Traditions of Christmas – Part Three

This week we finish up our talk about Christmas customs with looking at Christmas lights, Christmas Cards and Christmas Carols.  (This year, 2010, I have been touching on the main customs of Christmas as that is all we really have time for in the weekly messages.  If you would like to look into other Christmas Traditions, this is a very informative website: http://whychristmas.com/ . 

As we learned last week the Christmas season as we know it today with Santa Claus, a family time that is centered on children, was actually formed here in America with the input of several key folks and the bringing together of  many traditions from the old countries of Europe and the UK.  (Again I caution: These weekly messages about Christmas customs are not an attempt to say that any traditions are right or wrong. It is not an attempt to make anyone feel justified or guilty in what traditions they keep or they do not keep. It neither justifies keeping Christmas or not keeping Christmas.)   In this way we can bring knowledge and understanding to each of us.  We each can research the history of various customs that come to our interest so that we may determine and choose which customs we wish to honor, keep and teach our children. 

Christmas Lights

The use of decorative, festive lighting isn’t really based in religion at all but is a practice that is used to enhance many celebrations and crosses the customs of many nationalities and countries.  Ancient history never had the possibility of electric and solar lighting that we do today.  I know the Jewish holiday Hanukah is sometimes referred to as the Festival of Lights.   It sounded good and I looked for a connection there but didn’t find one. 

During the Christmas holiday season the use of decorative lights is a long standing tradition in many Christian cultures such as in the United States but it has also been adopted as a secular practice in a number of other non-Christian, or predominantly non-Christian, cultures such as in the country of Japan where I was born.  Displays have gotten grander and grander over the years as the strings of lights have been improved for ease of use and withstanding weather. 

Christmas lights at one time were simply candles on a Christmas tree, chosen because their twinkling appearance reminding families of the twinkling of moon light and stars through the glistening branches of frosty fir trees in the forest.  There is a legend passed down that after seeing such a beautiful sight one evening Martin Luther set up a small evergreen tree and lighted it with candles to impress on his children that Christ was the light of the world.  I thought the legend somewhat ironic but I never found such an event recorded in any of his writings.  Since Martin Luther was the famed reformer that denounced Christmas, it may never have happened at all.

The tradition of using small candles to light up the Christmas tree dates back to at least the middle of the 17th century.  However, it took two centuries for the tradition to become widely established first in Germany and soon spreading to Eastern Europe and eventually to America.  My grandmother, who grew up in Arkansas, told me the story about their school house burning down because of a fire that started with candles on a tree.  It was a poor community and the school couldn’t afford the newer candleholders that clipped onto the branches so the candles were ‘glued on’ to the branches with melted wax, the same type of wax Grandma used to pour on top her jellies.  

When Thomas Edison invented the first light bulbs in the late 1800’s, it was only a short time before people were putting them on their Christmas trees.  According to Wikipedia, the first known electrically illuminated Christmas tree was the creation of Edward H. Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison. While he was vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company he had Christmas tree light bulbs specially made and he proudly displayed his Christmas tree, which was hand-wired with 80 red, white and blue electric incandescent light bulbs the size of walnuts, on December 22, 1882 at his home on Fifth Avenue in New York City. As a result Johnson has become widely regarded as the “Father of Electric Christmas Tree Lights.”  These Christmas tree lights soon were being produced and displayed in other colors, but only for the very wealthy families, since this new product was very expensive.  In 1895, U.S. President Grover Cleveland proudly sponsored the first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White House. It was a huge specimen, featuring more than a hundred multicolored lights.

Mass production techniques soon lowered the price of these holiday decorations to the point where average families could afford them.  At the same time, the design and complexity of Christmas lights was also changing.  Instead of needing to have each light individually wired, the lights were created with spiral bases to screw into the light sockets on the Christmas tree light strings.  This made them easy enough for the average family to use and by the mid 1950’s when I was a child these lights decorated windows, doors, and even the outside of homes as well as the Christmas trees.  Soon, strings of lights adorned mantles and doorways inside homes, and ran along the rafters, roof lines, and porch railings of homes and businesses

In the United States, lights have been produced for other holidays as well.  Every year in our neighborhood we see displays of lights for the Fourth of July and Halloween.  The ones at Christmas time are the most spectacular though and even during our many years of not keeping Christmas we enjoyed driving through neighborhoods to look at the ‘fantasy of lights’.  The Christmas season is truly much brighter because of Christmas lights!

Christmas Cards

Greeting cards, whether at Christmas time or other times throughout the year, are often enhancements to other celebrations. What is used as a Christmas card today usually includes a New Year’s sentiment, a practice that dates back to ancient times before the holiday of Christmas existed.  It is believed the early Chinese were the first to send what could be called a greeting card for the New Year filled with tidings of good will. Evidence also shows that ancient Egyptians gave each other small presents and greetings written on papyrus scrolls as tokens of good luck for the coming year.  The Romans also exchanged gifts, considered good omens on the first day of January, the first day of the Roman calendar year.

Many centuries later, the invention of printing and engraving made possible a wider dissemination of such sentiments for the New Year.  While these printed cards were at first limited to wishes for the New Year, they often depicted Christ and so began to connect the Christmas and New Year festivals.  John Calcott Horsley was commissioned in 1843 to design the first published Christmas card and so England is credited in history with having created the first Christmas card.

The introduction of the postage stamp in 1840 helped the popularity of the greeting card. What was once relatively expensive, handmade, and personally-delivered gift became an effective and affordable means of personal communication. Another factor promoting advancement was the improvement of printing methods.

In the United States the custom was slower to catch on.  The person generally credited as the “father of the American Christmas card” is Louis Prang, a German immigrant. He started a lithography business near Boston in 1856 and soon his works were known as the best around. Today, almost two and a half billion Christmas cards are printed each year in the United States alone.  Seasonal greetings are an age-old custom and a lovely, warming one.

Christmas Carols

The singing of carols is the oldest of our Christmas customs. Carols were first sung in Europe thousands of years ago, but these were not Christmas Carols. They were pagan songs, sung at the Winter Solstice celebrations as people danced round stone circles. The word Carol originally signified ‘songs intermingled with dancing.’  Carols used to be written and sung during all four seasons, but only the tradition of singing them at Christmas has really survived and so ‘carols’ came to be thought of as ‘Christmas Carols.’

Early Christians took over the pagan solstice celebrations for Christmas and gave people Christian songs to sing instead of pagan ones.  St. Francis of Assisi started his Nativity Plays in Italy in 1223. The people in the plays sang songs or 'canticles' that told the story during the plays. The audiences would join in singing. These new carols spread to France, Spain, Germany and other European countries.

When Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans came to power in England in 1647, the celebration of Christmas and singing carols was stopped. However, the carols survived as people would still sing them in secret. Carols remained mainly unsung until Victorian times, when two men called William Sandys and Davis Gilbert collected lots of old Christmas music from villages in England.  Also, at this time, many orchestras and choirs were being set up in the cities of England and people wanted Christmas songs to sing, so carols once again became popular. Many new carols, such as 'Good King Wenceslas', were also written. (Wenceslas, incidentally, was an actual historical figure, a duke of Bohemia in the tenth century, said to be a good man and a good Christian.)

New caroling services were created and became popular, as did the custom of singing carols in the streets. Both of these customs are still quite popular today!

I don’t know about you but I have always loved the music (or carols) of Christmas:  oldies like ‘Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly’, “The First Noel”, and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”, “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  “Silent Night” was created in 1818 in Austria.  There have been some great carols of American origin as well: “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”, “Jingle Bells”, “We three Kings of Orient Are” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” to name a few.   I watched the movie “White Christmas” last night and listening to Bing Crosby crooning, I added “White Christmas” to my list of favorite carols as well.

This weekly message concludes my discussion of holiday traditions.  Next week I would like to follow up with a message concerning commercialism as well as other aspects of keeping Christmas.  Until then let each of us be thankful for the blessings we have been given and as God loves us, let us love others.  Blessings, Rev. Sharra