Christmas

CHRISTMAS is the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. The name, English in origin, means "Christ's Mass," that is, the mass celebrating the feast of Christ's nativity. Names for Christmas in Romance languages are derived from the Latin nativitas. The French Noël comes from either nativitas or nowell, meaning "news." German employs the term Weihnachten, meaning "holy (or blessed) night." Another name for the whole season is Yule. Originally this name did not have Christian connotations but derived either from the Germanic jol ("turning wheel"), with reference to the gain of sunlight after the winter solstice, or from the Anglo-Saxon geol ("feast"). The name of this pre-Christian winter feast of the solstice was eventually applied to the whole of the Christmas season.

There is no certain knowledge of the origin of the Christmas feast. It may have been celebrated as early as the beginning of the fourth century in North Africa, but certainly it was observed at Rome by the middle of the same century. Two theories have been advanced for the occurrence of the feast on December 25. One theory argues that Christmas originated in opposition to or competition with the Roman Feast of the Invincible Sun (Sol Invictus) that had been celebrated on the old date of the winter solstice. The computation theory, on the other hand, argues that the birth of Christ was calculated on the basis of the idea that the conception of Christ coincided with his death, which supposedly occurred on March 25.

By the end of the fourth century the observance on December 25 of the feast of Christ's nativity had spread throughout most of the Christian world. At Antioch, Chrysostom regarded it as the actual date of Christ's birth. In the mid-fifth century the Jerusalem church, too, accepted the December 25 date, which then replaced the older celebration of the nativity there on January 6. The Armenians, however, have never accepted December 25 as the Feast of the Na-tivity.

The Western Christian observance of Christmas was strongly influenced by the celebration of this feast in the city of Rome. Three masses came to be celebrated by the pope on Christmas Day. The original mass was held at Saint Peter's on Christmas morning. But in the course of the fifth century a second mass was added "in the middle of the night" (first at cockcrow and later at midnight) at the shrine of Christ's crib, which had been erected at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore as a replica of the crib at Bethlehem. Finally, during the Byzantine period of the sixth century a third mass was added in Rome, this one at dawn at the Church of Sant' Anastasia, a martyr whose feast was celebrated in Constantinople on December 25. Probably for the sake of convenience, in the course of the eleventh century the original mass celebrated at Saint Peter's was transferred to Santa Maria Maggiore, already the site of the second mass. Since the eighth century the Western Christian celebration of Christmas has been provided with an octave, or eight days of liturgical observance, in imitation of the feasts of Easter and Epiphany.

In the early sixth century the emperor Justinian made Christmas a public holiday. The feast was extremely popular in all European countries during the Middle Ages, inspiring the composition of music and liturgical drama. The observance of Christmas received added impetus in the early thirteenth century when Francis of Assisi originated the devotion of the Christmas crib.

After the sixteenth century most of the Reformation churches retained the Christmas feast. Martin Luther, for example, showed great devotion to Christmas in his preaching. However, the English Puritans tried to do away with the celebration of Christmas altogether in the course of the seventeenth century. The feast was revived with the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, but on a somewhat more secular basis. Under the Puritan influence in early America, especially in New England, Christmas was a regular workday until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The customs of Christmas in the Northern Hemisphere include, in addition to Christian religious practices and midwinter feasting, various celebrations of the returning light of the sun. In northern European folklore, the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany are a time when the evil spirits are considered to be especially active, combating the coming of spring and the gradual victory of sunlight over darkness that follows the winter solstice; thus Christmas Eve is called there "the devil's funeral." To celebrate the victory of life over winter's death and to combat evil spirits, homes are decorated in this darkest period of the year with lights and evergreens of all kinds. Similarly, the Yule log was kindled on Christmas Eve in northern countries and kept burning until Epiphany, and remains of the log were kept to kindle the next year's Yule fire. The Christmas tree itself seems to be of rather recent origin: it may be as late as the sixteenth century that Germans first decorated a fir tree with lights, fruits, and tinsel. From Germany the custom spread quickly and became universally popular, even in the Southern Hemisphere.

The custom of sending special greeting cards at Christmas originated in nineteenth-century England. Giving gifts at Christmas probably originated with the pagan Roman custom of exchanging gifts (strenae) at the New Year. The popular gift bringer, Santa Claus, is an American invention; he combines features of the traditional children's saint, Nicholas of Myra, with some elements of the Germanic fire god, Thor, who fought the giants of ice and snow from his home in the polar regions.

Other customs of the Christmas season include the baking of special foods, the cooking of poultry dinners on Christmas Day, and the singing of special songs, notably carols, a species of simple song that originally had wider application than as Christmas music. The celebration of Christmas thus includes both Christian observances and wider folkloric customs, the latter relating to general festivity at the time of the winter solstice.

Gift Giving; Sol Invictus; Winter Solstice Songs.

For a complete bibliography, see Sue Samuelson's Christmas: An Annotated Bibliography of Analytical Scholarship (New York, 1982). The most comprehensive treatment of the history of the Christmas celebration is still Hermann Usener's Das Weihnachtsfest (Bonn, 1889). For a survey of the liturgical development of the feast, see Ildephonso Schuster's The Sacramentary (New York, 1924). A good treatment of the customs associated with Christmas may be found in Francis X. Weiser's Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs (New York, 1958), as well as in the same author's The Christmas Book (New York, 1952). For a treatment of the feast from the perspective of the history of religions, see E. O. James's Seasonal Feasts and Festivals (New York, 1961).