Christmas Countdown

From Rome to the North Pole

A short history of Christmas

Updated 3 November 2026 · 6 min read

Christmas as most people know it, with the tree, the cards, Santa and the turkey, is mostly a nineteenth-century creation built on much older foundations. Here's how it came together.

Midwinter before Christmas

People were celebrating in late December long before Christianity. The Romans held Saturnalia from 17 December, a week of feasting, gift-giving and turned-around rules, when servants could be served by their masters. Across northern Europe, midwinter festivals marked the solstice, the point when days stop getting shorter. Evergreens, candles and big meals were common to many of them.

Why 25 December?

The Bible doesn't give a date for Jesus's birth. The earliest surviving record of it being celebrated on 25 December comes from a Roman calendar for the year 336. Historians have two main explanations. One is that early Christians calculated the date as nine months after 25 March, the day they believed Jesus was conceived. The other is that the church chose a date that overlapped with existing winter festivals, including a Roman feast of the sun. The two explanations aren't mutually exclusive, and the debate isn't settled.

Saint Nicholas

The figure who eventually became Santa Claus started as Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop of Myra, in what is now Turkey. He became known for quiet generosity; the best-known story has him secretly leaving gold for three poor sisters so they could marry. His feast day, 6 December, turned into a day for giving children presents in much of Europe, and the Dutch version of his name, Sinterklaas, later travelled to New York with Dutch settlers.

The Middle Ages

By the Middle Ages, Christmas in Europe was a twelve-day season running to the Epiphany on 6 January. It was loud and often rowdy: feasts, drinking, plays, and "mumming", where people in costume went from house to house. Lords were expected to feed their tenants. Many carols we still sing have medieval roots, though most popular carols are later.

Banned

That rowdiness, and the lack of a biblical basis for the date, made Christmas a target for reformers. In England, Puritans in Parliament abolished it as a holiday in the 1640s, and some shops opened deliberately on 25 December. The ban was lifted after the monarchy was restored in 1660. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, celebrating Christmas was actually an offence punishable by a fine from 1659 to 1681.

The tree

Decorated evergreen trees were a German custom by the sixteenth century, hung with apples, nuts, paper flowers and later candles. They spread slowly until December 1848, when a London newspaper printed a picture of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, who was German, and their children around a decorated tree. Within a few years, trees were fashionable across Britain and the United States.

The nineteenth-century reinvention

Much of modern Christmas was assembled in a few decades:

The twentieth century

On the Western Front in December 1914, soldiers on both sides arranged unofficial truces along parts of the line, singing carols, swapping food and, in some places, playing football in no man's land.

In 1931, workers building Rockefeller Center in New York put up a small tree on the site; the official tree-lighting tradition there began two years later. The same year, Haddon Sundblom's paintings for Coca-Cola advertising made a warm, round, red-suited Santa famous. Coca-Cola didn't invent the red suit, which was already common, but the ads fixed the look for much of the world.

Rudolph arrived in 1939, created by Robert L. May as a giveaway booklet for the department store Montgomery Ward. The song followed ten years later.

Christmas now

Today Christmas is both a religious festival and a secular holiday, celebrated in some form in most countries, including many where few people are Christian. Plenty of the traditions are recent, but the core of it, light and food and company in the middle of winter, is about as old as anything people do.