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December 2006: Christmas Traditions—Dija Know
No holiday has more traditions attached to it than Christmas. From Santa Claus to the wassail bowl, the things we do to celebrate Christmas go back deeply into the past.
One Christmas tradition is the use of the plant called holly. During the Christmas season we see a lot of hollys’s shiny green leaves and red berries. Let us examine what made this a Christmas tradition.
It goes way back before there was such a thing as Christmas. The Celtic people that inhabited the British isles revered the plant because of its ability to remain vibrant in cold weather. They considered this a good example of magic. Ultimately the Romans expanded their empire to include England. They had a winter holiday celebrating their own religion. It was called Saturnalia, after the great God Saturn. It occurred around the end of the month they called December (from the Latin word for 10, since it was the 10th month in their calendar. The Romans thought the magical plant holly was pretty neat and so adopted into their religion. Saturnalia was a wild, crazy period of reveling, and people gave each other holly boughs.
Ultimately Christianity became the religion of choice and the custom of drinking and reveling during the same season of the celebration of Christ’s birth was looked upon negatively. The church tried hard to change the traditions but people were reluctant to do so. The church adopted a tactic that served it well in changing behavior. Instead of preaching about evil, they would change the attitude of people to make such things as holly boughes symbols of Christianity. Holly lent itself well to be transformed into a religious symbol. The sharp leaves reminded people ot the crown of thorns Jesus had worn. The berries would represent blood. Even its name was derived from the word “holy”. Because it was evergreen it could symbolize everlasting life. So the church, when it couldn’t change the custom, adopted it to the religion and they “decked the halls in boughs of holly”.
Holly was not the only plant integrated into Christianity from the old pagan traditions. Some pagan beliefs dealt with the sexual influence of certain plants. This comes down to us as the custom of kissing under the mistletoe. Interesting to see how things evolve.
Another old Christmas tradition is that of the Wassail Bowl, and the custom of Wassailing, going around in groups to visit friends who have a good drink waiting for them. This seems to stem from England, also. It seems that in rural England the farm help was paid in apple juice, after the apple squeezing was done. In Christmastime, they made up a special drink to Wassail. It was made of eggs, curdled cream, nuts, roasted apples and fermented apple juice (apple jack);
My parents were born in Sweden and would occasionally talk about Christmas. There was some wassailing, though they didn’t have liquor, at least in my family. It was part of the custom that the visitors be given a treat to eat, usually sweet rolls. In Sweden they didn’t give presents on Christmas day. That was done on “Tretenedagen”. the 13th day, celebrated on January 6. It was a day honoring the 3 wise men, who gave gifts to the babe in the manger, hence it was the day for giving Christmas presents. In my not very affluent family, the gift usually consisted of an orange.
Another Christmas tradition deals with candy canes. This isn’t common in this country but in some places candy canes are a Christmas tradition. Why? Because they form the letter J, for Jesus.
Interesting how things have evolved over the years, and in different places, sometimes in totally different contexts from which they started. Whatever old traditions you may follow, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.