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t’s the Christmas season again, and
before we get sick of the eggnog,
fruitcake, and Christmas music played ad
nauseum, we get to enjoy it for a couple
weeks. But have you ever wondered where
some of our weird Christmas traditions
come from? I mean, we tell our kids that
a fat man is coming into our house at
night; we bring in trees in to shed all over
the carpet; and we kiss under parasitic
plants – all in the holiday spirit. How the
hell are these even related to Jesus, whose
birthday we’re supposed to be celebrating?
Well, sit
back, pull in some eggnog
and
gingerbread, and take a
ride
on the 10 Remark-
able
Origins of Common
Christmas Tradi-
tions.
Christ-
mas
Christ-
mas,
as
most
of us
know,
is the
Christian
tradition
honoring
the birth of
Christ –
though it
is not celebrated solely as such in our
modern society. To us, Christmas repre-
sents a time of joy, gift-giving, and family.
Christmas as we know it evolved out
of the Roman tradition of Saturnalia, a
festival honoring their god of agriculture,
Saturn, on the winter solstice. Due to the
already-rampant celebration taking place
on the date and the revering of light and
the sun, it was a natural development to
celebrate the birth of Christ on the same
date. Many Roman writers give references
to the date of December 25th and Christi-
anity between the 2nd and 3rd centuries,
and it is believed that the holiday was
widely celebrated by Christians by the
turn of the 4th century. Though Christmas
is celebrated as the birth of Jesus Christ,
we don’t know the exact date, or even the
year of his birth.
Gift Giving
It is sometimes said that the tradition of
gift-giving started with the 3 wise men,
who visited Jesus and gave him gifts of
myrrh, frankincense, and gold. If you want
to start a Christmas tradition, I suppose
the first Christmas would be a good date
to start. As with many other entries on this
list though, the true origin of gift-giving
lies in Pagan beliefs. During Saturnalia,
children would often be given gifts of
wax dolls – an act with a rather maca-
bre history itself; the dolls were used to
represent human sacrifices that Rome had
given to Saturn in the past as payment for
good harvests. Boughs of certain trees and
other plant matter were also a common
gifts during Saturnalia, and were used to
represent bounty and good harvests.
X-mas
While some rather ignorant groups in the
Americas believe that the abbreviation “x-
mas” is an attempt by the “dirty liberals”
to “keep the Christ out of Christmas”, the
true origins have a strong basis in Chris-
tianity. In the abbreviation, the X stands
for the Greek letter Chi, the first letter of
the Greek word for
Christ. Jesus’
name has also
been abbrevi-
ated as XP, a
combina-
tion of
the
first
and
sec-
ond
letters
of the
Greek word
for Christ.
From XP
comes the laba-
rum, a holy symbol
in Orthodox Christianity that
represents Jesus. The term X-
mas has been used since the
16th century, though it gained
prominent usage in the
18th and 19th centuries.
In the modern world,
X has been taken to be
used as an abbrevia-
tion for any word with
Christ or the “krys”
sound in
it, even
in words
which have
no ety-
mological
connec-