1)      The History of Christmas

As we all know, Christmas is the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth.  But historians are fairly certain that Jesus was not born on Dec. 25.  Rather, it seems, early Christians integrated the winter solstice celebration into their calendar in order to entice pagans to convert, an early example of employee benefits, it seems.  The solstice celebration, the commemoration of the year’s shortest day on Dec. 21, coincided with the Roman festival in honor of the war god Saturn (“Saturnalia”) which was traditionally celebrated from Dec. 17 to 24.

It was not until 325AD that Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, who had moved the Roman capital to Constantinople, i.e. a city named after him and present day Istanbul, Turkey, introduced Christmas as an immovable feast on 25 December. (BTW: He also introduced Sunday as a holy day in a new 7-day week.), In 354AD, Bishop Liberius of Rome officially did the same for “West-Rome”.

Christmas really became “en vogue” when the German Emperor Charles the Great (also called Charlemagne) pressured the pope to crown him as German Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas Day 800, followed by the Duke William of Normandy who was crowned by the pope on Christmas Day 1066 as king William I of England (having previously, as you might remember, defeated the English, a few months earlier, in the famous battle of Hastings).

Winter solstice, and subsequently Christmas, was celebrated in Roman times and in the middle ages as a lewd party, with drinking, gambling and significant public nudity common and even encouraged; business was suspended or postponed.  As you can see, not much has changed in 2.000 years.

Martin Luther’s Reformation, started by nailing 94 theses on the church door of Wittenberg in Thuringia in 1519, started to put a damper on this aspect of Christmas.  English and American purists felt the same way and asked for abolishing Christmas altogether.  As a matter of fact, Boston prohibited Christmas from 1659 to 1681 and fined everyone 5 shillings who was “exhibiting the Christmas spirit”.  But the continuous influx of immigrants made Christmas popular again - until the American Revolution.  Upon becoming independent, Americans abolished Christmas again as a custom of their despised colonial masters.  In fact, on Dec. 25, 1789, the first Christmas after the constitution was passed, the newly elected Congress was in session.  Tell that to a modern day politician.

The revival of Christmas started in the 1820ies by some of the leading writers of that time: Washington Irvin wrote short stories about peaceful family assemblies in which the maids and servants were integrated (when in reality NYCity at that time established a special police force against the feared Christmas riots by the poor); Harriet Beecher Stowe with her novel “First Christmas in New England”; Clement Clark Moore with his poem “A visit from St. Nicholas” (1822) – you might remember the first line of this poem: Twas the night before Christmas; and, of course, Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol (1834).

And the rest is history, as they say.  Christmas became a Federal holiday in 1870 (President Ulysses Grant) and has remained the most popular of all holidays throughout the world.

However, the orthodox Churches celebrate Christmas 13 days later, not because they believe Jesus was born on a different day, but because they adhere to the Julian calendar.  “What is the Julian calendar?” “And why 13 days?” you might ask.  Let me answer these 2 questions with a famous historical event:

Until the time of Julius Caesar the Roman year was based on the phases of the moon.  For many reasons this was hopelessly inaccurate so, on the advice of his astronomers, Julius instituted a calendar centered round the sun, and our modern calendar was born. It was decreed that one year was to consist of three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days, divided into twelve months; the month of Quirinus was renamed 'July' after Julius Caesar to commemorate the Julian reform.  Unfortunately, despite the introduction of leap years, the Julian calendar overestimated the length of the year by eleven minutes fifteen seconds, which comes to one day every 128 years. By the sixteenth century the calendar was ten days out. In 1582 reforms instituted by Pope Gregory XIII lopped the eleven minutes fifteen seconds off the length of a year and deleted the spare ten days. This new Gregorian calendar was adopted throughout Catholic Europe and is still in use throughout the Western world.

Everyone not subject to the pope’s directions, i.e. Protestant Europe, the Anglikan church, the various orthodox churches, etc., was not going to be told what day it was by the Pope, so it kept to the old Julian calendar. This meant that at the end of the 16th century London was a full ten days ahead of Paris – among other things.  (The English, not to be outdone, also kept the 25th of March as New Year's Day rather than the 1st of January.)  By the time England came round to adopting the Gregorian calendar, in the middle of the eighteenth century, England was eleven days ahead of the Continent.

The Calendar Act was passed in 1751 which stated that in order to bring England into line, the day following the 2nd of September 1752 was to be called the 14th, rather than the 3rd of September. Unfortunately, many people were not able to understand this simple maneuver and thought that the government had stolen eleven days of their lives. In some parts of Britain there were riots and shouts of 'give us back our eleven days!'

2)      Christmas Paraphernalia

There are 3 things that in the mind of most of us represent or remind us of Christmas – and all 3 are heavily influenced by Germans: Christmas trees, Christmas carols, and Santa Claus.  Let me explain.

2.1 Christmas trees: The concept of a Christmas tree was established by St. Boneface when he was converting the northern German tribes in the 8th century.  German pagans had worshipped the oak tree as a divine symbol of Germanic mythology and decorated the trees on the occasion of their festivities.  So St. Boneface cut the decorated oak tree to demonstrate their pagan fallacy.  Decorated trees then became the main symbol of Christmas in Germany.

In England, on the other hand, the preferred Christmas decoration was the wreath.  That changed in the mid 19th century when Queen Victoria who reigned Britain from 1837 to 1901 married Prince Albert of Saxonia-Coburg in 1840 - you guessed it, a German.  He introduced Christmas trees to the British court and from their the idea was accepted throughout the British Empire and exported to the United States.  Last year, ca. 33,487,000 live trees were sold in the United States – plus countless artificial trees.

2.2 Christmas carols: "Silent Night", probably the most popular and most famous of all Christmas carols, was first written as a poem in Germany in 1816 by a young priest named Joseph Mohr who was assigned to an Austrian pilgrimage church, Mariapfarr. Mohr asked his friend Franz Gruber (a local teacher) to compose a tune for the 1818 Midnight Mass.  Since the church organ was too rusted to play, Mohr had to compose a melody that he could play on an instrument other than his beloved organ and, thus, he decided to keep it as simple as possible – probably the single most important reason for the enduring popularity of the tune.  Mohr and Gruber sang the song together, with Gruber playing a guitar, put the paper down and went home to have their Gluehwein – and promptly forgot about the song. The piece might have been lost forever except that a visiting musician found the composition a few years later, and played it elsewhere in Germany and Austria.  From there, it grew in popularity as it was played from village to village.  Today, it has been recorded in approximately 1.250 versions and has not lost in popularity anywhere in the world to this day.

2.3 Santa Claus:  Santa Claus was created by Thomas Nast, a cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly, who had immigrated from Germany.  Nast is often referred to as the father of political cartoons.  Harper’s Weekly and Nast had a socialist agenda and depicted representatives of the catholic church in an unflattering way.  So he made Santa Claus fat and bearded and somewhat messy rather than tall, thin and sophisticated as most depictions of Santa Claus were before.  Nast drew Santa Claus cartoons until 1880 and his Santa Claus was standardized by the U.S. advertising industry in the 1920ies.  Nast’s most famous cartoon was a Santa Claus who distributed gifts to the soldiers of the North during the American Civil War – an early example of psychological warfare.

3) The Christmas Spirit

There are many moving Christmas stories and everyone of us probably has his or her own story to tell if asked.  But one of the most remarkable and most inspiring is this:

World War I was one of the most senseless and cruelest wars of all times – and that is some attribute since so many wars have been senseless and cruel.  Early on, the advance of the various armies had been stalled and the war was reduced to fighting in trenches and from well fortified positions; soldiers were killed by the thousands every week over uninhabited and useless territory.  Success was measured by advancing 10 feet in a week at a loss of 10,000 lives.  If you have ever read the book “All Quiet on the Western Front” by the German author Erich Maria Remarque or have seen the movie Gallipoli, the movie that made Mel Gibson famous, you know what I am talking about.

But around Christmas Day 1914, the sounds of rifles firing and shells exploding faded in a number of places along the Western Front in favor of holiday celebrations in the trenches and gestures of goodwill between enemies.

Starting on Christmas Eve, many German and British troops sang Christmas carols to each other across the lines, and at certain points the Allied soldiers even heard brass bands joining the Germans in their joyous singing.

At the first light of dawn on Christmas Day, some German soldiers emerged from their trenches and approached the Allied lines across no-man's-land, calling out "Merry Christmas" in their enemies' native tongues. At first, the Allied soldiers feared it was a trick, but seeing the Germans unarmed they climbed out of their trenches and shook hands with the enemy soldiers. The men exchanged presents of cigarettes and plum puddings and sang carols. There was even a documented case of soldiers from opposing sides playing a good-natured game of soccer.

Some soldiers used this short-lived ceasefire for a more somber task: the retrieval of the bodies of fellow combatants who had fallen within the no-man's land between the lines.

The so-called Christmas Truce of 1914 came only five months after the outbreak of war in Europe and was one of the last examples of the outdated notion of chivalry between enemies in warfare. It was never repeated—future attempts at holiday ceasefires were quashed by officers' threats of disciplinary action—but it served as heartening proof, however brief, that beneath the brutal clash of weapons, the soldiers' essential humanity endured.

With that in mind, let me wish all of you a great holiday season, health and happiness in 2008 and Merry Christmas or “Frohe Weihnachten”.