Where Do American Christmas Traditions Come From?

A brief history, including evergreen trees, presents, and Santa Claus.

4 MIN READ

Dec 24, 2021

Each season, the celebration of Christmas has religious leaders and conservatives publicly complaining about the and the growing lack of Christian sentiment. Many people seem to believe that there was once a way to celebrate the birth of Christ in .

Such perceptions about Christmas celebrations have, however, little basis in history. As a scholar of , I have studied the emergence of Christmas celebrations in German towns around 1800 and the .

While Europeans participated in church services and religious ceremonies to celebrate the birth of Jesus for centuries, they did not commemorate it as we do today. Christmas trees and gift-giving on Dec. 24 in Germany did not spread to other European Christian cultures until the end of the 18th century and did not come to North America until the 1830s.

Charles Haynes Haswell, an engineer and chronicler of everyday life in New York City, wrote in his that in the 1830s German families living in Brooklyn dressed up Christmas trees with lights and ornaments. Haswell was so curious about this novel custom that he went to Brooklyn on a very stormy and wet night just to see these Christmas trees through the windows of private homes.

The First Christmas Trees in Germany

Only in the late 1790s did the custom of putting up a Christmas tree decorated with wax candles and ornaments and exchanging gifts emerge in Germany. This new holiday practice was completely outside and independent of Christian religious practices.

The idea of putting wax candles on an evergreen was inspired by the pagan tradition of celebrating the winter solstice with bonfires on Dec. 21. These bonfires on the darkest day of the year were intended to . The lit Christmas tree was essentially a domesticated version of these bonfires.

A Christmas tree lit in Hamburg, Germany.

The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave the first description of a decorated Christmas tree in a German household when he reported in 1799 about having seen such a tree in a . In 1816, German poet E. T. A. Hoffmann published his famous story 鈥�.鈥� This story contains the first literary record of a Christmas tree decorated with apples, sweets, and lights.

From the onset, all family members, including children, were expected to participate in the gift-giving. Gifts were not brought by a mystical figure, but openly exchanged among family members鈥�.

From German Roots to American Soil

American visitors to Germany in the first half of the 19th century realized the potential of this celebration for nation building. In 1835, Harvard professor was the first American to observe and participate in this type of Christmas celebration and to . That year, Ticknor and his 12-year-old daughter, Anna, joined the family of Count von Ungern-Sternberg in Dresden for a memorable Christmas celebration.

Other American visitors to Germany鈥攕uch as Charles Loring Brace, who witnessed a Christmas celebration in Berlin nearly 20 years later鈥攃onsidered it a聽.

For both Ticknor and Brace, this holiday tradition provided the emotional glue that could bring families and members of a nation together. In 1843, Ticknor invited several prominent friends to join him in a Christmas celebration with a Christmas tree and gift-giving in his Boston home.

Ticknor鈥檚 holiday party was not the first Christmas celebration in the United States that featured a Christmas tree. However, it was Ticknor鈥檚 social influence that secured the spread and social acceptance of the alien custom to put up a Christmas tree and to exchange gifts in American society.

The Introduction of Santa Claus

For most of the 19th century, the celebration of Christmas with Christmas trees and gift-giving . Most Americans remained skeptical about this new custom. Some felt they had to choose between older English customs, such as hanging stockings for presents on the fireplace, and the Christmas tree as the proper space for placing gifts. It was also hard to find the necessary ingredients for this German custom. Christmas tree farms first had to be created. And ornaments needed to be produced.

The most significant steps toward integrating Christmas into popular American culture came in the context of the American Civil War. In January 1863, Harper鈥檚 Weekly . This image, which was produced by the German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast, represents the first image of Santa Claus.

In the following years, Nast developed the image of Santa Claus into the jolly old man with a big belly and long, white beard as we know it today. In 1866, Nast produced 鈥�,鈥� an elaborate drawing of Santa Claus鈥� tasks, from making gifts to recording children鈥檚 behavior. This sketch also introduced the idea that Santa Claus traveled in a sledge drawn by reindeer.

Declaring Christmas a federal holiday and putting up the first Christmas tree in the White House marked the final steps in making Christmas an American holiday. that turned Christmas Day, New Year鈥檚 Day, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving Day into holidays for federal employees.

And in December 1889, President Benjamin Harrison of setting up a Christmas tree at the White House.

Christmas had finally become an American holiday tradition.

This article was originally published by . It is published here under a Creative Commons license.

Thomas Adam is an associate professor of International and Global Studies at the University of Arkansas.