Christmas Festivities

Christmas, the annual festival of Christ s birth Day falls on December 25 and celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem as recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is, after Easter, the most important feast in the church s year. Since the Gospels make no mention of dates, it is not certain that Christ was born on this day. In fact, Christmas Day did not officially come into being until 354 when Pope Gregory proclaimed December 25 as the date of the Nativity. In doing so, he was following the early church s policy of absorbing rather than repressing existing pagan rites which, since early times had celebrated the whinter soltice and the coming of spring. The pagan festival most closely associated with the new Christmas was the Roman Saturnalia, which honoured the god of the harvest, Saturn, on December 19 and was marked by seven days of riotous marrymaking and feasting. At the same time in northern Europe a similar winter festival known as Yule was celebrated in which giant logs, trimmed with greenery and ribbons, were burnt in honour of gods and encourage the sun to shine more brightly. Having incorporated these elements, the Christian church subsequently added, in the Middle Ages, the Nativity crib and Christmas carols to its customs. By this time lavish feasting was the highlight of the festivities with large quantities of food, including a decorated boar s head, ceremoniously consumed over eight or nine hours by rich and poor alike. All this came to an abrupt end in Britain at least when in 1552 the Puritans banned Christmas, a move followed in Massachusetts seven years later. Although Christmas returned to England in 1660 with Charles II, the rituals all but died out until revived in Victorian times. Christmas as we know it today is thus a 19th-century invention. The decorated Christmas tree, common in German countries for centuries, was introduced to Britain by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria s Consort. Carols were revived and many new ones written, often to traditional melodies. The custom of carol-singing, although with ancient origins, dates mainly from the 19th century. Christmas crackers were invented in the late 19th century by an enterprising English baker, Tom Smith, eho, by 1900, was selling 13 million worldwide each year, and Christmas cards only became commonplace in the 1870s, although the first one was produced in London in 1846. The familiar image of Santa Claus, complete with sled, reindeers, and sack of toys, is an American invention ehich first appeared in a drawing by Thomas Nast in Harper s Magazine in 1868, although the legend of Father Christmas is ancient and complex, being partly derived from St. Nicholas and a jovial medieval figure, the spirit of Christmas. In Russia, he traditionally carries a pink piglet under his arm. Today, Christmas is as much a secular festival as a religious one. It is a time of great commercial activity ...