5 December 2025
5 December 2025
It took a while for the world to shape Christmas into the extravagant holiday we know today. Gerry Bowler, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of Christmas, says that Christmas has been “in the crosshairs” for two thousand years, as the world has both denounced and defended the holiday. In whatever ways this holiday has manifested itself, what is certain is that the Feast of the Nativity has been marked with ritual, art, and music with an ever-expanding volume of Christmas liturgies and customs. Bowler observes that Christmas festivities were greatly diminished by Puritans, the Industrial Revolution, and Enlightenment thinkers. For example, upon learning that some of the youth from his congregation had been to a Christmas Day dance, Boston minister Cotton Mather delivered a scathing sermon in 1712. Bowler quotes the minister:
“Can you in your conscience think that our holy Saviour is honoured,” he thundered at his congregation, by Mad Mirth, long Eating, by rude Revelling; by a mass fit for none but a Saturn or a Bacchus or the Night of a Mahometan Ramadan?” Could they possibly, on the anniversary of Christ’s birth, “take the Time to Please the Hellish Legions, and to do Actions that have much more of Hell than of Heaven in them?”
The Industrial Revolution also removed many Christian feasts from its calendar, and the agricultural year surrendered to the compulsions of productivity. Workers in London increased hours of labour by forty per cent in the years between 1750-1830. An eighteenth-century miller owner in Lancashire wrote: “that we would not hire any person who would wish to be off his two days [to take part in traditional leisure]. Now the men we employ are as regular as any set of men.” Philosophers such as Voltaire and Jean-François Marmontel mocked Christian festivals. What’s more, in the eighteenth century in the Austrian Empire, Joseph II described as “the enlightened despot,” brought reforms that attacked monasticism and heavily regulated the activities of church life. His laws restricted the number of candles, prescribed the content and length of any church sermon, prohibited Nativity scenes, and banned pilgrimages to Christ Child statues.
As religious traditions became increasingly limited, Christmas celebrations were instead marred by debauchery. In some parts of the world the distribution of free alcohol had become commonplace which fuelled the chaos. In 1848 a priest in Quebec said, “This is the time of year when there is greatest dissipation, the most amusements and the greatest disorder.” The disturbance that had become familiar at Christmastime even reached these Australian shores. In Tasmania, Christmas was described “as a period of dark eyes, blood red cheeks, workers lounging about the bars recovering from bouts of dipsomania, occasionally carried off to the ‘dead house’ at the back to sober up.” In Australian goldfields in 1851, greed added to the bedlam. Frank Cusack writes: “Ballarat, Castlemaine… Forest Creek, and Melbourne, the Christmas and New Year passed in riot and disorder, and every evil thing that accompanies the too easy acquirement of wealth, abounded.”
However, Bowler notes that the reinvention of Christmas in the late nineteenth-century came through “the work of a small group of poets, artists, and writers” in New York. One such example is the work of Clement Clarke Moore who wrote poetry for his daughters, “for their amusement.” His poem “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” was published in the New York newspaper The Troy Sentinel. The story is none other than The Night Before Christmas. These fifty-six lines transported Christmas from the tavern and public square to people’s homes complete with a warm kitchen and fireplace. It was here that Christmas became the preserve of children. The Night Before Christmas also transformed Santa Claus who was historically portrayed as a saint, a chastiser, a bishop, a Dutch Gift-Bringer, and many other iterations. After Moore’s poem, though, Santa was not defined by religion nor nationality. There are plenty of other examples of artworks and novels that provide evidence for how artists’ imaginations shaped experience, tradition, and meaning making. Yet perhaps none is more prominent than Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Written in 1834, this book is filled with imagery that is the prototype of how we commemorate Christmas today. Candlelight, plum puddings, and holly all feature in the pages of this novel. A Christmas Carol is an ode to the working class, and the haunting and humbling of an insatiable old man named Scrooge.
Music too, defines the season. The soundtrack is ever evolving. German hymns are placed next to the yearning melancholic ballads of wartime Hollywood, big band fanfare, mellow self-reflection from Laurel Canyon, and choir-powered gospel harmonies Everything has bells – sleigh bells, church bells, and toy bells.
But it is undeniable that the actual Nativity is the greatest theatre of all. The story of the Christ Child born of the Virgin Mary in a stable to the heavenly anthems of a divine choir of angels is best summarised in one of the world’s oldest surviving Christmas hymns, Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, or Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming:
Lo, how a rose e’er blooming
From tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming,
As men of old have sung.
It came, a flow’ret bright,
Amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.
Isaiah ’twas foretold it,
The Rose I have in mind;
With Mary we behold it,
The virgin mother kind.
To show God’s love aright,
She bore to men a Savior,
When half spent was the night.
This Flow’r, whose fragrance tender
With sweetness fills the air,
Dispels with glorious splendor
The darkness everywhere.
True man, yet very God,
From sin and death He saves us,
And lightens every load.
This German carol, which dates back to the fifteenth century, combines Luke 1-2, Matthew 2, John 1, and Isaiah’s prophecies about the “Rose” that would bloom from the stem of Jesse, particularly Isaiah 35:2: “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” (KJV). But the lyrics also draw from folklore – “amid the cold of winter.” Even though the various translations have evolved, the musical setting remains the same. Robinson Meyer wrote in The Atlantic, that what makes Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming remarkable is the staying power of its musical setting. The harmonics of this German hymn were composed by court composer and son of a Lutheran pastor, Michael Praetorius in Germany. While the text has been translated and changed slightly, the music remains the same. Meyer writes, “Hear the song today, in church or in a mall, and you’ll almost certainly hear the exact chords Praetorius picked, in the order he picked them.” He goes on to say that the harmonics have persevered over four centuries, describing them as “text in sound.”
While these harmonics have persevered for over four centuries, the true story of Christmas has persevered even longer, despite the fact it has been its co-opted by appropriators, revellers, merchants, and powerbrokers. Images of homes, greenery, merriment, and the warmth of fireplaces and hot summers, sit against a backdrop of war, longing, death, grief, and hearts that have been frozen for a long time. This all occurs while centuries of carols, hymns, and songs provide the soundtrack. And so, Christmas with all its propaganda, ritual, heartbreak, can be a meaning-making jumble. And yet, we persevere with the holiday, a chance for the whole world to consider the real mystery and wonder of a loving God who made a home with us. As Isaiah foretold:
“Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Emmanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14)
May this truth ever capture our imaginations, but more than that, transform our lives.