Christmas Day

History

The date is not a record of anything. No one knows when Jesus was born, and some scholars think early spring more likely. There are at least three competing routes to December 25: Sextus Julius Africanus dated the conception to March 25, which puts a birth nine months later on December 25; Rome already marked the rebirth of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, on December 25, near the winter solstice and the festival of Saturnalia; and December 25 was also given as the birthday of the deity Mithra. The church in Rome began formally celebrating Christmas on December 25 in 336, under Constantine. The familiar claim that the date was picked to crowd out pagan festivals is speculation, not a documented decision.

The holiday was also, for a time, illegal in New England. In 1659 the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a statute its law library still publishes under the heading "Penalty for Keeping Christmas," fining anyone found observing the day five shillings for conduct it called a "great dishonor of God and offence of others."

Legal standing came much later and all at once. Congress first established public holidays in 1870, for the District of Columbia: New Year's Day, Independence Day, Christmas, and Thanksgiving.

The tree is German, and the credit is usually misassigned. Prince Albert is the name attached to it, but the Royal Collection Trust points to Queen Charlotte, George III's consort, who brought the custom to the British court in the late eighteenth century — her tree was a yew, not a fir — from a Germany where decorated evergreens had been customary since the early 1600s. What Victoria and Albert did was popularize it: an 1848 illustration of the family gathered around a decorated tree in the Illustrated London News is what carried the idea into ordinary households. In the United States, Christmas trees were still uncommon until the 1840s.

Santa was assembled in print. "A Visit from St. Nicholas" appeared anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel on December 23, 1823. Clement Clarke Moore claimed authorship nearly fifteen years later, saying a friend had submitted it without his knowledge; the family of Henry Livingston Jr. claimed it for him, and because Livingston died before Moore spoke up the question has never been closed — some modern scholars favor Livingston. Moore's Santa is a tiny, soot-covered elf with a pipe who looks like a peddler. The red coat, the workshop, and the North Pole come from Thomas Nast's vignettes in Harper's Weekly, where "Merry Old Santa Claus" appeared on January 1, 1881. Coca-Cola is often said to have invented the red suit; it did not. The company was using Santa in advertising as early as the 1910s, and when it hired Haddon Sundblom in the early 1930s — his first Santa ran in 1931 — red and white were already the figure's colors.

How to observe

Read the two Santas against each other. The 1823 poem describes a pipe-smoking elf; Nast's "Merry Old Santa Claus" of January 1, 1881 is the figure on this year's wrapping paper. Fifty-eight years separate them, which is a useful thing to know about a character most people assume is ancient.

Check when your Christmas day off actually falls. Federal offices follow 5 U.S.C. 6103, and when December 25 lands on a Saturday the holiday is observed the preceding Friday. That is what happens in 2027: the federal observance is Friday, December 24.

Read the 1659 statute. The Massachusetts law library publishes it, and it is short, strange, and a better corrective to sentimentality about old-fashioned Christmases than anything written since.