This is divided into sections to make my (and your) life a little easier. You can skip around to whatever intrigues you most.

  1. The history of the holiday
  2. The history of Santa Claus
  3. The brief history of the Christmas tree
  4. Other

The holiday

2023 years ago little baby Jesus was born, and that was the start of everything. The first recorded Christmas was a celebration of Christ's birth in Rome on the year 336, and I'm not sure exactly when the word "Christmas" started being used but as for the etymology of it..


The romans wanted to use Christianity and specially Christmas to help unify their empire; Christianity was made the state religion and they did everything to push the holiday, and the most significant way they did this is... With the date they chose.
Nothing in the bible really supports Jesus Christ being born on December 25th. In fact, they never say his date of birth, so they had to get a little silly with it. There's a bunch of hypotheses on how the date was chose but in my opinion the one that's most likely is that they chose it to coincide and potentially overtake pagan holidays happening around the same time of year, such as the winter solstice; a holiday that occurs on the shortest day of the year and marks when the days will start lenghtening again, also celebrating the symbolic death and rebirth of the Sun. And the funniest thing, they pretty much DID replace the winter solstice!

There was some outrage from non-christians, but since they kept the festivals about the same and they could still eat and drink and celebrate plenty, they didn't care all that much that they were now celebrating Jesus being a birthday boy. They did the same thing with Yule and Saturnalia during the Christianisation of the Germanic peoples, and that's how Christmas spread and took aspects of other holidays to create what we know it as. That's still not the full story, though! Christmas spread more throughout the world but still not as popular of a holiday as it is now, until around the 17th century it actually started being prosecuted and even outlawed by puritans (specially in England, but in many parts of the world, by non-christians too in some cases) for not being based in Scripture and being 'unholy', all about indulging in gluttony and partaking in alcohol and general secular activities. It was not only until the Victorian era that Christmas started to resemble what it is now and gain some fame, since the royal family celebrated it, another thing in the victorian era that popularized Christmas was Charles Dickens' novel "A Christmas Carol", that was instantly loved and helped emphasize Christmas as a holiday about goodwill and family. It also has probably a billion trillion christmasillion adaptations and parodies by this point. Christmas gained lots of steam with the introduction of mass manufacturing, as consumerism goes along well with a marketable gift-giving holiday, of course. And that's about when we reach the modern day rendition of Christmas that we all know and love.


Santa Claus

While reading the previous section you might've thought, "Okay, when does Santa come in?"
And I am here to quench your Santa Claus thirst. I decided to make it a seperate section because it's kind of weird and convoluted, and I wanted to skip around in the timeline as least as possible.

The concept of a Christmas gift-giver is something that independently happened in many different places, and Santa Claus is sort of an amalgamation of all of those guys. But the earliest inspiration to Santa Claus is, of course, Saint Nicholas. Or more specifically St. Nicholas of Myra (sometimes called St. Nicholas the Wonderworker) as just "St. Nicholas" has become a sort of mythical figure, only based on the real St. Nicholas of Myra and more akin to Santa Claus. But anyway. St. Nicholas was an early Christian bishop that resided in what would now be Turkey, and during the time of the Roman empire. Not that much is known about real life St. Nicholas, but the most popular (and earliest told) story from him was that he rescued three girls from being forced into prostitution by secretly leaving them bags of gold (put in through the window in their house) so their father could pay a dowry for each of them. He was known for giving to the poor and for secretly leaving gifts to people, which would soon influence Santa Claus. The two other Christmas gift-givers that influenced Santa the most were Father Christmas and Sinterklaas (Sinterklaas mostly just gave Santa Claus his name, so I won't talk in-depth about him). Father Christmas was a personification of Christmas that had it's origins in pre-Christian winter celebrations (such as the aforementioned Yule and winter solstice) and he also was associated with and resembled Odin, the leader of the Wild Hunt (a folklore motif that's basically a chase by a mythological figure escorted by a spirit/ghost? Idk. It's so complicated) during the time of Yule.

Rendition of Father Christmas from 1848.


Father Christmas soon got associated with St. Nicholas, and that's where Santa Claus was born.
But some other notable Christmas gift-givers are Christkindl/Christkind (depicted as a child, usually with angelic elements, that is supposed to represent baby Jesus) and Father Frost/Ded Moroz (Uhh santa. but, blue). What really cemented the current look of Santa Claus were the Christmas Coca-Cola ads from the 1930s, although the factoid that Santa was a different color before Coca-Cola made him red is misleading, as there were many interpretations of Santa with red clothing before that.


The Christmas Tree

This will be shorter, I promise. During the winter time, some pagans would put evergreen trees in their homes during Saturnalia to remind them of the summertime, and possibly also because evergreen plants are considered sacred in some pagan belief systems. With Christmas taking over pagan holidays, people started to decorate their evergreen trees with Christian elements such as apples (to represent the garden of Eden), candles to illuminate the tree, white wafers (to represent the Eucharist and redemption), and others. The modern Christmas tree took shape around the rennaisance, with the apples being switched to ornaments. With electricity, the candles were changed to lights, and we started decorating them with tinsel and other extra bits and bobs - I'm not completely sure about when the practice of the Christmas topper was introduced though, but it also has Christian roots with the star topper representing the Star of Bethlehem that led the three wise men to baby Jesus, and the sometimes used angel topper representing Gabriel.


Other stuff

Here is some old Christmas advertisements from around the 1940s I found