STILLWATER OKLAHOMA MAGAZINE / 12
THE HISTORY OF
Christmas
When it comes to Christmas what comes to someone’ s home likely depends on the traditions one grew up with.
by ALISA BOSWELL
When it comes to Christmas what comes to someone’ s home likely depends on the traditions one grew up with. As Matthew Pereira, teaching associate professor of history at Oklahoma State University, says, Christmas did not begin in one moment as exactly what it is today.
“ It’ s a historical layering of Christian theology and Roman and European seasonal customs meshed together with medieval saint traditions, folklore and family practices,” Pereira said.“ It took time for us to arrive at the kind of consumer culture Christmas that we know today. It evolved through a historical mix of Roman festivals, pagan winter customs, Christian theology and modern traditions.”
According to Pereira, Christmas first became a holiday sometime in the 330s AD, when Emperor Constantine Christianized the Roman Empire, with the holiday coinciding with the winter solstice and the Roman festival of Saturnalia. The precise origins of Dec. 25 as the day of celebration remain a mystery, according to the Library of Congress.
But the history of how the holiday we all know and love came to be what it is today is so much more complex than that.
Taken from historical scholarship, Library of Congress and Smithsonian collections, and the work of historians including Stephen Nissenbaum, Penne L. Restad and Judith Flanders, here’ s a glimpse at the historical timeline of Christmas and its tame and terrifying towering figures.
1st- 3rd CENTURIES
The earliest Christians did not initially celebrate Jesus Christ’ s birth as an annual holiday. The central Christian celebration was Easter, but there were numerous winter festivals and customs throughout the Roman Empire and northern Europe that entailed feasts, gift-giving, greenery, public celebrations and religious observances.
Saint Nicholas was a Christian bishop in what is now called Turkey. Very little is known about his life, but what is clear is that he became associated with charity, children and gift-giving.
“ In some traditional storytelling, St. Nicholas was mistreated and imprisoned under the rule of Roman emperor Diocletian from 303 to 311, but he became a bishop after Constantine enforced the tolerance of Christianity,” Pereira said.“ In Turkey, he was known as an anonymous gift-giver. In one of the famous folklore stories, a father could not afford to pay a dowry for his three daughters, so for three nights in a row, St. Nicholas put gold coins into a stocking in the window.”
4th – 6th CENTURIES
By the 4th century, Christians in Rome were celebrating-
STILLWATER OKLAHOMA MAGAZINE / 12