Modern Customs during Christmas

Modern customs of the holiday include gift-giving, Church celebrations, and the display of various decorations, including the Christmas tree, lights, mistletoe, nativity scenes, and holly.

Santa Claus (also referred to as Father Christmas, although the two figures have different origins) is a popular mythological figure often associated with bringing gifts at Christmas for children.

Santa is generally believed to be the result of a syncretization between Saint Nicholas and elements from pagan Nordic and Christian mythology, and his modern appearance is believed to have originated in 19th century media.

Christmas is celebrated throughout the Christian population, but is also celebrated by many non-Christians as a secular, cultural festival. Because gift-giving and several other aspects of the holiday involve heightened economic activity among both Christians and non-Christians, Christmas has become a major event for many retailers.

History and the Celebration of Chrsitmas

New York observed the holiday freely. Pennsylvania German Settlers, pre-eminently the Moravian settlers of Bethlehem, Nazareth and Lititz in Pennsylvania and the Wachovia Settlements in North Carolina, were enthusiastic celebrators of Christmas. The Moravians in Bethlehem had the first Christmas trees in America as well as the first Nativity Scenes. Christmas fell out of favor in the United States after the American Revolution, when it was considered an English custom. George Washington attacked Hessian mercenaries on Christmas during the Battle of Trenton in 1777. (Christmas being much more popular in Germany than in America at this time.) By the 1820s, sectarian tension had eased and British writers, including William Winstanly, began to worry that Christmas was dying out.

These writers imagined Tudor Christmas as a time of heartfelt celebration, and efforts were made to revive the holiday. Charles Dickens’s book A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, played a major role in reinventing Christmas as a holiday emphasizing family, goodwill, and compassion as opposed to communal celebration and hedonistic excess. In America, interest in Christmas was revived in the 1820s by several short stories by Washington Irving which appear in his The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon and “Old Christmas”, and by Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem A Visit From St. Nicholas (popularly known by its first line: Twas the Night Before Christmas). Irving’s stories depicted harmonious warm-hearted holiday traditions he claimed to have observed in England.

Although some argue that Irving invented the traditions he describes, they were widely imitated by his American readers. The poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas popularized the tradition of exchanging gifts and seasonal Christmas shopping began to assume economic importance. In reaction, this also started the cultural conflict of the holiday’s spiritualism and its commercialism that some see as corrupting the holiday. In her 1850 book “The First Christmas in New England”, Harriet Beecher Stowe includes a character who complains that the true meaning of Christmas was lost in a shopping spree. Christmas was declared a United States Federal holiday in 1870, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant.

Importantance of Christmas and other American Holidays

It all seems to begin with the Thanksgiving Holiday

Thanksgiving	American Holidays	American Traditions	Macys Parade
Seasons Greetings	Holiday Gifts	Holiday Entertainment	Holiday TV and Movie Entertainment