Christmas Traditions: What the Written Record Actually Shows

December 25 in a Roman almanac of 354

The almanac is the Chronography of 354. It was made for a wealthy Christian aristocrat in Rome named Valentinus and lettered by the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus. The original codex is lost, as the introduction to Roger Pearse's transcription explains. Its text survives in a ninth-century copy without pictures and in Renaissance copies of a second ninth-century copy, now also lost.

In that narrow sense the almanac belongs with the lost books of antiquity: a book known only through what later copyists made of it. Two of its lists bear on Christmas. The list of martyrs' feasts, the Depositio martyrum, begins with the December 25 entry quoted above.

Clement A. Miles noted in 1912 that the calendar seems to reuse an older document of 336. The entry may therefore be that old. English Wikipedia's article on Christmas reports that this part is generally dated to 336 by liturgical historians.

The almanac's calendar of Roman festivals marks December 25 "N·INVICTI·CM·XXX." The transcription's notes expand N as natalis, "birthday," and CM as circenses missus, "games ordered"; English Wikipedia's article on Sol Invictus gives the feast thirty chariot races. The line reads "birthday of the Unconquered: circus games, 30 races" (Translation: Where Tales Began). The same calendar puts the Saturnalia on December 17, not on the 25th.

Why December 25?

The surviving sources do not settle why Christmas was put on December 25. Miles took the Unconquered of the 354 calendar to be the sun, and in 1912 he called one explanation the view of most scholars: the church set Christ's birth against the birthday of the sun.

Louis Duchesne proposed a calculation instead. A tradition placed the Passion on March 25, and the conception was given the same date. The birth then fell nine months later, on December 25. English Wikipedia's summary of the debate sets out both views and notes that Duchesne found this belief in no early Christian text.

English Wikipedia's Christmas article notes that some Eastern Orthodox churches keep the Julian calendar for fixed feasts like this one. Their December 25 falls on January 7 in the Gregorian calendar; by this page's recomputation, the gap is 13 days in every year from 1901 to 2099. Easter, by contrast, has no fixed date. It is worked out anew each year, as the entry on how Easter is calculated shows.

The record, layer by layer

Each row below gives a first-ink date: the date of the earliest written record of a custom that can be checked. It marks where the paper evidence starts, not where the custom began. It also holds only for the sources listed at the end of this page, and how the site dates records sets out the rules. Where a record is known here only from a later summary, the table says so.

Table data: christmas-traditions-record-layers.csv, with all 19 records behind this page, their sources and links.

Herrick's poem, printed in 1648, is the earliest English text in the table, 1,294 years after the Roman list:

Come, bring with a noise, / My merry, merry boys, / The Christmas log to the firing;

Robert Herrick, "Ceremonies for Christmas," Hesperides (1648), in Alfred Pollard's 1898 edition

Christmas trees, from guild houses to Windsor

In Miles's 1912 account, the story that Martin Luther set up a candle-lit tree for his children is a legend. Miles gave the earliest historical mention as an anonymous Strasbourg note of 1605, 1,251 years after the Roman list. English Wikipedia quotes Joe Perry's Christmas in Germany (2010), which dates the same chronicle to 1604.

At Christmas, according to the note as Miles renders it in English, people there set up fir trees in their parlors. They hung them with paper roses, apples, wafers, gilt foil and sweets.

The Strasbourg preacher Johann Konrad Dannhauer complained about such trees in the mid-1600s. Neither record mentions candles. In Miles's account they appear in 1737, in a Latin work by Karl Gottfried Kissling of Wittenberg. In England, Miles noted an allusion to the tree in 1789 and dated a tree kept by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to 1840; the 1848 engraving at the top of this page shows the royal tree at Windsor.

English Wikipedia reports trees older than the Strasbourg note, though not in homes. The Brotherhood of Blackheads set them up in its guild houses in Reval (now Tallinn) and Riga in 1441, 1442, 1510 and 1514. English Wikipedia cites Friedrich Amelung's 1885 history of the guild. This page has not checked those archive entries, so the chart marks them as reported.

Whether the tree descends from older rites is a separate question. Miles called its kinship with other rites of plant life evident but judged its exact ancestry hard to pin down. He reported Alexander Tille's view that it joined Roman New Year greenery with a legend of trees blossoming on Christmas Eve. Miles thought a Roman link very possible, though he found closer parallels in folk customs with no sign of Roman or Greek influence.

English Wikipedia also summarizes a theory, held by some researchers, that the apple-hung "paradise tree" of medieval plays given on December 24 is the forerunner. None of the dated records in the chart names a pre-Christian rite.

Cards, stockings and reindeer

The reindeer reach print in 1821. The Children's Friend, a small book from the New York publisher William B. Gilley, shows "Old Santeclaus" driving a sleigh behind one reindeer over the rooftops. The copy scanned for Wikimedia Commons is in color, with Santeclaus in a red coat. English Wikipedia describes the book's eight illustrations as colored in the original.

Two years later, on December 23, 1823, the Troy Sentinel, a newspaper in Troy, New York, printed "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" without an author's name. The poem has the stockings "hung by the chimney with care" and "eight tiny rein-deer." Its newspaper text ends "Happy Christmas to all," where the 1862 illustrated edition reads "Merry Christmas to all."

Clement C. Moore was named as the author in 1837 and printed the poem in his own Poems of 1844. Henry Livingston Jr.'s family and the scholar Donald Foster have argued for Livingston instead. English Wikipedia summarizes both sides.

The poem sets the visit on Christmas Eve, but Miles, writing in 1912, gave another date in his chapter on St. Nicholas's Day. In Holland, Belgium and Tyrol, St. Nicholas called on December 5, the eve of his feast on December 6, and in Lower Austria a figure called Krampus followed him. His chapter on Christmas Eve places a visit by the saint and Ruprecht in south-western Lower Austria on that night. The entry on Krampus lays out what the dated records of these Alpine visits show.

For the Christmas card, the sources disagree on the year. The Commons record for the card John Callcott Horsley designed for Henry Cole dates it to 1843, and English Wikipedia gives the same year. Miles, writing in 1912, said the first true Christmas card seems to have been issued in 1846. He added that sending cards caught on only around 1862.

Santa's look, from Nast onward

The 1823 poem dresses St. Nicholas "all in fur, from his head to his foot" and gives him a pipe. It names no color for his clothes. Thomas Nast's "Merry Old Santa Claus" appeared in Harper's Weekly on January 1, 1881. It shows him in a fur-trimmed suit with holly in his cap, a pipe and an armful of toys, all in black and white.

English Wikipedia dates Haddon Sundblom's Santa paintings for Coca-Cola's Christmas advertising to the 1930s. It calls the story that Santa wears red and white because of the company's colors an urban legend. Puck had already printed a Santa in a red suit trimmed with white fur on its covers of December 3, 1902, and December 7, 1904. Both covers survive as Library of Congress prints, viewable on Wikimedia Commons, and both come about three decades before those ads.

Popular claims vs. the record

Each claim in the table below sits beside the dated records that bear on it. All of them come from the sources listed at the end of this page, and the chart after the table plots four of the claims on one time axis.

The mistletoe claim points to a rite that Pliny the Elder, who died in AD 79, described among the Druids of Gaul:

Clad in a white robe the priest ascends the tree, and cuts the mistletoe with a golden sickle, which is received by others in a white cloak.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 16.95, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley (1855)