The Hour

As December approaches the Christmas trees are decorated with bright lights, the children send their wish list off to the North Pole and the Christmas wreath is placed proudly on your front door. These Christmas festivities are ingrained within popular culture and never questioned but just where did they originate from?

Historian Ashley Cowie has been busy researching the history of Christmas, finding out how traditions that span back four or five thousand years have gradually been amalgamated into our culture.

Yule Logs can be found in abundance at this time of year in the supermarkets and are a yummy treat to share with the family. However, the symbol of the yule log, which was engulfed in superstition, used to take on a very different meaning.

“You have to go back four or five thousand years,” Cowie explains. “At the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in December, people used to have great bonfires to try and welcome back the light, make sure it came back.

“The largest log that was found on the last hunt of the year was taking back into the biggest household in the centre of the community and all the small households around about lit their fires from this one log.”

Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without the jolly man in the red suit with the white beard. But as Cowie discovered, the image of Father Christmas didn’t stick as the most popular image until the Coca Cola Christmas advertising campaign in the 1930’s. The first image of Santa was in fact documented as far back as the 13th century in a story about a nobleman and his three daughters.

“There is a tradition that Santa Claus came along and delivered some sweets down the chimney that were caught in the dirty stockings washed and hung up by his three daughters.

“They woke up in the morning, it wasn't actually sweets at the time, it was three bags of gold coins that were found in the stockings. This afforded the daughters to be married the next year and pulled the family out of squalor.”

Last but not least, the tradition of bringing the outdoors inside for decorative purposes is a tradition that can be traced back to the Romans recording the Celtic nations bringing trees inside and decorating them with apples and ribbons. However, it was the influence of one royal family member that brought the tradition into popular culture.

“About 1850, Prince Albert came in from Germany and released an etching, a very famous card, which had a large tree all decorated with trees and his family around it. Since then, every family in Britain has had a tree inside.”