Ah, Christmas! I love it. I love the spiritual side of it, honoring the coming of Jesus. And I love the festive side, with its pre-Christian symbology, AND the modern-day incarnations of Santa Claus, classic movies, and polar bears drinking Coke.

But despite all the angry demands for a Christian Christmas, for centuries Christians never gave a thought to such a thing. Early Christians had no such observance, and seemed supremely uninterested in the geographical scenes of the Nativity.

This started to change when the Emperor Constantine’s mother saw visons telling her where the manger had stood, and where Gabriel appeared to Mary, and so on. Considering three centuries had gone by, and the country had been destroyed, depopulated, and repopulated twice, and that nobody before her seemed to care where those sites were anyhow, she couldn’t have done it WITHOUT a vision (or at least an optimistic imagination).

When Christians finally DID create Christmas, they borrowed shamelessly from pagan celebrations (holly, evergreens, candles, gifts), and set it at the darkest time of the year, RATHER THAN the time when shepherds had been abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night.

Despite what we often hear, America was not founded as a Christian country, and those new Americans who were MOST Christian despised Christmas as an unbiblical, pagan-based occasion for excess. In the Puritan colonies, Christmas was a crime. In Plymouth the Pilgrims didn’t criminalize it, they simply treated it (and its practitioners) with contempt.

In the 1700s and early 1800s, Christmas was a time when gangs of teenagers, sailors, and slaves were allowed to force their way into people’s homes to demand food, drink, and money.

Christmas in some form presumably trickled into our area when the first whites muscled in in the 1790s, but Christmas in America was mainly celebrated by German-speakers, and often overlooked by the English. It seems likely that the first Christmas tree in Steuben County went up in Dansville, Cohocton, or Wayland, where many German speakers lived. Contemporary newspapers often overlooked it, or gave it only the briefest attention.

“A Visit from St. Nicholas” captured the imagination once it was published in 1823. Queen Victoria’s German husband brought in Christmas customs wholesale after their marriage in 1839, and the thing became stylish. Dickens sealed the deal with A Christmas Carol in 1843. Letters show that many folks were celebrating, at least in a small way (and especially aimed at children), during the Civil War. Cartoonist Thomas Nast created Santa Claus as we know him, complete with his huge living, manufacturing, and distribution complex at the North Pole.

So Christmas was part of the local scene by the late 1800s, although for most people it was still a regular work day well into the 20th century. In 1901 the Hammondsport weekly newspaper started running Christmas ads the day before Thanksgiving, and the holiday was already thoroughly commercialized. Toys and children’s gifts were touted, but so were shoes, ranges, and buggy whips. (“Santa Claus is a practical old fellow.”)

In 1913, Frank Burnside flew Santa from Bath to Corning, with a stop for repairs in Campbell.

Christmas 1918 must have been very confusing. The Great War had ended in November, but the boys still weren’t home, and many never would be, and others would never be the same. The Spanish influenza, which had killed millions, still lingered. Prohibition was running the wineries and grape growers. War workers were out of jobs, farm prices collapsed.

We still weren’t recovered when the Great Depression came, and then the catastrophe of Pearl Harbor. But scarcely two weeks later President Roosevelt lighted the National Christmas Tree. “Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” said Winston Churchill. “Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grownups share to the full in their unstinted pleasure.”

I look at a lot of one-room school photographs, and I’m always impressed at how well the children are dressed by the time the war ends in 1945, compared with how they dressed earlier. Better times made Christmas a bigger celebration. Captain Kangaroo hosted the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade on CBS, joined by Santa Claus for dinner at the Treasure House.

In 1962 came the first animated Christmas special, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. The following year was another confused holiday, as Thanksgiving and Christmas followed hard on the heels of President Kennedy’s funeral. A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in 1965.

Christmas is what you make of it – or don’t make of it. For a couple of years in Virginia we belonged to a church that discouraged celebrating Christmas, as an unbiblical holiday. It certainly SHOULDN’T be a club to hit people with! But ever since it was created it’s been LIVING (and so changing), not frozen. It’s always been a work in progress, ever in flux, pagan, Christian, and secular. Whichever tack you take, feel free. I hope you and yours enjoy it well.