How Christmas Became an American Holiday Custom, With a Santa Claus, Presents and a Tree

How Christmas Became an American Holiday Custom, With a Santa Claus, Presents and a Tree

Each Season, The celebration of Christmas has a religious peak and conventional openly complaining about the commercial of the holiday and developing lack of Christian sentimentalism. It seems to believe that there was once a way of celebrating the birth of Christ in a more spiritual way.

Such perceptions related to Christmas celebrations have, while, little basis in history. As a master of transnational and world history, I have studied the evolution of Christmas celebrations in German cities near about 1800 and the global spread of this holiday custom.

While Europeans took part in church services and devoted ceremonies to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ for centuries, they did not commemorate him as we do today. Christmas trees and presents for December 24 in Germany did not spread to other European Christian cultures until the close 18th century and did not arrive in North America until the 1830s.

In Germany, The First Christmas Tree

In the late 1790s, the new custom of stepping up a Christmas tree decorated with candles and wax accessories and the appearance of exchanging presents in Germany. The latest holiday practice was entirely outermost and independent of Christian religious practices. The idea of setting wax candles on an evergreen was influenced by the pagan heritage of celebrating the winter stature with bonfires as of December 21. These campfires on the darkest day of the year have deliberated the remembrance of the sun and showed her the way home. The lit Christmas tree was basically a domesticated sort of those bonfires.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is the English poet, gave the very first specification of a decorated Christmas tree in a German House when he communicated in 1799 after seeing such a tree in a private house in Ratzeburg, northwestern England. In 1816, the German poet ETA Hoffmann posted his famous story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The story holds the very first literary evidence of a Christmas tree decorated with apples, candies, and lights.

From the arrival, all family members, including children, were involved in participating in gift-giving. A mystical figure did not buy the gifts but frankly exchanged among family members symbolizing the new conventional culture of egalitarianism.

American travelers to Germany in the first half of the 19th century realized this celebration of nation-building potential. In 1835, the primer American to preserve and participate in this kind of Christmas celebration and to praise its usefulness in creating a national culture. That year, Ticknor and his daughter Anna united the family of Count von Ungern-Sternberg in Dresden for a catchy Christmas celebration.

Other American Travelers to Germany, such as Charles Loring Brace, who appeared in the Christmas celebration in Berlin around 20 years later, observed it as a specific German festival with the potential to conduct people together.

It was for both Ticknor and Brace; this holiday culture provided the emotional glue that could bring families and members of a nation to be gathered. In 1843, Ticknor was invited various well-known friends to unite him for the celebration of Christmas, with a Christmas tree and presents at his Boston home.

Ticknor’s holiday party was not the primer Christmas celebration in the United States that prompted a Christmas tree. German-American families had brought the ritual with them and had planted Christmas trees in advance. However, it was Ticknor’s social influence that assured the open out and social acceptance of the alien ritual of planting a Christmas tree and exchanging presents in American society.

Mostly in the 19th century, the festival of Christmas with Christmas trees and presents endured a minimal phenomenon in American society. Most of the Americans endured doubtful about this new ritual. Some felt that they had to pick previous English rituals like drooping equipping for presents on the fireplace and the Christmas tree as worthy space for the holding of gifts. It was also hard to find the essential components for this German ritual. Christmas tree farms had primer to be made. And ornaments needed to be fabricated.

Introducing of Santa Clause

The most remarkable way towards integrating Christmas into American well-liked culture arise in the context of the Civil War. In January 1863, Harper’s Weekly posted on the front page an image of Santa Claus visiting the Union Army in 1862. This image, produced by German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast, represents the very first image of Santa Claus.

In the next years, Nast evolved the picture of Santa clause in joyful old man was seen with a big belly and pure white beard toady everyone knows him. This drawing also found the way that Santa Clause was visited by a sled drawn by a reindeer.

Finally, the Christmas tradition had listed in the list of American people.

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