Merry Christmas, celebrants! Did you know Christmas, or at least important aspects of it, comes from the Romans? As far as we know, Christmas was celebrated for the first time ever in the year 336. According to an ancient document called the Chronograph of 354, it happened in Rome on December 25, which was the traditional celebration in Rome of the winter solstice — so maybe it was a way to take an existing celebration and sort of repurpose it. Some of the theologians of that era justified it by connecting the lengthening of daylight hours after the solstice to the metaphorical light brought to the world by Christ. This also meshed with Roman traditions; the December 25 festivities honored their god of the sun, Sol Invictus.

But despite the metaphorical support, celebrating Christmas didn’t persist, and for the next few centuries. It wasn’t until the year 800, when Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans on December 25. His crowning was, by the way, quite literal; Pope Leo III placed a jeweled crown on Charlemagne’s head during Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica. That added another reason for celebration and feasting, and people took advantage of it. It also influenced later monarchs, at least in the British Isles; King Edmund the Martyr, who ruled East Anglia, was crowned on the same day in 855, and King William I followed suit in 1066. Sweyn Forkbeard was definitely not interested in Christmas — in fact he was known for persecuting Christians — but in 1013 he, too, became King of England on December 25. As an aside, Sweyn is also known for being the son of Harald Bluetooth, the King of Denmark between 958 and 986 and the namesake of the Bluetooth wireless communication protocol, which might be featured in quite a few of today’s gifts.

Christmas merrymaking got a bit out of hand…

Speaking of England, Christmas stuck around as a holiday marked by a feast until the 1500s. It did not, in those days, include gift-giving. That happened on New Year’s Day. Over the years, though, Christmas merrymaking got a bit out of hand, giving the holiday a bad reputation for drunkenness, gambling, and promiscuity. When the Puritan movement arose around midcentury, they disapproved of Christmas because of the wanton behavior associated with it. They eventually banned it entirely.

The ban on Christmas in England was revoked in 1660, restoring the date as a legal holiday. It kept its rather questionable reputation, though. About 150 years later there was a movement in the Church of England to mildly reform the Anglican traditions into more purely religious practices, including “the revival and increasing centrality of the keeping of Christmas itself as a Christian festival.” Most of the movers and shakers of this effort were from Oxford College, so it became known as the Oxford Movement. That was the environment in which Charles Dickens started writing about the Christmas we’re more familiar with today, placing at the center things like gift exchanges, family, and at least lip service given to peace and tranquility. But Dickens wasn’t exactly describing the practice of Christmas in his time — he was inventing it for our time. It even appears that he came up with — or at least popularized — the phrase “Merry Christmas.”

Dickens’ best-known Christmas story is, of course, A Christmas Carol. It was first published on December 19, 1843, and sold out by December 24. Thirteen editions followed in the next year alone, and the book has never been out of print since. Readings of A Christmas Carol are still popular as well; that was also begun by Dickens himself. The tradition has been continued by countless people, not least by Gerald Dickens, Charles’ great great grandson, who bases his performances on some of Charles’ original annotations.

Not every modern Christmas tradition was started by A Christmas Carol — for one thing, it contains no mention of Christmas cards. The first Christmas card predates the book by a long stretch, though; it was sent by Michael Maier, a German physician, to James I of England in 1611. That one was just a hand-made personal greeting, although it did include the essential elements: words and illustrations. The first commercial Christmas card was commissioned, by coincidence, the same year A Christmas Carol was published: 1843. The man commissioning the work was Sir Henry Cole, who had (perhaps not coincidentally) introduced a postal service, the “Penny Post”, to the UK in 1840.

That first card was designed by John Horsley, and featured a convivial rather than religious theme. Here it is:

Christmas cards were the impetus for the creation of one of their signature sources today: Hallmark. The company was founded in 1913 by the brothers Joyce and Rollie Hall. Initially the company marketed the brothers’ homemade Christmas cards, but was quickly successful and expanded — and in 1917 introduced “wrapping paper”. They created wrapping paper out of necessity; the stationery store they owned ran out of colored tissue paper, which was the traditional material used for wrapping gifts, so they substituted some fancy French paper they had that was used to line envelopes. The wrapping paper was a success too, and they started printing their own a year or two later.

Wait, are those icebergs?

Not everything that’s happened on December 25 has been about Christmas, of course. In 1776 the Continental Army led by George Washington conducted their famous crossing of the Delaware River to attack the Hessian troops occupying Trenton, New Jersey. There’s a famous painting of the crossing by Emanuel Leutze. You’ve almost certainly seen it before:

But take another look at it now: those are icebergs. In the Delaware River. You don’t see icebergs in that river nowadays. And for that matter, some of the scenes in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol feature bitter cold and even enough snow for sledding. In London — also not something you’d generally find today. The answer is probably that it was significantly colder back then, particularly in the North Atlantic region (both on the west, where the US is, and the east, where you’ll find England. It was the “Little Ice Age”, which lasted from about 1300 to about 1850. Nobody is really sure why temperatures were lower at the time, but there are several working theories, from solar variations to volcanic activity to early effects of human population, which was much reduced in the general area because of the Black Death in the 1300s. Science hadn’t progressed to the point that we have complete meteorological records of that era, but there was some science around already, and such observations as they were capable of do still exist.

Science was advancing quickly in those days thanks in part to people like Isaac Newton, who was and still is one of the most influential scientists in history. In his day he was known as a “natural philosopher”, but today we would definitely call him a scientist. And we might raise a glass to him and his achievements today in particular, because December 25 is his birthday. Since this is the season of caring for others, we might also toast Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross and a well-known nurse. It’s her birthday, too.

In addition to nursing, Clara Barton worked on civil rights and the abolition movement, including becoming acquainted with Frederick Douglass. Particularly since Barton’s nursing work began during the US Civil War, she and Douglass may have discussed the Christmas Rebellion of 1831. It was an uprising in Jamaica by around 60,000 of the slaves working the plantations there (there was probably a total of about 300,000). The revolt was a failure in the short term, but it raised awareness in England of the brutality of the plantation system, and spurred on by the publicity and public outcry, Parliament outlawed slavery just two years later.

Treating anyone with callousness and brutality is pretty much the antithesis of how we hope to behave around the Christmas season. In our stories and legends, at least, that kind of behavior receives its own reward. You can see that sometimes in real life, both in the abolishment of slavery after the Christmas Rebellion and the Civil War, as well as in fiction — Scrooge himself is quite reformed when the three ghosts force him to confront his own actions. And in modern allegorical tales you can find the same thing — take, for example, The Caine Mutiny, a classic film from 1954. It’s the story of Captain Queeg of the USS Caine during World War II, who mistreats his crew, ignores their warnings and advice in making basic navigational errors, and abandoning a group of landing craft the Caine was supposed to escort to an island. Queeg, played by Humphrey Bogart, is originally relieved by a lieutenant, but later the lieutenant backs down and refuses to support his cohorts. Like Scrooge and Marley, all the characters either reform or face their just deserts. But why bring this up in a post that’s mostly about Christmas? Well, because today is Humphrey Bogart’s birthday too!