"At Christmas play and make good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year"
Thomas Tusser (c1515-1580) The Farmer's Daily Diet.
"Here are some timely ones for you. What is the origin of Santa Klaus, the Christmas Tree, the reason we kiss under Mistletoe...?" -- Lord Thorvald Egilsson
Thank you, Lord Thorvald, for these truly lovely questions. I must admit that reading the material about the origins of these items has been time I think was well used. Let me look at them in order:
Santa Claus
The modern "Santa Claus", as such, first shows up in 1822 in the poem ‘A visit from St. Nicholas’ by Clement Clark Moore. Moore was a New Yorker who seems to have taken and modified the old Dutch traditions of St. Nicholas, as described in Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York, which had been reprinted in 1821. Irving had taken the traditions of St. Nicholas (practiced in New Amsterdam before it became New York) and moved them from St. Nicholas’ Eve, marrying them in the process to the concept of Father Christmas. Father Christmas, originally just Christmas, was the personification of the holiday of Christmas, and as such, first appears in 1616 in a play by Ben Jonson, Christmas, His Masque. Father Christmas had nothing to do with children, however, being more of a Lord of Misrule figure of fun sort of person, representing the parties and games of the season. St. Nicholas, on the other hand, was the patron saint of children, and the practice of leaving presents in children’s shoes on the eve of St. Nicholas’s day (or the evening of the 5th of December). Nicholas was the Bishop of Myra, in what is now Turkey, and died on the 6th of December, c342. Nicholas was well known for helping the poor with gifts, left in the middle of the night in an attempt to disquise his identity.
Christmas Trees
The Chrsitmas Tree is a development that is seen first in the Rhineland in the 1520s and came to the New World with the German immigrants. The concept of the tree was simply an outgrowth though, of the older use of evergreen boughs, holly and ivy to decorate homes and churches during the Christmas season. As can be seen from the materials from the Council of Braga, that this was itself a holdover from the older pagan traditions that the Church finally gave up trying to eradicate.
Kissing under the Mistletoe
Kissing under a sprig of Mistletoe has its origins not only in the greenery decorations of Christmas, like the Christmas tree above, but in the so-called "Kissing Bush", and also again in the works of Washington Irving. In his 1819 short story ‘Chrsitmas Day’, Irving described the mistletoe being used, in conjunction with other evergreen plants, as being a "druid’s plant" and "never trusted by the church", although it had been used in the decoration of churches for centuries. Irving was describing the Kissing Bush. The Kissing bush was a bit of greenery set up (starting in the 1700s) to emulate the large church bush, begun in the 1600s, to allow the populace to hear the Word of God, like Moses, "from the bush". The actual point linking the kissing to the bush is unclear, but it seems to have been derived from one of the kissing games popular during the period before the English Civil War, although this is just speculation.
Sources:
Goldby. J.M. and A.W. Purdue. Making of the Modern Chrsitmas.
1986.
Hutton, Ronald. Stations of the Sun. Oxford:, 1997.
Miller, David (ed.) Unwrapping Chrsitmas. Oxford, 1993.
Plimlott, J.A.R. Englishman’s Christmas. Hassocks, 1978.
Weightman, Gavin and Steve Humphries. Christmas Past. 1987.
If you have any questions about things that interest you, please send them to me directly, or by way of Chronicler.