• News |  
• Articles |  
• TYDKYDK about Christmas

'Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know' about Christmas

In this yuletide adventure, host Brandon Etheredge and Associate Professor of History Christopher Ferguson unwrap the layers of Christmas traditions, from the fascinating tales of Santa Claus's evolution to the unexpected global impact of this beloved holiday. Dr. Ferguson shares heartwarming childhood memories and the inspiration behind his research on Christmas around the world.

Discover the surprising stories behind the Christmas truce during World War I, where enemies laid down their arms and shared moments of peace and camaraderie. Delve into the diverse celebrations across the globe, from the secular festivities in Japan to the religious traditions in Russia and the unique Christmas customs in Trinidad.

Explore the commercialization paradox of Christmas, where the fear of secularization led to the creation of products aiming to preserve the religious essence of the holiday. Unpack the historical tensions between Christianity and commerce, revealing how publishers and manufacturers contributed to the commercialization while trying to combat its effects.

And, of course, no Christmas episode would be complete without sharing favorite Christmas movies and traditions. 

Transcript

Brandon Etheredge:

Well, it is the most wonderful time of the year. The holidays are officially here, and today we're taking a dive back in time to learn all the things you didn't know you didn't know about Christmas. Our guest today has a list, he's checked it twice. He's a history of Christmas, naughty or nice. Stick around. We'll unpack it all on the Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know Podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of the Things You Didn't Know, You Didn't Know podcast, you might've noticed we changed up the music a little bit in the intro because it is the holiday season. I'm Brandon Etheridge, and today I'm super excited because Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year.

So our guest today, he knows a ton about Christmas. Some might say he even has sugar plums dancing in his head. Welcome to the podcast Dr. Chris Ferguson. He is an Associate Professor of History at Auburn University, specializing in the period from 1780 to 1870, urban history, autobiography, and other ego documents and material culture. Welcome to the podcast, it's great having you here as we deck the proverbial halls getting ready for Christmas. Hopefully by the end of this, some of our listeners will understand more about this holiday season. Thanks for being here.

Chris Ferguson:

Thanks for having me.

Brandon Etheredge:

So I know some of your interest in this area comes from your childhood, so I want to start there. Specifically, it starts with a memory with your mom. Tell me about that.

Chris Ferguson:

So my mother had a book she got as a gift from one of her friends in college called Christmas Around the World, and it was published by a company called the Ideals Publishing Company. At that time they were based in Milwaukee, they're now in Nashville, they still exist. But when I was a kid, she would read me an individual chapter before bed from this book during Advent. So one night we'd read about Christmas in Serbia, and another night we'd read about Christmas in the United Kingdom. I really loved this for some reason and so we did it many, many years in a row, into when I was in junior high actually.

Then when she passed away in 2014, I inherited this book from her. I've read it somewhat with my kids. They're not as keen on it as I was, but when I was asked a few years ago to write this chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Christmas on the history of Christmas, and the editor, Timothy Larson said, "So what I'm going to need you to do is write the history of Christmas everywhere in the 20th and 21st centuries in 5,000 words or less." That brought this book to mind. I was like, okay, I have to tell the history of Christmas around the world. I probably should start thinking about what Christmas around the world looks like. So it brought me back full circle to that book.

Brandon Etheredge:

I love that. I love that. So my good friend, Tim Allen, some people know him, popularized at least for young American audiences, the different names of Santa around the world. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 4:

I know you're Scott Calvin. You're Scott Calvin. So let's make this simple. I say name, you say Scott Calvin. Name?

Tim Allen:

Kris Kringle.

Speaker 4:

Name?

Tim Allen:

Sinterklaas.

Speaker 4:

Name?

Tim Allen:

Paere Noel. Babbo Natale. Pelz-Nickel. Topo Gigio.

Speaker 4:

Okay, Calvin. Maybe a couple hours in the tank will change your mind.

Brandon Etheredge:

So Tim talks about all the different Santas and the names of Santa. So how does Santa play into the history of Christmas? When does his sleigh pull onto the scene of this holiday?

Chris Ferguson:

So Santa Claus has existed in a number of different forms in different cultures as these, they call them gift bringers or a gobbin bringers is what they're called in German speaking countries, have existed particularly in European Christmas traditions for centuries, but they really only start to solidify into a vision of the Santa Claus I think most of us are familiar with, the jolly, red-cheeked, portly chap driving his sleigh, delivering presents, going down chimneys. That really solidifies over the course of the 19th and particularly the 20th centuries.

So well into the 19th century, if you lived in a German speaking part of Europe and you were a child, you might receive gifts from St. Nicholas, you might receive gifts from Father Christmas, or you might actually receive gifts from the Christcant. The Christ child would come and deliver your presents on Christmas Eve. But in both Europe and the United States, there is a way in which the figure of Father Christmas or Santa Claus becomes more uniform and less sinister, quite frankly. A lot of these earlier gift bringer characters often both rewarded the nice but also punished the naughty. So they would bring along a sinister accomplice who would beat children with a club or whatever, if they had been bad, and then give gifts to the good. The more sinister element disappears over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But I think most historians agree that the biggest influence in many ways that creates the kind of Santa Claus of today is the Americanization of the Christmas holiday on a global level, and in particular the jolly, rosy cheeked, portly cheeked Santa Claus, is heavily popularized by the images produced by Haddon Sundblom, who's an illustrator for the Coca-Cola company and he does this annual image of Santa Claus every year for Coca-Cola between 1931 and 1964. If you look at his images, they are consistently that kind of vision of Santa Claus as this grandfatherly, rosy-cheeked, gregarious character. A lot of scholars argue that's really what helped to cement that image, is the use of this figure in advertising in the first half of the 20th century.

Brandon Etheredge:

How interesting. So you write about Christmas becoming really a truly global holiday in the 20th century. What caused that massive boom in the celebration across the world?

Chris Ferguson:

So it's a number of intersecting and mutually reinforcing factors. So on the one hand in the 19th century, you have a large expansion of people from Europe into other parts of the world. Some of them are migrating and settling in other places, that includes in the Americas, but then you also have people going and settling in parts of the non-European world in Asia, Oceania, Africa as part of both European settler colonialism, but also European imperialism.

So as Europeans go and settle in other parts of the world, they bring their traditions with them. Christian missionaries are going around the world in the 19th century to a much greater extent than ever before, and that helps to spread Christianity. There are ways in which in the 19th century and early 20th century, different Christian denominations begin to embrace Christmas to a greater extent than before. This is something Timothy Larson has actually written quite a bit about. So on the one hand, you have as a religious dimension, you have a movement of people, but then you also have a global economy that is becoming ever more integrated over the course of the 20th century. You have major developments in media, particularly radio, film, and television, are very important in popularizing and exposing people to different Christian traditions.

Then there's also the fact that the 20th century witnesses very large global wars. So historians would argue that the deployment of large numbers of American soldiers overseas, particularly in World War II and during the Cold War, is very, very important in globalizing Christmas and particularly globalizing a certain kind of Christmas that's very familiar to us in the United States. Christmas becomes a holiday in Japan, for instance, in the 1950s almost entirely because of Japanese peoples' sort of emulating, imitating and borrowing from what they see American servicemen doing while they're stationed there during the holiday season.

But this means that national, distinct regional customs and traditions have the power to become everybody's traditions. So the Christmas tree, for instance, is very much a central European, German thing that becomes something people do everywhere, potentially. Even in places like Australia where there are no fur trees, they have to import them in. Advent calendars, the ones where you open little doors and take out a chocolate or two or whatever, are very much something associated with Scandinavian countries. But again, Advent calendars are a huge part of lots of people's Christmas traditions. So you have the possibility for these very distinct customs to become everybody's customs that people can pick and choose from as they like because of a more integrated, connected global marketplace in which more people, ideas, and goods are moving around than ever before.

Brandon Etheredge:

Very interesting. So I want to stick on the discussion of Christmas in wartime. There's one particular story that I would love to talk about for a few minutes. I was actually watching one of my favorite TV shows personally, Blue Bloods. Frank Reagan, who plays the New York Police Commissioner, he's one of the stars of the show, played by Tom Selleck, recalls an old Christmas story of German and British soldiers, and this is what he had to say at the family dinner table.

Tom Selleck:

Where my bar is set is Christmas morning in 1914, when British and French soldiers laid down their arms, climbed out of the trenches and spent the day playing soccer with their German enemies.

Speaker 8:

I heard that was a myth.

Tom Selleck:

Well, nobody knows where it began or how it spread, but it did happen, Jack.

Speaker 9:

Over a hundred thousand men up and down the west of the front.

Tom Selleck:

How old was I when you first told me about that?

Speaker 9:

Just old enough to understand it.

Speaker 8:

So now after every Christmas dinner we put down our weapons, go out back and play soccer.

Brandon Etheredge:

So when I started reading through some of your work, I was really digging to see if this story was in there because I thought it was so interesting. You write about this, was in 1914, and I would love for you to explain exactly what's happening here with the Christmas truce as it's come to be known.

Chris Ferguson:

Yeah, so the Christmas truce becomes an enormously celebrated moment in the larger history of the first World War. It's become the subject of poetry, fiction. There was an award-winning opera produced called Silent Night about it in 2011. It featured in a controversial but very popular Sainsbury's ad in Great Britain in 2014.

What we know is that in the first year of World War I, along the western front, there are these impromptu Christmas celebrations that take place involving fraternization, particularly between German and British soldiers. So they often start on Christmas Eve with soldiers making scratch-built Christmas trees and holding them up above the parapets of their trenches. There are accounts of men exchanging Christmas carols. So the Germans would sing a Christmas carol and then the British would sing one back and they repeated.

Then on Christmas Day, December 25th, 1914, we know there are incidents where soldiers go out into the land between the trenches, no man's land, and they talk to each other, they exchange gifts, they exchange cigarettes, chocolate bars. There are supposedly some impromptu soccer games that are played in no man's land between these soldiers. This incident takes on a kind of enormous mythological status almost immediately. So people write about it extensively in both the British and the French and the German press. It's discussed in America, which is still neutral in 1914, it hasn't entered the war yet. It's discussed extensively after the war among the veteran community.

What's really tricky about the Christmas truce is it's one of these histories that's actually a lot more complicated than the story initially indicates because while there are these moments of fraternization on the Western front, it doesn't always work that way. French and Belgian soldiers are much less willing to reach out a hand of friendship to the Germans on the opposite side of the trenches because the Germans are occupying French and Belgian land. Some of the wine that British and German soldiers get drunk on in no man's land in 1914 has been stolen from French farms by the German army. So the meaning of the truce works differently.

We also know, for instance, that there are no truces on the Eastern front because the Russian Orthodox Christmas happens on a completely different date than the Catholic and Protestant Christmas. So the German soldiers, even if they'd wanted to stage a truce with the Russians, don't have the know-how to actually coordinate. So we know that actually when the Russians are celebrating Christmas in 1914, the German army is actually launching an offensive. There are accounts of people trying to attend Christmas services while artillery shells are falling around them.

So while there are these kind of moments of fraternization that do occur, they occur within a larger context in which in some cases, German soldiers stick up a Christmas tree and the trees get shot to pieces because the people on the other side recently were fighting with them and are still embittered or because they literally don't understand the ritual. So there are Hindu soldiers in the British army, for instance, who don't know what Christmas is at all. So when German soldiers try to stage these truces with them, they just fail miserably because they don't understand what's going on.

Brandon Etheredge:

I'm trying to remember if it was in something, in one of the pages that you wrote that I read, or if it was somewhere else, but if I remember correctly, it was of some of the higher up military folks were not necessarily a fan of this because it complicates things afterwards. Am I correct in that?

Chris Ferguson:

Yes, so the military high commands of both the Allied and the central powers are very concerned about these reports and these incidents. So in the subsequent Christmases during the war in 1915 and '16 and '17, both the generals in both sides of the conflict actually take major steps to avoid these types of things. They often actually set very severe artillery bombardments for Christmas day. They'll actually stage small scale attacks up and down the trenches to make sure basically that the soldiers are still fighting and to reduce the possibility for these types of interactions because again, while they're never large scale enough to really threaten the war effort in 1914, there is this awareness, I think, that when you interact with your enemies in human way, it undermines your ability to wage war against them. This is actually really what inspired Mark Campbell, the librettist of the Silent Night Opera. He was really interested in the way in which becoming aware of other people's humanity makes conflict impossible, which is why he found the idea of the Christmas truce such an interesting subject for a musical composition.

Brandon Etheredge:

So we've talked about and hit on this throughout our discussion, but Christmas is obviously not just an American or European holiday. So I'd love for you to talk about what some of those traditions and festivities are around the world and give us an idea of what Christmas looks like in different places.

Chris Ferguson:

Sure. I mean, I'm not a total expert on this obviously, but I can give you three examples that I learned about when I was working on this book chapter I found particularly striking.

So Japan for instance, has probably, Christmas is a huge holiday in Japan, but it's pretty much a purely secular commercial holiday. So Bruce Forbes, he's an American historian, talks about how in the 20th century you really have actually two different Christmases that are happening simultaneously. You have a secular Christmas that's often linked to gift-giving, commercialism, Santa Claus, etc, but then you also have the traditional Christian Christmas. Of course a lot of people celebrate both, but the two sometimes do exist in a tension with each other. But Japan is a place where there are very, very few Christians at all. Over 95% of the population are not Christian, but the vast majority of Japanese do celebrate Christmas. So the Japanese Christmas is this very purely commercial event. In the 1990s, it's like the biggest date night of the year. This means that some things that in the United States or in Europe, you might associate with the Christmas holidays play slightly different in the Japanese context.

So for instance, these anthropologists in the 1990s write about how there's all these Japanese companies using the phrase Silent Night when there's selling products for Christmas, but they're very much date night products. They're these erotically charged colognes or champagne or chocolates. There's one cologne that's marketed as Silent Night's Sweet Message for Him. So you get this familiar, yet very unfamiliar use of things we associate with the holidays of the West.

A second example I think is really interest is the case of Russia because in Russia, the Christmas holiday is very, very religious. It's incredibly overt in the way it's celebrated, but this is partly because when the Bolsheviks come to power in 1917, they outlaw the holiday because the Communist Party wants to create a purely secular society in the Soviet Union. So Christmas essentially goes underground in the Soviet Union until Glasnost in the late 1980s. So many of the things though, that people associate with Christmas are co-opted by the Bolsheviks and turned into New Year's things. So New Year becomes the big holiday in the Soviet Union, and people exchange New Year's cards and put up New Year's trees, which look a lot like Christmas trees and look a lot like Christmas cards. But when the Communist party falls from power in the 1990s and Christmas is allowed to go public again, all of those things that had been removed from it stay New Year's holidays. So people in Russia today still don't send Christmas cards, they send New Year's cards, which means that a lot of the commercialism you get with the American Christmas, for instance, is really associated with New Year's in Russia. Christmas Day itself is actually a very religious holiday, primarily celebrated by the Christian population of Russia.

One third example, Trinidad, I think has some very interesting Christmas traditions. In Trinidad, people also do a great deal of shopping and socializing, but a lot of the focus is very much on the home. So instead of exchanging gifts with each other, people are often exchanging things like drapes. A lot of the money families spend is on household repair or household renovation. So house paint sales peak in Trinidad in the two weeks leading up to Christmas. The most likely time someone will repaint their house is in Advent in Trinidad. So there's this enormous sort of emphasis on the household as a space of celebration that you prepare. So house cleaning is incredibly important in the days leading up to Christmas, and then people come in and entertain and visit each other's homes.

Apples, because they are a temperate product, are actually one of the most favorite imported Christmas treats in Trinidad because they don't grow right in a tropical climate. So people associate Christmas apples much in the way in which people, particularly in the 19th century Europe associated citrus fruits like oranges with Christmas. People would get oranges in their stockings, in fact, still do.

So those are three examples, and they're all, and again, in each of these cases, there are things that feel a bit familiar, but then they also have a very local unique sort of spin to them.

Brandon Etheredge:

How interesting. That's... So this was not planned to talk about, but one of the things that in my family has been a tradition my entire life has been in a stocking. At Christmas, we'd get an apple and an orange, and I had family in the military stationed in tropical climates, and I wonder if that's where it came from. I'm going to have to ask some questions this Christmas. That's really interesting.

Chris Ferguson:

I mean, I know fruit has been put in children's stockings in the United States and in Europe, as long as people have been hanging up stockings too. So it could be purely coincidental, but.

Brandon Etheredge:

Interesting, very interesting. Well one thing, and we've talked about this in other countries, but you discussed the commercialization of this holiday a lot. One thing you wrote about that particularly stood out to me is this quote, it says, "Arguably there was no greater contributing factor to the anxieties of Western Christians about the secularization of Christmas during the 20th century than that the holiday seemingly evermore rampant materialism. The Ideal Company's publications, thus exhibited one of the inherent paradoxes of Christian ambivalence towards Christmas commercialization. The fact that publishers and manufacturers actively contributed to the process of commercializing Christmas by producing products that sought to help the religious avoid the secularization tendencies of Christmas commercialization." That's the end of the quote, it was kind of long, but I mean, what a thought. We fought commercialization with more commercialization. You just can't make that up. So talk about the interesting contrast of commercialization over time with even stores being closed on Christmas Day.

Chris Ferguson:

Sure. So I mean, one of the I think interesting things, and I'm not the only person who've noticed this. There's a British historian, Martin Johnes, who's actually written a lot about this, and he argues that one of the things that's fascinating about the argument about the commercialization of Christmas, is the argument's been around for a really long time. Then there's a parallel argument about how people are always saying, well, Christmas was better in the past. He says that it's almost a Christmas tradition to complain about the commercialization of Christmas and how Christmas isn't as good as it used to be. But you have that statement being made in a world in which it seems like the vast majority of the population is pretty on board with the commercialism. There's lots of shopping, lots of purchasing, and people seem to embrace this. But one of the curious paradoxes about this is, there's all this spending that goes on before Christmas, but then Christmas Day itself just about everything is closed. This is still the case in the United States, but it's even more pronounced in other parts of the world.

In the UK for instance, most of the train systems and stuff are shut down entirely. So really it's not... there isn't commercial activity going on. Now, the internet has started to break this down, but it's still, I think, quite interesting to think about the way in which a holiday that has this enormous spending, buying, going on, leading up to it, itself is a day when people are, for the most part, not buying things, not shopping, because it's not a possibility because everything's shut down. But there is no question that the fear that commercialism and with its secularism is watering down, undermining, endangering the Christian character of the holiday itself, has produced an enormous commercial opportunity for publishers, manufacturers in the 20th and 21st centuries.

So to give you one example, in the British Isles where the Christmas card is arguably invented, before the 20th century, Christmas cards almost never have religious messages in them and if you look at Victorian greeting cards, some of them are very bizarre. They have dancing frogs or like anthropomorphic plum puddings with steam coming out of their ears, a lot of animals drinking and playing games, a lot of cute pictures of children caroling, but not a lot of Christian imagery. Suddenly in the 1920s after the first World War, a number of British religious publishing houses start producing Christmas cards with overt Christmas messaging because they actually see a demand for that in the market. So they produce these products to meet it.

The company that makes this book I inherited from my mother, the Ideals Publishing Company, is a company that basically exclusively sells products that are about preserving Christmas traditions. Some of which are Christian, some of which are not, but they're still very much harnessing the desire to keep Christmas the same as a way to make money. There's all kinds of other companies that make enormous amounts of money on the Christmas holiday focusing on the actual religious dimensions of the holiday. There's huge amounts of money to be made.

I would just add that this is a particularly new, particularly evangelical groups in the 19th century are very, very good at using the marketplace to advance Christian messaging, using mass print, products for the home, china patterns, et cetera. There's been a lot of really great research by historians about this, about the way in which, in fact, while we often see Christianity and commerce as existing in tension with each other, there are actually ways in which devout people have really harnessed the power of the marketplace to advance Christian messaging, and at the same time make a lot of money selling these types of products.

Brandon Etheredge:

Very interesting. Well, we are getting close to the end of this episode, but I can't have a discussion about Christmas without asking this. So what is your favorite Christmas movie and your go-to Christmas morning breakfast?

Chris Ferguson:

So my favorite Christmas movie, it's probably a tie between Christmas Vacation, which my family watches annually. It's the first Christmas movie we watch after Thanksgiving. Then The Muppets Christmas Carol. Even though most of my writing on the history of Christmas has been for the 20th century, I'm a Victorianist by training, and I love Dickens' Christmas Carol and I think most Victorianists would agree with me that actually Henson does the best job of capturing Dickens' story, even though it's Muppets performing it. So that's a huge favorite of mine.

In terms of Christmas morning traditions, my family didn't actually have any because my parents were both church musicians. So one or both of them often had to work on Christmas Day to play services. So our Christmas mornings tended to be very rushed, eat a bowl of cereal, put on your clothes and go to church. But my wife's family always ate cinnamon rolls. So once I married into her family, that became our family tradition as well. So my children expect cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, whether we're in Alabama or back visiting her family in Iowa.

Brandon Etheredge:

I love that. We have a house in our neighborhood that just put up a Christmas display with an old vehicle and Cousin Eddie out front from Christmas Cacation. I on this podcast cannot say the words painted on the side of that vehicle, but it is a fun display. I would have to say mine is Miracle on 34th Street is a favorite, and growing up it was always orange cinnamon rolls and sausage balls. So those are the go-to Christmas in the Etheridge house, is those two things. So I can relate with your kids on that. It's very confusing if those things aren't there on Christmas morning.

Chris Ferguson:

Foods are so important, and that was one of the things I found most interesting when I was doing research for this project, is the way specific foods become associated with the holiday. So in the British Isles until the 20th century, everybody eats roast beef, and if you can't eat roast beef on Christmas, that means you're just grievously poor. But in the 1920s and particularly 1930s during the Great Depression, there's a massive influx of turkeys from Canada, which is still a British colony, and because people have to budget, turkeys are much cheaper than beef. Turkey becomes the mainstay dish in the British Isles. Last year, something like 85% of the British population reported eating Turkey on Christmas Day, and they eat it with Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts are a very common side dish in the UK. People have all these jokes about Brussels sprouts at Christmas dinner. So you have both family cuisines that are very important, what our family eats, but then you also have national family cuisines, what every British person eats, or what every German person eats, or what every Norwegian person eats.

Brandon Etheredge:

That's so interesting. So, so, interesting. Well, thank you Christopher, so much for your time talking about this and your research. It's so very interesting.

For all of our listeners, this is the final episode of season five for the Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know podcast. We'll be back with season six after the new year. We hope you'll join us then. Make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you back next year. Have a Merry Christmas. Happy holidays and happy New Year.

Tags: History Research Faculty