the rising sun—was established.
The reason for celebrating Christ’s birth on the shortest day of the year is explained by Saint Augustine in a sermon from the late fourth century: “He was born on the day which is the shortest in our earthly reckoning and from which subsequent days begin to increase in length.” The University of Alberta’s Steven Hijmans highlighted the significance of cosmic symbolism in the selection of December 25, the southern solstice, as Christ’s birthday.
The second half of the fourth century Christian treatise “De solstitia et aequinoctia conceptionis et nativitatis Domini nostri Iesu Christi et Iohannis Baptistae” places the birth of Jesus on the winter solstice and the birth of John on the summer solstice. March 25, the Roman spring equinox and the date of Jesus’s conception (the Annunciation), coincide, quite conveniently, nine months later on December 25.
There are two primary explanations for why December 25 was chosen as Christmas Day, but some academics like Susan Roll, a professor of theology acknowledge the relationship between the holiday and the sun, the winter solstice, and the widespread practice of solar worship in the later Roman Empire.
Hypothesis of computation:
Additional details: Jesus’s chronology
The “Calculation hypothesis” postulates that Christmas was purposefully timed to coincide with the Annunciation, or the date that the Romans identify as the conception of Christ. This date is March 25, which is also the date of the spring equinox. The French author Louis Duchesne first proposed this theory in 1889. Despite the fact that the calculation hypothesis was once thought to be the “minority opinion” about the origin of Christmas, Susan Roll (1995) notes that it was nonetheless “taught in graduate liturgy programs as a thoroughly viable hypothesis.”
Sextus Julius Africanus declared that March 25, the conventional spring equinox, was the day of Christ’s conception as well as the day of creation in the year AD 221. Although this would suggest that Christ was born in December, Africanus did not give a precise birthdate for Christ, and his literary influence at the time was not very great.
A few early Christians connected the date of Jesus’s crucifixion to the Hebrew calendar’s 14th of Nisan, which is the day before Passover. The name of this celebration, Quartodeciman, comes from the Latin for “fourteenth.” Some early Christian writers connected the date of Jesus’s conception or birth with his death by equating the 14th of Nisan with the March 25 equinox. According to Duchesne’s conjecture, Jesus was thought to have lived a complete number of years—”since symbolic number systems do not permit the imperfection of fractions”—and to have been born and died on the same day. He did admit, though, that there was no evidence for this theory in any early Christian writing.
Religion professor Adam C. English of Campbell University believes that December 25 is the day that Jesus was born. His argument is based on Luke 1:26 in the Bible, which describes how Mary, the mother of John the Baptist, was annunciated to during the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. English assumes that the events recorded in Luke 1:5–23, which describe Zechariah’s ministry in the Temple, took place on Yom Kippur the year prior to the birth of Jesus. After tracing Luke’s story from the Annunciation to the birth of John the Baptist, English comes to the conclusion that December 25 is when Jesus was born. The Feast of the Annunciation, also known as the Incarnation, has its origins in the sixth century.
“Ordinary Christians in the third and fourth centuries [were] much interested in calculations with symbolic numbers,” according to Susan Roll, who casts doubt on this claim. In a similar vein, Gerard Rouwhorst expresses doubt that feasts arise “based on calculations by exegetes and theologians,” contending that more is required for a feast to become ingrained in a community than a complex calculation. history of christmas ornaments
Hypothesis on the history of religions:
According to the “History of Religions” hypothesis, which is related to the winter solstice theory mentioned earlier, the Church purposefully chose December 25 as Christ’s birthday (dies Natalis Christi) in order to incorporate the Roman winter solstice celebration, dies Natalis Solis Invicti (birthday of the Unconquered Sun), which also fell on that date. This festival honored the sun god Sol Invictus, whose worship was revived in AD 274 by Emperor Aurelian. There were thirty chariot races as part of the yearly celebration in Rome. Professor of Ancient History Gary Forsythe points out that this celebration would have gone well with the seven-day Saturnalia period (December 17–23), which is Rome’s most joyous holiday season since the Republican era and is filled with feasts, celebrations, and gift-giving. Emperor Julian lived in 362 AD. outlined how the Agon Solis was a sun festival that ended the Saturnalia in late December in his Hymn to King Helios.
Early in the fourth century AD, a Christian treatise attributed to John Chrysostom links the birth of Christ to Sol’s birthday. “Our Lord, too, is born in the month of December… the eighth before the calends of January [25 December],” according to this treatise. However, the pagan people refer to it as the “Birthday of the Unconquered.” Who is more unconquered than Our Lord, really? Alternatively, we could state that He is the Sun of Justice if they claim that it is the Sun’s birthday.” The hypothesis is mentioned in an ambiguous date annotation that Syrian bishop Jacob Bar-Salibi added to a manuscript in the twelfth century. The scribe describes how Pagans commemorated the Sun’s birthday on December 25 by lighting festive lights and Eventually, Christians took part in these celebrations. The leaders of the Church chose to celebrate the true Nativity on the same day after realizing this tendency.
Born on December 25, Isaac Newton proposed in the 17th century that the Christmas date should be chosen to coincide with the winter solstice. Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German scholar, contended in 1743 that the date was chosen to align with the Natalis Solis Invicti. German researcher Hermann Usener made significant progress on this theory in 1889, and other academics have since supported it. The University of Alberta’s Steven Hijmans admits that there is widespread acceptance for the theory that the date was picked to appropriate the pagan celebration. He argues, though, that even though the Church knew about the pagan celebration of Sol Invictus on that day, it had no bearing on their choice of Christmas. Hijmans states that “during the winter solstice on or Since December 25 was a fixed date in the Roman imperial calendar, there is no proof that a religious Solstice celebration took place on that day before Christmas.”
According to Thomas Talley, Aurelian instituted the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti in part to give a pagan meaning to a day that was already significant to Christians. The “calculations hypothesis potentially establishes 25 December as a Christian festival before Aurelian’s decree,” according to the Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. Professor of Trinity College Dublin C. Philipp E. Nothaft, however, notes that proponents of the history of religions theory might not be fully aware of the little evidence that supports their theory.
Christmas has given rise to a number of well-known traditions that predate the celebration of Jesus’ birth. Some contend that some aspects were Christianized and have their origins in pre-Christian celebrations that were subsequently adopted by pagans. On the other hand, some academics refute these claims and argue that Christmas traditions primarily developed within a Christian context. Since its inception, the holiday’s celebratory atmosphere has changed constantly. During the Middle Ages, it was occasionally raucous and carnivalesque; in the 19th century, a more somber, family- and kid-focused theme was added.
Some religious communities, like the Puritans and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who don’t celebrate birthdays in general, have occasionally outlawed Christmas because they believe it doesn’t align with scripture. This highlights the various viewpoints regarding the suitability of celebrating Christmas in various religious and cultural contexts.
Winter festivals were an important part of many European pagan cultures’ customs during the pre-Christian era and the early Christian centuries. This prominence resulted from a decrease in agricultural activity in the winter and the hope of better weather in the spring. English-speaking nations frequently borrow Christmas customs from Celtic winter herbs such as ivy and mistletoe, such as the kissing under the mistletoe tradition.
The Anglo-Saxons and the Norse were among the pre-Christian Germanic peoples who observed Yule, a winter celebration that took place in late December or early January. In contemporary English, “yule” continues to be used as a synonym for Christmas. Yule is the source of many elements of modern Germanic-speaking regions’ Christmas folklore and iconography, including the Yule goat, Yule boar, and Yule log. The long-bearded god Odin is referred to in Old Norse texts as “the Yule one” and “Yule father,” while other gods are called “Yule beings.” A unique element to Yule customs is the image of Odin leading a ghostly procession through the sky, called the Wild Hunt.
But there are no trustworthy historical sources for some Christmas customs, like burning the Yule log, that date back earlier than the sixteenth century. Because of this, academics are now debating whether the Christmas block burning custom originated with early modern Christianity and had nothing to do with pagan customs.
Similar incorporation of pre-Christian customs into Christmas celebrations is visible in Eastern Europe. The Koleda tradition, which has similarities to Christmas carols, serves as an example. This blending of traditions draws attention to the flexibility and syncretism that have been inherent in the development of Christmas celebrations throughout various cultural contexts.
In the end, the intricate web of Christmas traditions illustrates the dynamic interaction of historical, cultural, and religious factors. Whatever its origins—ancient pagan festivals, Christian doctrine, or more modern cultural inventions—Christmas remains a global phenomenon that appeals to a wide range of cultures, each of which adds its own customs and interpretations to the occasion.
Modern history: 17th and 18th centuries
Christmas celebrations were carried on by a number of new churches after the Protestant Reformation, such as the Lutheran Church and the Anglican Church. The poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” composed in 1629 by the Anglican poet John Milton, has become a Christmas classic. Professor Donald Heinz of California State University claims that Martin Luther was instrumental in creating Germany’s distinctive Christmas culture, which subsequently spread to North America. Christmas was also accepted by the Dutch Reformed Church as one of its main evangelical feasts.
But in 17th-century England, factions such as the Puritans fiercely disagreed with Christmas, seeing it as a Catholic fabrication and labeling it as the “rags of the Beast” or the “trappings of popery.” There was conflict between Anglicans and Puritans as a result of the established Anglican Church’s support for more elaborate feast days, penitential seasons, and saints’ days. Among the nobility, King Charles I promoted customary Christmas generosity.
Christmas was outlawed by the Puritan rulers in 1647 following the Parliamentarian victory in the English Civil War. Pro-Christmas rioting broke out in a number of cities as a result. Rioters, in particular, had control of Canterbury; they chanted royalist slogans and adorned doorways with holly. Since football was forbidden by Puritans on Sundays, it has come to represent disobedience. Crowds used footballs as a symbol of festive misrule when the Puritans banned Christmas in 1647.
In opposition to the Puritans, The Vindication of Christmas (London, 1652) promoted Old English Christmas customs such as card games, dinners, roast apples over the fire, dances with “plow-boys” and “maidservants,” old Father Christmas, and carol singing. People continued to sing carols in secret and hold semi-covert religious services to commemorate the birth of Christ despite the ban.
After Puritan laws were overturned in 1660 with the Restoration of King Charles II, Christmas was once again recognized as a legal holiday in England. But Calvinist clergymen still frowned upon Christmas celebrations, especially in Scotland. Christmas was officially outlawed in 1640 by the Scottish Parliament, which stated that the Presbyterian Church of Scotland had eradicated all “superstitious observation of days.” The church actively discouraged people from celebrating Christmas.
Christmas Day was not declared a bank holiday in Scotland until 1871, although it is a common law holiday in England, Wales, and Ireland. After Charles II’s Restoration, poor Robin’s Almanack was relieved that Christmas was once again observed. A diary kept by James Woodforde in the second half of the eighteenth century describes Christmas observances and related festivities.
Following in the footsteps of their English counterparts, Puritans in Colonial America were adamantly against celebrating Christmas. Deliberately, on their first December 25 in the New World, the Pilgrims in New England went about their business as usual. Christmas was despised by Cotton Mather and other Puritans because it was not mentioned in the Bible and because of the frequently raucous behavior that went along with it. The English governor Edmund Andros removed Boston’s 1659 ban on celebrating Christmas in 1681. But in the Boston area, Christmas celebrations didn’t become popular until the middle of the 1800s.
In the meantime, Christians in Virginia and New York celebrated Christmas openly, and Pennsylvania Dutch settlers—mostly Moravians—celebrated the holiday with great fervor in towns like Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Lititz, as well as the Wachovia settlements in North Carolina. The first Nativity Scenes and Christmas trees in America were brought to the country by the Bethlehem Moravians. Christmas lost popularity in the United States following the American Revolution because it was seen as an English tradition. It was during the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776, that George Washington launched an attack on Hessian mercenaries, a move that demonstrated how unpopular Christmas was in America at the time compared to Germany.
Christmas religious services were outlawed during the French Revolution, when the Cult of Reason held sway. The three kings cake was renamed the “equality cake” as part of anticlerical government policies.
19th century, Christmas
Christmas celebrations saw substantial changes in the early 19th century due to a variety of literary and cultural influences. An important factor was the emergence of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England, which promoted charitable deeds and emphasized the significance of Christmas in Christian traditions. Influential authors like Washington Irving and Charles Dickens worked to change people’s perceptions of Christmas at the same time by focusing on themes like kindness, family, children, gift-giving, and the beloved characters Santa Claus and Father Christmas.
During the Tudor era in particular, writers of this era imagined Christmas as a time of deep celebration. With his novel “A Christmas Carol,” published in 1843, renowned author Charles Dickens permanently altered the Christmas story. This work was essential in bringing back the joyous atmosphere of Christmas and encouraging kindness and generosity. Dickens wanted to create a picture of Christmas as a generous, family-oriented celebration that combined worship and eating in the service of societal healing. His ideas, sometimes known as the “Carol Philosophy,” had a big impact on a lot of modern Western Christmas traditions, such as family get-togethers, festive food and drink, dancing, games, and a spirit of giving.
It is Dickens’s story that made phrases like “Merry Christmas” popular. This led to a resurgence of customary practices and religious holidays at the same time as the Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholicism grew. With his condescending “Bah! Humbug!” demeanor, Scrooge’s persona came to represent frugal living and a rejection of the holiday spirit.
Sir Henry Cole started a new custom in holiday greetings in 1843 when he created the first Christmas card for commercial use. William Sandys’s “Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern” (1833), which included classic carols like “The First Noel,” “I Saw Three Ships,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” is credited with igniting the Christmas Carol tradition. Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” helped to popularize the genre even further.
The German-born queen Queen Charlotte is credited with bringing the Christmas tree to Britain in the early 1700s. In 1832, Queen Victoria declared how happy she was to have a Christmas tree decked out with lights, ornaments, and gifts. After she married Prince Albert, the tradition became very well-liked all over Britain. The British royal family’s Christmas tree at Windsor Castle was shown in a sensational illustration that sparked the tradition’s adoption in 1848. In America, decorating a Christmas tree had become customary by the 1870s.
Christmas became popular again in the United States in the 1820s thanks to short stories by Washington Irving, particularly “Old Christmas” and “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” These tales portrayed heartwarming English Christmas celebrations and fueled a societal tension between the holiday’s spiritual significance and the materialism that goes along with it.
The poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (also referred to as “Twas the Night Before Christmas”) by Clement Clarke Moore, published in 1822, was a major contributor to the spread of the custom of gift-giving. This was the first indication that seasonal Christmas shopping was becoming economically significant. It also spurred a national conversation about Christmas’s commercialization, raising concerns about materialism’s erasure of the holiday’s spiritual significance.
In her 1850 book “The First Christmas in New England,” Harriet Beecher Stowe voiced her concerns about the true meaning of Christmas being lost in a frenzy of consumerism. Discussions centered on the conflict between the commercialization of the holiday and its spiritual significance.
While some parts of the United States had not yet adopted the custom of celebrating Christmas, prominent people such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted a transitional state regarding Christmas in New England in 1856. A Reading, Pennsylvania, newspaper observed in 1861 that even adamantly traditional Presbyterian communities were celebrating Christmas, signaling a change in public perception of the occasion.
As early as 1864, the First Congregational Church of Rockford, Illinois, announced plans for a large-scale Christmas jubilee, demonstrating how Christmas was becoming more and more accepted—even in Puritan communities. Fourteen states—several of which were in New England—had formally acknowledged Christmas as a legal holiday by 1860. On June 28, 1870, Christmas was formally declared a federal holiday in the United States, a move that highlighted the holiday’s expanding cultural and societal importance in American culture.
Louis Prang is credited with popularizing the Christmas card in America in 1875, earning him the moniker “father of the American Christmas card.” These cards helped make the custom of exchanging greetings during the holidays even more widespread.
In summary, religious movements, literary works, and cultural changes all had an impact on the evolution of Christmas celebrations in the early 19th century. The Oxford Movement and authors such as Charles Dickens transformed Christmas into a family-oriented celebration that highlights kindness and giving. The commercial Christmas card, the Christmas tree, and the gift-exchanging custom all became popular and helped shape the diverse Christmas celebration that we know today. Christmas’s religious and cultural dynamics have developed over time, mirroring broader shifts in society and the persistent conflict between the holiday’s spiritual and secular aspects.
20th century, Christmas
Amidst the chaos of World War I, particularly in 1914, a curious sequence of unofficial ceasefires took place between enemy armies over the Christmas season. These impromptu truces, which were arranged by soldiers on the front lines, included everything from vows to refrain from using force—expressed through distant shouts of assurance—to extraordinary demonstrations of friendship and camaraderie, like gift-giving, amiable banter, and even unscheduled sporting events between former foes. Since then, these incidents have ingrained themselves into popular culture and taken on a semi-mythological quality. They are used to teach children the timeless values associated with Christmas and are frequently cited as poignant symbols of shared humanity in the darkest of circumstances.
Many Christmas traditions in the UK were mostly restricted to the upper and middle classes until the 1950s. Many of the Christmas customs that would eventually spread throughout society had not yet been adopted by the general public, such as the omnipresent Christmas tree. Traditionally, Christmas dinner consisted of beef or goose, not the increasingly common turkey. Rather than the more ornate gifts that were typical in later years, children received fruits and sweets in their stockings. Family Christmases, with all the trimmings, were a relatively new phenomenon, only becoming widely popular with rising prosperity in the 1950s.
In the past, national newspapers were published on Christmas Day in the UK until 1912, and postal services remained open on this day until 1961. In terms of sports, league football games continued in Scotland until the 1970s, but ended at the end of the 1950s in England.
Christmas and other Christian holidays could not be observed in public after the Soviet Union’s establishment of state atheism in 1917. The League of Militant Atheists actively pushed schoolchildren to oppose Christian holidays like Easter and Christmas customs like the Christmas tree during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. In 1929, during an especially harsh period of persecution, children in Moscow were encouraged to demonstrate against the celebration by spitting on crosses. Rather, the focus of Christmas and its related traditions—like decorating the tree and exchanging gifts—was moved to New Year’s Eve festivities. The prohibition on Christmas celebrations was not lifted until the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, and after a seven-decade break, Orthodox Christmas was once again declared a state holiday in Russia.
Similar changes occurred to the Christmas holiday during the Nazi Germany era. Nazi propagandists attempted to minimize or eradicate the Christian aspects of the celebration because they saw organized religion as a rival to the authoritarian government. Nazified Christmas songs were relentlessly promoted by propagandists, who substituted the racial ideologies of the regime for Christian themes.
Christmas was outlawed in some Muslim-majority nations because they believed it violated Islamic principles, even as the holiday spread beyond traditional Christian cultures and became a global holiday in the 20th century. This position represented differing opinions about whether it is appropriate to celebrate a holiday that has its origins in a different religion.
