Christmas symbols

About christmas symbols

Christmas is the Christian feast of the birth of Jesus, kept on 25 December by most churches and on 6 January by the Armenian Church. These pages follow its symbols back to the oldest records we could read: the nativity scene and the Star of Bethlehem, the Advent wreath, the Christmas tree, Holly, Mistletoe, the Poinsettia and the Yule log, and the gift-bringers, St Nicholas and his dark companion Krampus, with the stocking and the candy cane. Las Posadas, the nightly processions of 16 to 24 December in Mexico, Guatemala and other parts of Latin America and the United States, as Britannica describes them, has a page of its own. Several of their origins are disputed, and each view below is given with the name of the person who holds it.

Why 25 December?

The Gospels give no date for the birth of Jesus, and early Christian writers did not keep it as a feast. The first record of 25 December is a Roman calendar of 354, which notes under that day “natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae”, Christ born in Bethlehem of Judea. The same calendar marks 25 December as “Natalis Invicti”, the birthday of the Unconquered Sun.

Two explanations are offered. In the first, the church chose the date to replace the pagan feast. C. C. Martindale, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1908, thought the solar feast had “a strong claim” to explain the date, though he rejected any origin in the Saturnalia. In the second, the date was calculated. Andrew McGowan of Yale Divinity School points out that the pagan theory is found in no ancient Christian writing; the first hint of it is a marginal note of the 12th century. Christians of the third and fourth centuries, he writes, believed that Jesus was conceived and died on the same day, 25 March, and so placed his birth nine months later. Louis Duchesne first put this case in the early 20th century. Martindale knew it, and objected that there is no evidence of a feast of the conception on 25 March in the fourth century.

Francis at Greccio

The crib goes back to one Christmas. In 1223, at Greccio, Francis of Assisi had a manger filled with hay and an ox and an ass brought in, and Mass was celebrated over it. “At Greccio there were no statues,” Pope Francis wrote in 2019; the scene was acted by everyone there. The ox and the ass are not in the Gospels. Martindale traced them to a verse of Isaiah: “Ox recognizes its owner, ass knows the way to its master’s crib.”

Evergreens, pagan or Christian

Decking houses and churches with greenery at Christmas is old in England: John Stow describes houses and churches decked “with holme, ivy, bayes”, and in 1444 a pole “nailed full of holme and ivie” stood in Cornhill. Writers have long argued over what it means. Polydore Vergil said the custom “was taken of the heathen people”. The tree itself is younger. Its first sure record is a note from Strasbourg in 1605, and the stories that put it earlier, Martin Luther under the stars or the merchants of Riga and Tallinn, rest on legend or, as the Latvian historian Gustavs Strenga says of the Baltic claim, on 19th-century historians. Clement Miles, writing in 1912, thought it might descend from Roman greenery at the January Kalends or from older sacred trees; the American Catholic bishops trace it to the tree of paradise in the medieval plays; James Lancaster of the University of Queensland calls it “completely unrelated” to pagan festivals.

The Yule log and the old year

The Yule log is the clearest case of a disputed survival. James Frazer called it the old fire festival of the winter solstice brought indoors, its customs with “their heathen origin plainly stamped upon them”. Martindale thought it was probably lit at first only because the season was cold.

How St Nicholas became Santa Claus

Of Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop of Myra, the Catholic Encyclopedia says that scarcely anything is certain except his see. His legend of secret gifts made him the bringer of children’s presents on 6 December, as he still is in the Netherlands and the Alps, where Krampus comes with him on the evening before. How he became Santa Claus is argued over. Jeroen Dewulf of the University of California, Berkeley calls the American Santa “a direct descendant” of Sinterklaas, brought by Dutch settlers; Charles W. Jones found in 1954 no evidence of the saint in New Amsterdam. Clement Clarke Moore’s poem of 1823 gave him his sleigh, his pipe and the stockings hung by the chimney, and Thomas Nast drew him from 1863.

Stories told later

Some of the best-known explanations are recent. The tale that the candy cane was shaped as a J for Jesus, white for his purity and red for his blood, is documented no earlier than the mid-20th century, according to Snopes. The story that Joel Poinsett found the poinsettia in the ravines near Taxco is, in the words of Gaceta UNAM, unverified; the Mexica knew the plant as cuetlaxóchitl long before, and Franciscans in Mexico had used it to dress their nativity scenes.