The Stories Behind Our Easter Traditions

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and welcome to our very special Christmas episodes. And we love doing this at this time of year every year to remind everybody why we’re celebrating this season. Here’s Greg Hangler with the real story of our cherished Christmas holiday.

Ah, Christmas. Up goes the tree, and on go the lights. An exciting season of presents and parties only a Scrooge could hate. But where did all our traditions start? Why do we bring huge evergreen trees into our homes? How do we get Santa and his eight tiny reindeer? We are about to pull back the curtain to unveil the hidden history of our cherished holiday. These days, cities and towns see to be dressing up earlier and earlier for the Christmas season. And there are lights, lots and lots of lights.

Two hundred and fifty strands of lights, one hundred individual bulbs per strand, for a grand total of twenty-five thousand imported Italian twickle lights.

Twenty-five thousand.

Drumroll, please. Here’s Ace Collins, author of Stories Behind the Best Loved Songs of Christmas and Stories Behind the Great Traditions of Christmas.

Christmas trees would not be the same without Christmas lights, and yes, for hundreds of years there were Christmas trees with no lights on him. As a matter of fact, a man named Johnson, who worked for Thomas Edison, realized that there was another way to use the light bulb other than just illuminating a house. And he created a strand of multicolored lights that twinkled, ironically enough, and flashed, and put them on his tree in the last twenty years of the eighteen hundreds, and people came by from everywhere to look at this magical picture in his window of this tree with these lights. And he was such an inventor. As a matter of fact, his tree actually turned as well, so they had many, many reasons to be impressed with it. Journalists from all of the United States were sent east to report this story. What ultimately happened was people who were wealthy wanted lights. Well, it took a lot of money to buy lights. It would not be until the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties when a couple of different American companies developed very cheap lights that you could put on trees for a dollar or two, and that is when it came from being a rich person’s toy to a part of a standard American Christmas and those lights on the tree. Initially, people would put seven lights on a tree. Why seven? Because that’s all there was on a strand. Then they made strands that you could hook into each other, and they started growing to where now many people have thousands of lights on their tree.

The Christmas story is one we all know. After a rude refusal by a local innkeeper, Mary and Joseph bedded down in a barn in Bethlehem, where they gave birth to a sun, the Son of God. Those are the biblical origins of Christmas. But centuries before Jesus walked the earth, early Europeans were celebrating light and birth in the darkest days of winter. Every December, on the shortest day in the year, when the earth was tilted furthest from the sun, came the winter solstice. It marked the darkest day of the year, but also the time when the promise of longer days gave cause to celebrate. To honor the occasion, ancient Norse tribes held a twelve-day festival. Here’s the director of Nordic studies at the University of Colorado, Doctor Jackson Crawford.

Their holiday was called Yol, which also survives in the form of an English word Yule, which is cognate with the Norse word. We know that the festival contained a lot of feasting and drinking, legally, that there was a minimum amount of alcohol that had to be consumed by each free man, and whereas measurements in the sagas are not always very clear or very strictly defined, this amount, as near as I can figure, it would be about four gallons over the course of those three nights, so a pretty considerable amount, leading to the only culture I’m aware of in which you might have been pulled over by the cops for drinking too little.

Fathers and sons dragged home the biggest log they could find and set it on the fire. This Yule log burned for all twelve days of the feast, and they brought evergreens, furs, and holly into their homes. Over the centuries, the concept grew, and later it was co-opted into our modern Christmas tree custom. Today, picking out a tree as a family tradition, and in any given year, American farmers are growing three one hundred and fifteen million trees on fifteen thousand Christmas tree farms. One San Antonian couple finds theirs at Pop and Noel’s Christmas Tree Farm, which has been in business for over forty years. Here’s what they look for in a tree.

Just, we look for the shape, you know, the fullness of the tree, and we try to stay around six, seven feet to have the smell of the tree in the house. It just feels more Christmassy.

So, what does any of this have to do with the birth of Jesus two thousand years ago? After all, the Nativity, derived from the Latin word natal, which means birth, is where the story of Christmas all begins. There are two different sources from the New Testament for the Nativity. There’s the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. They tell us two different sets of things about Jesus’ birth. And what we do is we put these two stories together to get the full picture, which we call the Nativity. Here’s Archbishop Fulton Sheen with the story.

Mary and Joseph set out from the village of Nazareth for the village of Bethlehem. Mary is now with child, waiting birth. He searched for a place where he to whom heaven and earth belonged might be born. “Certainly,” thought Joseph, “and there would be room in the village inn.” The inn is the gathering place of public opinion, the rallying place of the popular and the successful. But there’s no room. And the place where the world gathered, stable. Ah, that is a place for outcasts, be ignored, and the forgotten. Shepherds, they who know they know nothing. Wise, they who know they do not know everything.

And you’re listening to the real reasons behind our Christmas season, and to merely hear Fulton Sheen on the air, what a blessing for all of us! This was a voice that Americans heard across the country. When we come back, more of the real reasons behind our Christmas season here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.

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Here’s Greg Hengel.

Matthew’s Gospel gives us the Star of Bethlehem and the wise Men, and no, contrary to popular belief, there were not three wise men. The Bible only mentions that they brought three gifts for baby Jesus: gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but the exact number of wise men is not included in the scriptures. This is the first example of Christmas gift-giving, but nowhere in the New Testament is it recorded when the birth actually happened. One of the few things that all scholars seem to agree on is that Jesus wasn’t born in wintertime. Now, I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but let me explain. The early followers of Jesus Christ weren’t concerned with marking his birthday, partially because they expected his imminent return, but this didn’t prevent early Christian scholars and present-day historians from trying to speculate when he was born. The one thing you will get from their estimates on Christ’s birth is that they all occur in the springtime, because one of the few details you’ll find in the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus Christ is that it was a time when the shepherds were with their flocks in the fields. That could not have been in December, because what we do know about the traditions of ancient Judaea is that at that time shepherds took their flocks indoors so they wouldn’t get cold at night starting in November, and they wouldn’t bring them back out again until March. So, how did Jesus end up with the birthday on December twenty-fifth? Long before Jesus was born, Romans celebrated many pagan holidays, especially in December. Here’s scholar of religion Andrew Henry.

Saturnalia is probably the most famous Roman holiday, which may have something to do with its proximity to Christmas. But what is Saturnalia? Quick summary: Saturnalia was the Roman festival of the god Saturn. It began on December seventeenth with a mass public sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, followed by several days of feasting, gambling, drinking, and most notably, the role reversal between slaves and slave owners, a holiday when slaves were encouraged to dine with their slavers, talk back to them, and even make them serve the slaves.

The second Roman party was New Year’s. It lasted five days, and it was quite enjoyable as well. And in between Saturnalia and New Year’s, there was a birthday for a Roman god, Mithras, on December twenty-fifth. So, how do we get from Mithras to Santa? Here’s Reverend Ken and Jim Rosenthal, president and founder of the Saint Nicholas Society.

The idea of Santa Claus. It comes from a long tradition, and Santa Claus was a person, a real person, and he had a real name, and his name was Nicholas. Saint Nicholas was born in a place called Patara, in what is now Turkey. At a very young age, his parents died. They happened to be very wealthy, so Nicholas was well cared for for the future. Financially, and because he had very few relatives, he was sent off to a monastery to live with his uncle, who was a priest. His whole being would be transformed. Why? Because he saw people coming to the clergy, to the monks for help. So, he was ordained to the priesthood, and he was a priest for a short time before he actually would be made a bishop. And there’s a famous story of Nicholas helping three girls who would have been sold into prostitution because their father did not have enough money for dowries for them, and Nicholas comes to the rescue. He hears about the story, and there we have the legend of the climbing up on the chimney and dropping gold in three nights consecutively, one bag of gold for each girl, as they sought to have dowries and to be married. The first night he gets away with it, he does it. It drops into the stocking hanging by the chimney. The second night, the father and the girls are so, so surprised, because now one girl was saved, and now a second girl. They wake up in the morning, and there’s another bag of gold. The father decides to stay up at night and see who this gift giver is. And sure enough, the third bag of gold goes into the stocking, and the father runs out, and he’s confronted by a man in a cape, and it’s good old Saint Nicholas. And he falls on his knees and says, “Nicholas, thank you, thank you, thank you.” And Nicholas says, “Don’t thank me, thank God, and don’t tell anybody.” He became, by legend, penniless because he gave everything away. He dies in three point forty-three in office as a bishop. It is through him that we have many of the traditions that we love at Christmastime. One: the bishop’s staff, the candy cane, something that reminds us of his role as a leader in the church. We have the gold coins—chocolate coins we get now, but in his day there are real gold coins—and he gave them to people. He becomes the figure of someone known as Santa Claus, or in certain parts of the world, Father Christmas.

After Christianity became Rome’s official religion in the fourth century, leaders chose to absorb pagan traditions rather than outlaw them.

But in a prelude to…

Those who complain that it’s such a shame we don’t celebrate Christmas the way they used to—that Christmas has been commercialized. Well, sixteen centuries ago, Archbishop Gregory of Constantinople urged that the Christmas celebration be conducted after a heavenly and not an earthly manner, and he warned his congregants against feasting to excess, dancing, and crowning the doors. Here again is Ace Collins.

One of the most interesting traditions, and I think maybe the most fascinating tradition I have found, is mistletoe, the kissing plant. How did that become a part of Christmas? The early missionaries did something that I thought was so brilliant. They took the culture that was already there and found a way to explain the Gospel to heathen people. When they got to the Vikings and the Celts, they discovered that these people looked up in trees in the wintertime, and they looked at the mistletoe plant, and they thought it was this mysterious, wonderful sense of power. Here was this green plant growing out of what looked like a dead piece of wood. Well, they were so enamored with mistletoe that they would not fight battles in force with mistletoe. It was known as the plant of peace. Well, the early missionaries looked at these plants that were green, and in Europe had both white and red berries. And as they were sharing the Gospel, they pointed to that tree and said, “See that living sprig coming out of that dead piece of wood. That represents Christ. On the cross he came down, he lived again. That green represents the everlasting life that you can receive from accepting Christ as your Savior. The white berries represent the purity of his life. The red berries represent the blood He shed for you.” When these people became Christians, they fought so much of that imagery created by these missionaries’ reinterpretation of mistletoe that they would put it over babies’ cribs to remind them of their faith, put it over their doors to signify that they were Christians. And they thought so much of it, and they wanted their young people to remember the lessons of Christ’s life and his faith so deeply that when couples got married, they got married underneath a mistletoe plant.

Well, what is…

The last thing that happens in a marriage ceremony? You kiss each other. Nowadays, we’ve lost the story, and it’s been replaced as the kissing plant.

At Christmas, the Church continued to absorb various ancient traditions. What emerged were two experiences of Christmas: one sacred and one secular. Each of these Christmases had their own music, just…

Like we have today.

Here’s historian Doctor James Palmer and Jim Rosenthal.

We have stories from the fifteenth century about people singing carols in the backs of churches and being asked to leave by the priests who thought that they were inappropriate.

They are very important. It’s like stained glass. They tell a story, and they do it in a nonjudgmental way, and so people enjoy them. They were started basically as as drinking songs and the songs that people would sing in pubs and fairs and carnivals, and many of the tunes come from those kind of traditions. But what do they say: “Hark the herald angels sing glory to the newborn King.” Charles Wesley, some of the greatest theologians of all time, give us the texts of these carols, and they’re the kind of things that we keep with us for the rest of our life. We memorize them just by nature of hearing them all the time, and they become so important to us.

And you’re listening to stories behind the stories of our Christmas traditions.

These stories continue, and…

Our special Christmas celebration here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the real reasons behind our Christmas season. Let’s pick up when we last left off. Beginning in the fifteenth century, medieval Christmas carols were gaining popularity. The holiday was establishing roots in both the sacred and the secular traditions.

Let’s continue with Greg Hangler.

But medieval caroling was not just about caroling. It was about drinking. At every door, revelers begged for a gulp from the household punch bowl, getting drunker with every note they sang. Besides singing, they could also dance or act a rude drama, mocking propriety and challenging the social order, which was a reflection of the Saturnalia holiday. But all of the celebration and merriment didn’t sit well, particularly after the Protestant Reformation. One of the hallmarks of Martin Luther’s message was to clear away from the entire church calendar all the feast days and saints’ days. Saint Nicholas Feast Day was one of the most popular on the Catholic Church calendar, perhaps because it also involved gift-giving. So, what Martin Luther suggested was this: instead of telling kids about Saint Nicholas bringing gifts, they would tell the kids that the gifts were brought by the Christ Child himself. Now, how do you say Christ’s child in Luther’s German language, “Christkindl”? Well, Luther’s attempts failed, but “Christkindl” got swallowed up by Christmas and got transformed into “Kris Kringle,” yet another endearing name for the big man in the red suit. So, why did Luther declare a war on Saint Nick? He did because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. One of the messages of the