Christmas

Christmas is the Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, observed on 25 December in most of the world and on 7 January by churches that follow the Julian calendar. It is one of the central feasts of the Christian liturgical year, preceded by the season of Advent and followed by Christmastide, which runs to Epiphany. Beyond its theological meaning, Christmas has become one of the most widely observed holidays on earth, shaping calendars, public holidays, art, music, family life and commerce in societies far beyond the church.

This entry traces the feast from its uncertain origins in the early Roman church through its medieval development and liturgical forms, then examines the secular customs (gift-giving, the Christmas tree, Santa Claus and greeting cards) that took shape mainly in the nineteenth century. It surveys the literature, music and visual arts that defined the holiday, the many different ways it is celebrated around the world, the periods in which it was restricted or contested, and its economic role in the modern holiday season. The discussion draws on the biblical nativity accounts, historical calendars and the cultural history of the cultural practices that developed around them.

Name, date and place in the church year

The English word Christmas comes from the Old English Crīstes mæsse, meaning "Christ's Mass". The form is recorded in 1038 in the sources, and the term first named a Christian worship service before it came to name the feast itself. Today the feast is one of the principal observances of both Western and Eastern Christianity, although the churches do not all mark it on the same date.

In the Western calendar, the feast falls on 25 December. Its liturgical season, Christmastide, runs from Christmas to Epiphany on 6 January. This twelve-day structure took shape in the late fourth century, when Eastern and Western churches adopted each other's Incarnation festival, thus establishing the 12-day celebration from Christmas to Epiphany. The preceding Advent season, a four-week period of preparation, lies outside this twelve-day span and is treated in the entry on ritual practice.

The observance has an internal structure that begins before the feast day itself. Christmas Eve, 24 December, is the vigil, and in many Western churches the first liturgy of the feast is the Midnight Mass, which traditionally begins at midnight when Christmas Eve gives way to Christmas Day. The custom has early roots: Egeria, a pilgrim from Galicia, described a midnight Christmas Eve service in Jerusalem around 381. The custom then reached Rome, where Pope Sixtus III played a key part in shaping the Roman form of Midnight Mass. Over time the day's liturgies multiplied. It became customary for priests to celebrate three distinct Masses on Christmas: at midnight, at dawn, and during the day. In recent decades, it has become common to celebrate the "midnight" Mass at an earlier time on Christmas Eve, with vigil Masses in the late afternoon and early evening, so the name now often refers to a service held at night rather than at the stroke of midnight.

Eastern dating follows a different calendar. The Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the feast on 25 December on the Julian calendar, which corresponds to 7 January on the Gregorian calendar, and the offset is expected to change in 2101. Because Christmas Eve falls on the preceding day, traditional Russian Christmas festivities start on Christmas Eve, which is celebrated on 6 January in the Gregorian reckoning. The difference arises because the Julian calendar runs 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. Some Eastern churches, including the Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian Orthodox churches, have adopted a revised Julian calendar and keep 25 December instead.

Taken together, the dating rules explain the shape of the observance: a fixed feast date, a multi-day season that closes at Epiphany, a vigil on the evening before, and a sequence of Masses that begins at night. These features are shared across traditions, but the exact dates and liturgical boundaries vary by church and calendar.

Early Christian origins and the dating of the feast

The earliest secure witness to 25 December as a Christian observance is the Chronograph of 354, a illuminated Roman almanac associated with the scribe Furius Dionysius Filocalus. It is often described as the first document to record Christmas as an annual feast on 25 December. Its martyrology entry for that day reads, in Latin, "natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae," which is the oldest reference to Jesus' birth as an annual feast day. The civil portion of the same calendar also marks the date with an entry for the birthday of the Unconquered, a point that matters for the debates discussed below.

Evidence from before 354 is more ambiguous. A commentary on Daniel attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, dated to the early third century, is sometimes cited as mentioning 25 December, but if the Chalki manuscript of Hippolytus were genuine, evidence for the December feast would exist as early as around 205. Because that attribution is disputed, the Chronograph remains the first unambiguous source for the date in Rome.

The Eastern tradition of 6 January

The Eastern churches did not begin with 25 December. Instead, a chronology attributed to the Byzantine Chronicon Paschale calculates April 6 as the date of the crucifixion, and therefore places Jesus' birth on January 6. In Egypt, a passage from the New Catholic Encyclopedia quoted by a church magazine says that Christians there first treated 6 January as the Nativity, and that the custom of commemorating the birth of the Savior on that day gradually spread until by the fourth century it was universally established in the East.

The same date also carried other meanings. In the West, the focus of 6 January shifted to the Feast of Epiphany, linked with the visit of the Magi, while in the East it was connected with Christ's baptism. The Armenian Apostolic Church has kept the nativity on 6 January, and the modern Armenian church continues to celebrate Christmas on January 6.

Western dating and the spread of 25 December

In the West, the date was reached by a different chain of reasoning. Western Christians linked Christ's death with the calendar date of 25 March and took that as the day of his conception; if Christ's conception occurred on March 25, then nine months later, on December 25, he was born. The logic of this chronology and the alternatives proposed for it are discussed in the section on debates over the origin of the date.

The shift to 25 December in the East happened later and was contested. In a sermon preached at Antioch in 386, John Chrysostom stressed that the feast was a recent import from the West and noted that it had been unknown in the city only a decade earlier. In the same sermon he argued that the date had a long tradition that began in Rome and had now become widely accepted. His statement is one of the main pieces of evidence that the Western observance was already established by the late fourth century, though it is a rhetorical argument by a preacher rather than a documentary record. The Catholic Encyclopedia account holds that the Western Church adopted 25 December at the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century, and in time the Eastern Church accepted that decision as well.

Limits of the sources

The evidence for the earliest celebrations is thin. The New Testament writers place Jesus' birth under Caesar Augustus and Herod the Great, but they do not give the day or month of his birth. As a result, the dates of 25 December and 6 January rest on later chronological arguments, church calendars and occasional sermons, many of them from after the feast was already in use. Historians therefore reconstruct the early history from a small number of fragmentary texts, and some questions, such as when the Western date first appeared and how widely it was observed before the mid-fourth century, remain open.

Debates over the origin of 25 December

No single explanation for the date of 25 December is accepted by all historians, and the evidence for each hypothesis is partial. The three main lines of argument are a calendrical calculation, a solar or solstice connection, and a link to Roman winter festivals.

Calculation from the date of conception

The explanation with the earliest attested sources depends on arithmetic rather than on any festival. Around 200, the North African writer Tertullian placed Jesus's death on 25 March, and a third-century Christian chronographer, Sextus Julius Africanus, dated the conception to the same day. Counting nine months from 25 March gives 25 December. Modern scholars note that this reasoning drew on an idea that a revered figure died on the day of conception, which French scholar Louis Duchesne proposed in the early twentieth century and American scholar Thomas Talley later developed. The 25 March date became the feast of the Annunciation. The same logic also explains the Eastern date of 6 January: Eastern Christians reckoned the crucifixion on 6 April, which produced a birth date of 6 January. Critics of this view point out that the chain of assumptions behind it, including the Passover dating, is itself contested.

Solstice and the cult of Sol Invictus

A second hypothesis links the date to the winter solstice, when the sun's light begins to lengthen again. Ancient authors did not agree on the solstice's exact day: Pliny placed it on 26 December and Columella on 23 December, while the calendar associated with Julius Caesar marked it as 25 December. Emperor Aurelian established a cult of the sun god Sol Invictus in 274, and a festival called the Natalis Invicti ("birthday of the Unconquered") appears on 25 December in the Chronograph of 354. That same document also records the birth of Christ on this date. Because the calendar does not explicitly name the sun, some scholars argue that the "Unconquered" may refer to Christ, while others see the two entries as evidence of a shared solar interest in the date. The theory that Christians borrowed the date from Sol Invictus was popularised by the nineteenth-century German scholar Hermann Usener. Historian Steven Hijmans has argued that there is no direct evidence that Aurelian's festival on this day predated the Christian observance. The earliest explicit statement that Christmas was moved to match Sol Invictus comes from a marginal note in a twelfth-century Syriac manuscript, a source written centuries after the events it describes.

Saturnalia and Roman winter festivals

A third hypothesis points to Saturnalia, a seven-day festival in late December marked by banquets and gift exchange. Its dates are debated, but many accounts place it between 17 and 23 December. Its themes were agricultural and centred on the mythical Golden Age, not the sun, and the writer Macrobius, around 431, describes an earlier single-day form falling on 19 December. Historian David Gwynn has said that most modern scholars are reluctant to accept a close connection between Saturnalia and the emergence of Christmas. Some authors have argued that the link was exaggerated in later writing.

Status of the debate

Scholars disagree about which factors, if any, were decisive. Early Christian writers offer mixed evidence. Clement of Alexandria, around 200, discussed attempts to fix the date of Jesus's birth but did not mention 25 December. Augustine of Hippo, in the early fifth century, warned his congregation to honour the Creator of the sun rather than the sun itself, which suggests that the solar association was already familiar to his audience. Many scholars regard the solstice and pagan parallels as having been emphasised by later interpreters, and some conclude that the date was selected for theological or calendrical reasons. Because the earliest sources for the Christian and the Sol Invictus dates appear in the same calendar, the sequence of their adoption cannot be established from the surviving evidence, and the question remains open.

Medieval development and spread

Once Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century, the Nativity gradually grew from a single liturgical day into a longer festive season. By the high Middle Ages, the observance combined church services with public festivity. Across medieval England, communities kept a full twelve days of holiday, in which feasting, drinking and games sat alongside regular churchgoing. In Reading and across medieval England, Christmas was celebrated with a full twelve days of holiday. This extended festival was marked by plenty of eating, drinking and playing as well as churchgoing.

The feast also became entangled with political authority. On 25 December 800, during a Mass at St Peter's Basilica in Rome, the imperial title passed to Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, in a ceremony that tied papal sanction to royal power. At Mass, on Christmas Day (December 25), when Charlemagne knelt at the altar to pray, the pope crowned him Imperator Romanorum ("Emperor of the Romans") in Saint Peter's Basilica. According to his biographer Einhard, Charlemagne had not expected the honour and would have declined it had he known in advance. According to Charlemagne's biographer, Einhard, Charlemagne had no suspicion of what was about to happen, and if informed would not have accepted the imperial crown. Whether that account is accurate remains an open question for historians. The coronation also strained relations with Constantinople, which regarded itself as the rightful successor of Rome: The Byzantine Empire, which still claimed to be Rome's true successor, saw the coronation as a challenge. Diplomatic strains followed.

In northern Europe, the relationship between Christmas and older midwinter customs is more difficult to reconstruct. The Old English word geol originally denoted Christmas Day and the surrounding season, and it is related to the Old Norse jól, the name of a pre-Christian winter feast that Christianity eventually absorbed. "the Christmas season," Middle English Yol, from Old English geol, geola "Christmas Day, Christmastide," which is cognate with Old Norse jol (plural), the name of a heathen feast, later absorbed into Christianity. However, the etymology is contested: OED (1989), however, finds this "extremely doubtful," based on "historic and phonetic difficulties." Early written evidence is also thin. The Northumbrian scholar Bede, writing in the early eighth century, records the Old English name Giuli for the months of December and January, and scholars also cite Modranecht, a pre-Christian night of mothers that fell on the same date as Christmas. The clearest surviving trace of the merger is linguistic. Father Christmas is attested in a carol attributed to Richard Smart, Rector of Plymtree (Devon) from 1435-77.

Medieval festivities also included rituals of inversion. The best known is the Feast of Fools, in which lower-ranking churchmen temporarily stepped into the positions held by their seniors. The Feast of Fools was celebrated between 26 and 28 December and involved junior clergy assuming the roles of their superiors. Other sources place the event on New Year's Day: A one-day festival of chaos at the start of the new year, the medieval Feast of Fools was traditionally celebrated on 1 January in the Middle Ages. The custom provoked official objections. Complaints are recorded from Wells, Exeter, Lincoln, Canterbury and York about the 'outrageous' behaviour of clerics during this feast. Lay revels followed a similar logic. The office of Lord of Misrule, who directed the entertainments of the Twelve Days, was revived by the first Tudor king, Henry VII (1485-1509), with a Lord of Misrule presiding over festivities during the Twelve Days. Churches and guilds also staged nativity plays, which retold the story of the birth in Bethlehem in dramatic form and helped the Gospel narrative reach lay audiences.

Liturgy, theology and religious observance

Theological basis

The feast celebrates the Christian belief in the Incarnation, the claim that God took human form in Jesus. The scriptural basis is the birth narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, which are part of the Bible. The two accounts differ in detail. Matthew centres on Joseph and the visiting magi, while Luke describes Mary, the census, and the shepherds, and the church's liturgy draws on both to build up the meaning of the Nativity.

Services and the liturgical night

The most distinctive observance is the Christmas Eve service at midnight. In many Western Christian traditions, Midnight Mass is the first liturgy of Christmastide, celebrated on the night of Christmas Eve, traditionally beginning at midnight when Christmas Eve gives way to Christmas Day. Its timing rests on a belief that Jesus was born at night. The church celebrates Mass at midnight to honor the very hour He was born. Sources disagree about its origin. One account says a Galician woman named Egeria recorded a midnight vigil in Jerusalem around 381, and Roman practice is linked to Pope Sixtus III, who began to say Christmas Mass at midnight in that grotto-like chapel in Rome. The historical record for these claims is thin, and one liturgist notes that the origin of the three Christmas Masses at midnight, dawn, and during the day is not totally certain. Over time, clergy came to celebrate three separate Masses on the feast, one at night, one at dawn, and one during the day.

Practice has also changed. Many parishes now hold the service earlier in the evening. Some churches have in recent decades scheduled their Midnight Mass as early as 7 pm in an effort to better accommodate young children. The Catholic liturgical books in English also adopted the more general term "Mass at Night" rather than insisting on midnight, which seemed to encourage moving away from the Mass specifically at midnight.

Advent and the season of waiting

Christmas is preceded by Advent, a period whose name comes from Latin, where the word "Advent" comes from the Latin word "adventus," which means "a coming, approach, arrival." Advent is a time of expectation that looks back to the birth of Christ and forward to his return. Its most common domestic symbol is the Advent wreath. Its origin is uncertain, but the best-documented form dates to 1839, when a Lutheran minister working at a mission for children created a wreath out of the wheel of a cart. Its lights were used to count down the weeks and days until Christmas. Today the wreath typically holds four candles, one for each week of Advent. Three candles are purple, and one is pink. The rose candle is lit on the third Sunday, called Gaudete Sunday. "Gaudete" means "rejoice." The four candles are often associated with hope, peace, joy and love. Advent calendars, which open a new window each day in December, serve a similar purpose for children and families.

The nativity scene

The nativity scene, or crèche, is traditionally linked to the first Christmas crib instituted by Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) in the mountain village of Greccio in central Italy. Francis reportedly arranged a live tableau in a cave near Greccio in 1223. The main source is his biographer Thomas of Celano, who recounted how Francis used a real baby, hay upon which to lay him, and an ox and an ass to complete his manger scene. Sources differ on the exact timing. One modern account says the event was late in 1223, while Franciscan sources place it on Christmas Eve. A later painting by Giotto in the Upper Church at Assisi shows the scene, and a fresco of the scene is preserved in the grotto at Greccio. The custom spread widely. The tradition of the Christmas crib spread from Greccio to all over Europe and now the whole world. Protestant churches also commemorate the event, as Francis' 1223 living nativity scene is commemorated on the calendars of the Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican liturgical calendars.

Secular customs and folk traditions

Gift-givers and their origins

Christmas gift-giving draws on several overlapping figures. The Dutch Sinterklaas, as the Dutch call him, is dressed like a bishop and brings presents, and he descends from Christian tradition about Saint Nicholas, a real 4th century Greek bishop who was known for his kindness and for putting gifts in people's socks. The English counterpart, Father Christmas, had a different origin. He began as a personification of the festival itself. Notions of 'Father Christmas' can be traced back to at least 15th century England, in a Christmas carol, and it was the English playwright Ben Jonson who popularised the idea of an old man with a long white beard in his 1616 play, Christmas, His Masque.

Until the Victorian period, Father Christmas was associated with feasting and merrymaking rather than with children. He had no particular connection with children, nor with the giving of presents, nocturnal visits, stockings, chimneys or reindeer. As later Victorian Christmases developed into child-centric family festivals, Father Christmas became a bringer of gifts. The popular American myth of Santa Claus arrived in England in the 1850s and Father Christmas started to take on Santa Claus's attributes. The two figures were then popularly regarded as the same person in many places, and the Santa Claus of the English-speaking world owes much to American writers and illustrators.

The American Santa Claus

The American image was shaped in the nineteenth century. Credit is due to two literary works, Washington Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809), a satirical take on Dutch customs in New York, and the poem 'A Visit from St. Nicholas'. Clement Clarke Moore's poem, written in the early 1820s, presented the saint not as the bishop he was in Europe, but as a merry elf with joyous spirit that was able to glide through the chimney due to his small size. Later illustrators fixed the familiar look. The cartoonist Thomas Nast established the bounds for Santa Claus' current look with an initial illustration in an 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly, and in later Nast drawings a home at the North Pole was added, as was the workshop for building toys. Accounts of the red costume vary, and the colour was not fixed in every earlier depiction; as can be seen from his green robes, the Father Christmas/Santa Claus character was not yet associated with the color red.

The Christmas tree

The decorated tree originated in Germany, where Albert was born. Sources differ on how early it reached Britain. Some accounts credit Queen Charlotte, whose family introduced her family to the tradition of decorating trees with candles, paper flowers and sweets in the 1790s, while others stress the role of Prince Albert, who wanted to keep the tradition alive for his own children. The decisive moment came in 1848. The Illustrated London News published a drawing of the royal family celebrating around a tree bedecked with ornaments. Historians note that the image spread the custom beyond the aristocracy: the upper classes had been decorating trees for some time, but this image spread the fashion to the rest of society. In the United States, early Americans largely rejected Christmas trees, considering them a pagan ritual. That began to change as German and Irish immigrants flooded the country in the mid-1800s. A decorated tree also appeared in Godey's Lady's Book in 1850, which helped popularise the image in America. Mass production then followed, and the first advertisements for tree ornaments appeared in 1853.

Christmas cards

The commercial Christmas card has a well-documented origin. On May 1, 1843 English Academic painter and illustrator John Callcott Horsley designed the first commercially produced and printed Christmas card, commissioned by English civil servant and inventor Henry Cole. Cole's motive was practical. The Penny Post had made posting cheap, and he wanted to avoid handwriting many individual messages. Why not just mass produce one message that could be sent out en masse? The design was not free of controversy: the hand-colored lithographed card, which read "A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year to You," was controversial because it included a picture of a family with a small child drinking wine together. That disturbed the UK temperance movement. The first printing was 1000 copies, and the cards became a common means of sending seasonal greetings in the following decades, a practice that printing and the postal system made possible.

Shared customs

Many other customs, including decorating homes with evergreens, holly and mistletoe, and gathering for a family meal, appear across many cultures and households. Their meanings differ widely. Evergreens and holly, for example, carry different associations in different regions and religious traditions, and the family meal may be held on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day depending on local custom.

Literature, music and visual arts

Nativity scenes have been a central subject of Western painting and sculpture since the Middle Ages. Medieval artists placed the Bethlehem birth in manuscripts, altarpieces and church reliefs, and Renaissance painters developed the subject with greater attention to architecture, perspective and emotion. Giotto's fresco of the Nativity in the Arena Chapel at Padua, painted around 1305, presents the scene with restraint and clear spatial order. Sandro Botticelli's Mystical Nativity (c. 1500) takes a more unusual route, combining the stable with angels dancing above it and an explicit note of anxiety about the times. In Italy, the elaborate presepe (nativity tableau) of Naples in the eighteenth century turned the scene into a large-scale, populated theatre of figures, and it remains a distinctive form of art tied to the feast.

Music has been equally important. Handel's oratorio "Messiah", with a text compiled by Charles Jennens, was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742, in a concert given for charitable causes. The work is divided into three parts, and only the first treats the Nativity directly; the rest moves through prophecy, the Passion and the Resurrection. Its popularity at Christmas therefore reflects later custom rather than a strictly seasonal design. The term carol derives from the Old French carole, a round dance, and early carols were dance-songs with vernacular texts before the form became associated with congregational singing. Many familiar carols came from poetry and hymnody of later centuries: Charles Wesley's words for "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" date from 1739, while "Silent Night" was first performed in 1818 in Oberndorf, with words by Joseph Mohr and a melody by Franz Xaver Gruber.

Charles Dickens's novella "A Christmas Carol" was published in December 1843 and follows the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge through a visit from his dead partner Marley and three spirits. The book was widely read and quickly adapted for the stage, and it did much to establish the image of a warm, generous and family-centred holiday that later became standard. Dickens's influence on the novel and on popular imagery is therefore considerable, though the story's moral emphasis on charity owes as much to Victorian social concern as to the liturgical calendar. In North America, Clement Clarke Moore's poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (1823) played a similar role in shaping the figure of Santa Claus.

Christmas themes have also shaped large-scale performing and screen works. Tchaikovsky's ballet "The Nutcracker" had its premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in December 1892. It was based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's tale of 1816 and on Alexandre Dumas's later adaptation, and it was not an immediate success. In the mid-twentieth century it became an annual fixture of the holiday season in North America, where it is now staged by ballet companies across the continent. The dance tradition thus carried the season into a new public ritual. On film and television, seasonal works are numerous. Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946), the animated "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965) and the comedy "Home Alone" (1990) are among the most frequently screened. Many of these works are set at Christmas without being religious in content, and this mixture of sacred origin and secular storytelling is characteristic of the holiday's cultural afterlife in film and literature alike.

Regional variation and global celebration

Across much of Europe and the Americas, Christmas is a major public holiday, but its customs differ from one region to another. Most of the variation comes from three sources: which calendar a church follows, how local religious history shaped the feast, and the season in which it falls.

Eastern churches that keep the Julian calendar date the feast differently in the Gregorian calendar. In Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church follows a Coptic-derived calendar that places the Nativity on 7 January, thirteen days after the Western Christmas of 25 December. Ethiopians call the feast Genna. Believers keep a 43-day fast called Tsome Nebiyat, during which they abstain from meat, dairy, and alcohol. On the night of 6 January, worshippers attend an all-night service that runs into the morning, and everyone receives a candle as they enter the church. The candles are then lit, and people walk around the church three times. At Lalibela, clergy stand on a cliff and in the courtyard below to symbolize the angels (on the cliff) and the herds (in the courtyard) praising the Lord. Sources disagree on one detail. A tour operator states that the Lalibela celebration moves to 8 January in leap years, while the rest of the country is always celebrating Genna on January 7th. Armenian churches traditionally mark the feast on 6 January.

In Mexico, Las Posadas runs for nine nights, from 16 to 24 December. It is designed to reenact the story of Mary and Joseph's journey to Bethlehem and search for lodging. Children take part in nightly processions, visiting homes and singing to ask whether there is room for the couple to ask if there is room for Mary and Joseph. The cycle ends with a Christmas Eve service. Its origins are traced to the Augustinian friars of San Agustín de Acolman near Mexico City, who in 1586 received papal permission from Pope Sixtus V to hold "Misas de Aguinaldo," or "Christmas bonus masses," from December 16 to December 24. Accounts differ on the starting point. One says although it began in Spain, Mexico has been celebrating it annually for more than 400 years. The question of indigenous roots is contested. Many researchers believe that the holiday was adapted from existing Aztec practices in the sixteenth century in order to make it easier for the local Aztec population to convert to Christianity. Some accounts link the timing to Aztec solstice observances, but this connection is not firmly established.

In the Philippines, the Christmas season is often described as the longest in the world. Local usage calls September through December the "ber months," the four months whose names end in "-ber." Festivities start as early as September 1, and the season is generally considered to run from September to January. The Guinness World Records has acknowledged Filipino Christmas traditions, although the claim is largely based on custom rather than a formal definition of when the season begins. The religious core remains the nine-day dawn Masses of Simbang Gabi, which run from 16 December to Christmas Eve. The COVID-19 pandemic briefly disrupted this pattern: in 2020, gatherings were banned, night-time curfews were in force, and church attendance was limited.

In Australia and other countries of the southern hemisphere, Christmas falls in midsummer, so the holiday is often marked with outdoor gatherings, barbecues and beach visits rather than the snowy scenes familiar from northern Europe and North America.

Legal restrictions and contested observance

England under the Puritan Parliament

In 1644 the English Parliament ordered that 25 December be kept as a day of fasting and humiliation rather than feasting. In June 1647 a further ordinance abolished the feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun and made their celebration an offence. The Puritan authors argued that the feast had no warrant in scripture and that its revelry encouraged sinful indulgence. They also objected to its Catholic associations, and some Puritans disliked the word "Mass" itself.

Enforcement was uneven and sometimes violent. Soldiers of the New Model Army were sent to break up church services, and in London they seized food being prepared for festive meals. Shops were ordered to stay open on 25 December, and holly, ivy and carol singing were discouraged. When the mayor of Canterbury tried to enforce the ban in 1647, most shopkeepers closed, and rioting broke out that took days to bring under control. Many households kept the holiday in private. The ban ended after the monarchy was restored in 1660, and Christmas returned as a public holiday under Charles II.

Massachusetts Bay Colony

The ban in New England was narrower and longer-lived than the English one. On 11 May 1659 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law that fined anyone observing Christmas "by forbearing of labour, feasting, or any other way" five shillings. Historians attribute the law to a mix of theology and concern about the disorderly customs of the season, such as mummers, wassailing and gambling. The fine was small, but the law stayed on the books for 22 years.

The prohibition was repealed in 1681. Accounts agree that the repeal came under pressure from the English crown, which threatened the colony's royal charter, rather than from a change of local opinion. Even after the repeal, Christmas remained a weak holiday in New England for many decades. Work and schooling often continued as normal, and the holiday was only slowly adopted there.

The federal holiday in the United States

The first federal holiday law was passed on 28 June 1870 and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant. It made New Year's Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays for federal employees in the District of Columbia. Its scope was limited. Congress extended the coverage to all federal employees in 1885, and state governments and private employers followed the precedent over time. Christmas now stands among the twelve permanent federal holidays, though its legal status as a public holiday has continued to be defined by statute rather than by religion.

Continuing debates

Disputes about how the state and public institutions should mark the holiday recur in many countries. They usually concern the display of religious symbols such as nativity scenes in public buildings, the content of school celebrations, and the rights of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and secular citizens to take part in or decline the festivities. Positions vary by country and by religious and political tradition, and the debates are reported widely in the press.

Commercialisation and economic role

Estimates of the holiday's economic weight depend on how the period and "retail" are defined. The National Retail Federation counts sales from November and December, excluding car dealers, petrol stations and restaurants, and finds that these two months have averaged about 19% of total retail sales over five years. Other compilations using different definitions report figures near 13% or 18%.

The seasonal share has also declined over the long run. Census-based figures show December accounting for 9.8% of American retail spending in 2024, compared with 11.4% in 1994, even as the monthly totals themselves reached record levels. Spending is also concentrated near the end of the season. Mastercard data indicate that the final five days before the holiday accounted for about a tenth of all holiday spending, with many shoppers responding to promotions that began around Black Friday.

Commercial activity around the feast predates the modern retail era. In Britain, the commercialisation of Christmas is generally dated to the Victorian period. In the United States, an 1806 newspaper notice from a bookseller in Salem, Massachusetts, is usually cited as the first explicit advertisement for Christmas gifts, and such notices became more frequent from the 1820s. By the 1840s, newspapers were running separate holiday advertising pages, some with images of Santa Claus. Savings schemes followed: the first Christmas Club, a bank account for saving weekly toward gifts, appeared in 1909. During the First World War, retailers and officials urged early shopping because of wartime limits on store operations. Mail-order catalogues extended the reach of this marketing, and the annual Sears Christmas catalogue became a fixture of American homes from 1933.

Mass advertising and later online retail have widened the scale of gift-giving and shifted its timing. Advertising images, such as the Santa Claus figure commissioned by Coca-Cola in 1931, helped standardise the holiday's visual language. A 2025 industry compilation projected that roughly a quarter of American holiday sales dollars would be spent online. Shopping now begins earlier and is spread across several weeks, a change that retailers have encouraged through promotions and extended sales periods.

Supporters of seasonal trade point to its economic importance. Many retailers rely on December sales for their annual results, and some economists have argued that holiday spending contributes to wider economic recovery. Historian Ruth McClelland-Nugent has argued that Christmas became popular in the United States largely through this commercial process, so that the expansion of the holiday and its marketing cannot be fully separated.

Critics have objected to commercialisation on religious and cultural grounds. According to historian Leigh Schmidt, Christian protest against the commercialisation of Christmas began in the nineteenth century and was a standard seasonal theme by the 1930s. In 1977, Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, wrote that the sharp criticism of popular Christmas practice was largely justified, while maintaining that a deeper longing for meaning persisted beneath the commercial surface. Secular critics have framed the same trend as consumerism and a broader cultural superficiality.

Defenders of gift exchange have offered different assessments. Some argue that most purchases are made for other people, so that the impulses behind commercial activity can be generous rather than merely acquisitive. Others contend that comparing shopping centres to the traders driven from the Temple in Jerusalem overlooks the economic function of retail and expresses resentment toward successful businesses. The disagreement thus rests partly on different accounts of what the holiday is for, and partly on how to measure its effects on religious practice, family life and the economy.

References

1. Church year - Christmas, Advent, Epiphanybritannica.com
2. Midnight Massen.wikipedia.org
3. Why Do Catholics Celebrate Christmas Mass at Midnight? The Beautiful History of an Ancient Traditionewtn.co.uk
4. When it comes to midnight Mass, times have changed - The Catholic Timescatholictimescolumbus.org
5. Christmas in Russiaen.wikipedia.org
6. Russian Orthodox Holidays: A Complete Calendar Guiderussianconcepts.com
7. CHRISTMASTIDE definition in American Englishcollinsdictionary.com
8. Christmasen.wikipedia.org
9. Eastern Orthodox Christmasebsco.com
10. Chronograph of 354en.wikipedia.org
11. CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Christmasnewadvent.org
12. Was Christmas moved to eclipse Rome's Saturnalia festival?nationalgeographic.com
13. Christmas: The Curious Origins of a Popular Holidayucg.org
14. NOBTS - ‘Every 25th of December’: The Dating of Christmasnobts.edu
15. How December 25 Became Christmas - Biblical Archaeology Societybiblicalarchaeology.org
16. Why Is Christmas on December 25? - Archaeologyhaaretz.com
17. John Chrysostom, Homily on the Date of Christmas 2judaism-and-rome.org
18. Why December 25? The History Behind Christmas Day - Bellator Christibellatorchristi.com
19. Sanctifying the day: How Christmas became a Christian feast - ABC Religion & Ethicsabc.net.au
20. Date of the birth of Jesusen.wikipedia.org
21. Why December 25 for Christmas? - The Good Book Blog - Biola Universitybiola.edu
22. How did December 25 become Christmas?britannica.com
23. Is Christmas a Pagan Rip-off?thegospelcoalition.org
24. Myth-Busting the Supposed Pagan Roots of Christmasbiblearchaeologyreport.com
25. Christmas & Dec. 25th: NOT Derived From Saturnalia Christmas & Dec. 25th: NOT Derived From Saturnaliapatheos.com
26. Debunking the Myth: Is Christmas Really a Repurposed Pagan Holiday?rinosapologetics.org
27. Christmas controversiesen.wikipedia.org
28. The Dies Natalis Solis Invicti: A Celebration of the Unconquered Sun in Ancient Romejensequel.com
29. A very medieval Christmas: what was Christmas like in medieval Reading?readingmuseum.org.uk
30. The Carolingian Dynasty - History Guildhistoryguild.org
31. Pope Leo IIIen.wikipedia.org
32. Charlemagne Crowned Emperor (800 CE)gertitashkomd.com
33. Yule - Etymology, Origin & Meaningetymonline.com
34. The Many Stories Behind the Origins of Yulementalfloss.com
35. The Lord of Misruleenglish-heritage.org.uk
36. The Feast of Foolssebreilly.com
37. December 25, 800: Charlemagne Receives His Crown - This Day of Historythisdayofhistory.com
38. Origins of Midnight Mass -midnightmass.com
39. Christmas Eveen.wikipedia.org
40. Advent Candles and Advent Wreaths: The History and Meaning, Colors, Symbolism, Themes, and Morehallow.com
41. The Advent Wreath and Candles Meaning and Beautiful Traditioncrosswalk.com
42. The Advent Wreath: An Inspiring Daily Practiceyoung-catholics.com
43. Saint Francis of Assisi and the first Christmas crib - CatholicTTcatholictt.org
44. Greccio: Home of the world's first Nativity scene - Wanted in Romewantedinrome.com
45. Greccioen.wikipedia.org
46. The Christmas Crèchechapel.franciscan.edu
47. Nativity sceneen.wikipedia.org
48. Pope marks 800th anniversary of Nativity scene, asks prayers for Holy Landusccb.org
49. First Week of Advent - Candle of Hope Meaningbiblestudytools.com
50. A Brief Visual History of Santa Clausattireclub.org
51. What Are the Origins of Santa Claus?thecollector.com
52. Father Christmasen.wikipedia.org
53. Santa Clausen.wikipedia.org
54. Santa Claus Imagery Through the Ages - HeadStuffheadstuff.org
55. A Pictorial History of Santa Claus — The Public Domain Reviewpublicdomainreview.org
56. Victorian Christmas traditions · V&Avam.ac.uk
57. The royal family and Christmas treesqueenvictoriaroses.co.uk
58. Christmas Tree at Windsor Castle, 1848 – #ChristmasCountdown Door no. 23blogs.ncl.ac.uk
59. What the Christmas Tree Teaches About a Flourishing Lifecommongoodmag.com
60. Christmas tree at Windsor Castle, 1848costumecocktail.com
61. The First Commercial Christmas Card is Publishedhistoryofinformation.com
62. Sir Henry Cole And The First Victorian Christmas Card.london-walking-tours.co.uk
63. The Real Santa Claus: Saint Nicholas and the Invention of Father Christmashistoryhit.com
64. Origins of Father Christmas: From England to the Worldmedium.com
65. Queen Victoria’s Christmas Treedoinghistoryinpublic.org
66. How Queen Charlotte and Queen Victoria & Albert introduced the Christmas Tree to Britain - Royal Centralroyalcentral.co.uk
67. Ethiopian Christmas (Genna) in Ethiopiaertale.com
68. Ganna, January 7 — Web-Holidays.comweb-holidays.com
69. Genna (Ethiopian Christmas) - Boundless Ethiopia - tour operatorboundlessethiopia.com
70. Las Posadas - Christian Theological Seminarycts.edu
71. Las Posadasebsco.com
72. Las Posadas: A Journey Of Faith And Traditioncalendarr.com
73. Las Posadas: A Joyous Mexican Christmas Traditionremitly.com
74. Ber Months 2026: Why Filipino Christmas Starts in Septemberremitly.com
75. Why Christmas in the Philippines Starts in Septemberlifestyleasia-onemega.com
76. Festive Filipinos trying to save Christmas from coronavirus | Inquirer Newsnewsinfo.inquirer.net
77. Las Posadas - Evening & Weekend Diversity, Equity, and Inclusionkellogg.campusgroups.com
78. Philippines: A very long Christmas seasonjohanniter.de
79. Ethiopian Christmas, Ethiopian Genna - Christmas in Ethiopiaethiopiancalendar.net
80. The war on Christmasnam.ac.uk
81. Christmas under the Puritans - Discover Your Ancestors - Explore how Oliver Cromwell's regime transformed Christmas from joy to prohibition in 17th century England.thegenealogist.co.uk
82. Why did the Puritans cancel Christmas?history.co.uk
83. When Massachusetts Banned Christmashistory.com
84. When Christmas Was Banned In Boston (Dec 67,Vol:19 Issue:1)americanheritage.com
85. Christmas Celebration Outlawedmassmoments.org
86. How the Puritans once banned Christmas in Massachusettswbur.org
87. Federal holidays in the United Statesen.wikipedia.org
88. Federal Holidays: Evolution and Current Practicescongress.gov
89. Christmas: Surprising Story of the Holiday in Americatime.com
90. Winter Holiday FAQ'snrf.com
91. Holiday Shopping Statistics by Year (2025): Sales Data & Behaviorcapitaloneshopping.com
92. holiday season retail salesstatista.com
93. Are Americans spending more during the holidays than ever before?usafacts.org
94. US retail sales rose 3.8% this holiday seasonretaildive.com
95. Consuming Christmas: a history of Yuletide advertisingthebubble.org.uk
96. The Commercialization of Christmas in American Society By: Melissa Leoneufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu
97. The Commercialization Of Christmas: A Short Historypatheos.com
98. A Visual History Of Mail Order Catalogs - Publitaspublitas.com
99. In Defense of a Commercialized Christmas - The American Interestthe-american-interest.com
100. Is Christmas too commercial? Well, that’s the reason it became popular.jagwire.augusta.edu
101. The roots of de-Christianization and the commercialization of Christmascatholicworldreport.com
102. Christmas, sacred and secularacton.org
103. Christmas 2025 Economics - Futures Trading Platform - Plus500us.plus500.com
104. Christmas Spending Statistics 2026demandsage.com
105. History As It Happens: The commercialization of Christmaswashingtontimes.com