CW: rioting, blood
Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. You might not know, but the symbols you associate with Christmas – whether you’re coming from a secular or religious background – have their roots in very different practices than how they’re being used now. In this episode, we’ll look at the history of how people have celebrated Christmas (or been told they can’t), how recently some of our Christmas traditions were established, and what all the symbols of this holiday originally meant.
This article talks through the different theories we have as to why people started celebrating Christmas on the 25th of December.
This article talks about Oliver Cromwell and the Christmas Ban and everything that went into the ban being put in place.
This article is some further reading for you on how Christmas was celebrated in the United States’ 13 colonies. It talks about the attitudes of the people and the laws on the books during the time.
Here’s some additional reading for you about how enslaved people in the U.S. partook in the Christmas season.
This article from the National Endowment for the Humanities goes into more detail about how Washington Irving, the writer of Sleep Hollow, influenced how we celebrated Christmas today.
And here’s a good list that just breaks down a lot of the symbolism we talked about in this episode and where it came from.
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