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The Christmas trees for sale never looked as lush as the ones in the northern hemisphere. So every year, the Dohnt family dusted off a fake. On holidays, their kids went to Nippers and swam in the surf as Let It Snow! <\/i>chimed in the shops. Christmas in Australia felt like a mismatch. They wanted to get closer to a \u201cperfect white Christmas\u201d.<\/p>\n
So the Dohnts flew to the other side of the world, to a town called Rovaniemi in Finland. Once a farming and trading hub, Rovaniemi was burned to the ground in World War II by the German army as it retreated. Then it was rebuilt to a street plan based on reindeer antlers by the architect Alvar Aalto. Today it is home to 63,000 residents and more than 12,000 reindeer \u2013 and to Santa Claus, his wife and their team of elves.<\/p>\n
Yes, Rovaniemi, the Official Hometown of Santa Claus\u00a9 since 2010, hosts a Santa Village that is, literally, on the Arctic Circle (there\u2019s a line painted on the ground), with a post office where many of the world\u2019s Santa letters are sorted. The town even has a soccer team called FC Santa Claus whose motto is Don\u2019t Stop Believing. All of which is big business, with half a million visitors each year. Among them are Chinese tourists (Xi Jinping has been snapped there, beaming beside a cuddly Mr Claus) and Australians, who are expected to have spent 6000 nights in the town this year, says its tourist bureau.<\/p>\n
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Deborah, Milly and Lex Dohnt in Lapland for Christmas. <\/span>Credit: <\/span> <\/cite><\/p>\n The Dohnt family rode in husky sleds and in sleighs pulled by reindeer, baked cookies, drove snowmobiles, learned about the indigenous Sami people (who, traditionally, herd reindeer), and dropped in on the man in red himself. Deborah admits she \u201ccan take or leave Santa\u201d, but she found what she was looking for in the sub-zero wonderland. \u201cI certainly experienced something completely different,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was the perfect Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, there is no definitive Christmas place, nor one version of the festival. There\u2019s a \u201cSantaworld\u201d in Sweden; a Turkish village has links to Santa\u2019s origins; and Indiana in the United States has a town named Santa Claus (population 2586). In fact, if you look inside its wrapping, every tinselly inch of modern Christmas includes a cornucopia of customs and layers of legend. It is, in some respects, \u201can invented tradition\u201d, harking from the Victorian era and swept along by capitalism, even if its customs seem old, says Carole Cusack, professor of religious studies at the University of Sydney. \u201cBut it doesn\u2019t really matter because once the tradition has been invented, people like it and it becomes self-propelling.\u201d<\/p>\n So how did we come to celebrate Christmas? Where did <\/i>Santa come from? Why the trees? And what medieval treats do we still eat on the day?<\/p>\n Credit: <\/span>Artwork by Matt Davidson <\/cite><\/p>\n \u201cYou have to begin at the beginning with: Christmas is a Christian festival celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ,\u201d says Cusack. \u201cThe bottom line is, that\u2019s why we have it. But then the question is how the Christians came to choose midwinter as when they would celebrate Christian Christmas in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n In countries where Christmas is a public holiday, most places have settled on December 25. The bible gives no date for when Jesus was born. As Timothy Larsen, a professor of Christian thought and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Christmas <\/i>puts it, December 25 \u201chas a one in 365 chance\u201d of being the date of Jesus\u2019 birth.<\/p>\n The earliest indisputable reference to Christmas festivities being held on December 25 is on a Roman calendar from the year 354, referring to events in 336. A copy survives in the Vatican. \u201dThat\u2019s really as early as we can be confident that Christmas was celebrated,\u201d says Gerry Bowler, a historian of Christmas for three decades.<\/p>\n The birth of Jesus and three wise men who visited him are shown in The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1525 by Ioannis Permeniatis.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n There are several theories on the date. \u201cNone of these things can be proved\u201d, says Larsen, before suggesting that lighter days following the northern-hemisphere winter solstice (on December 21 or 22) might have appealed to the church for symbolic reasons. \u201cJesus is the light of the world and therefore the winter solstice is the point at which it gets lighter,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Cusack concurs, and suggests the date dovetailed with that of other ancient religious festivals. December 25 is the birthday of the deity Mithras, for example, who became popular with Roman soldiers. And the festival of Saturnalia \u2013 honouring Saturn, god of agriculture \u2013 ran for several days from December 17, with Romans switching their togas for colourful clothes, the poor joining the rich in drinking games, and gifts exchanged (think, little clay statues, gold hairpins, live pigs) while revellers kissed under mistletoe.<\/p>\n Even then, early Christians might have turned up their noses at such pagan rituals. \u201cThey would die rather than sacrifice to the gods or to the emperor,\u201d Bowler says. Instead, he suggests the date might have come from arcane calculations that account for a belief that saints and great figures of history shared a birthday with the day they died. The Roman church believed Jesus died on March 25. \u201cBut wiser minds said, \u2018No, no, that wouldn\u2019t be the birth, that would be the conception\u2019,\u201d Bowler says. \u201cNine months later is December 25.\u201d<\/p>\n A re-enactment of the Roman festival of Saturnalia in Chester, England, in 2012.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n By the fourth century, churches in the east were marking Christ\u2019s birth on January 6; possibly, Bowler suggests, because they disagreed on the date of his death. The Armenian church still goes with January 6. On that date other churches mark the Epiphany, celebrating the arrival of the Wise Men, the three Magi.<\/p>\n Medieval church councils covered both possibilities, in effect, when they introduced 12 days of celebrations (those of French hen and turtledove fame). Yet in the church, each day honours a saint or encourages reflection. \u201cChristmas was expanding,\u201d Bowler says. \u201cIt\u2019s a bunch of ups and downs; some days you\u2019re happy, some days you\u2019re generous, some days you\u2019re sad.\u201d<\/p>\n Further complicating things, many Orthodox churches today celebrate Christmas on January 7 because they follow the Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar in 45BC, which Pope Gregory XIII replaced in 1582 to fix inaccuracies in leap years. January 7 on the Julian calendar aligns with December 25 on the Gregorian calendar.<\/p>\n Centuries on, governments enshrined Christmas Day as a holiday. Britain\u2019s Factory Act of 1833 legislated a day off for workers on December 25 and Good Friday; Boxing Day, too, from 1871. In colonial Australia, says culinary historian Barbara Santich, people sought to expand on it, as English journalist Nat Gould noted in 1896: \u201cThey are wonderful people for holidays in the colonies \u2026 [they] require the day before to get ready for the holidays, then the holiday itself, then the remainder of the week to gradually get over it.\u201d <\/p>\n Shenanigans such as those that had evolved from the heady days of Saturnalia were bound to cause friction with the Catholic Church. In 380, the Archbishop of Constantinople, Gregory Nazianzen, warned his congregation that putting wreaths on doors, dancing and decorating the streets were \u201cready paths to evil\u201d. These parties certainly have a sprinkling of today\u2019s \u201csilly season\u201d, especially the excessive eating and drinking. \u201cChristmas, almost from the beginning, has been about consumption,\u201d says historian Judith Flanders, author of Christmas: A Biography<\/i>.<\/p>\n In medieval times, the church instituted three Christmas masses but left open the opportunity for people to let off steam in other ways, says Larsen. One ritual, first recorded in the year 911, involved a youth dressing as a bishop and parading through town to receive gifts. But a boy bishop was killed in a street brawl in Paris in 1367 and a vicar knocked out a villager during the parade in England in 1443. Henry VIII banned the custom in England in 1541. By then, France\u2019s King Charles VII had already put his foot down, condemning a Christmas season \u201cfeast of fools\u201d in 1445 for its \u201cmockery disguisings, farces, rhyming and other follies\u201d. Others got nostalgic. \u201cThe first reference I have to someone writing, \u2018Christmas was better in the old days\u2019 was 1600,\u201d Flanders says. \u201cIt was always more \u2018something\u2019 in the past.\u201d <\/p>\n Meanwhile, landowners still gave free food and drink to peasants and servants at Christmas, whether out of charity or excess harvest, Flanders says. Begging, or wassailing took hold, echoes of which can be heard in carols today: \u201cBring us some figgy pudding \u2026 we won\u2019t go until we get some.\u201d<\/p>\n Protestant reformers took a dim view of Christmas, along with any Roman Catholic tradition \u2013 after all, the bible doesn\u2019t actually tell believers to celebrate Christmas, notes Larsen. In the 1640s, a Protestant-led government banned Christmas, triggering riots; the ban was reversed with the return of the monarchy in 1660. In Scotland, where invading Vikings had imported Yuletide \u2013 Yule was a 12-day pagan festival of feasting \u2013 Christmas was also banned as a \u201csuperstitious observation\u201d. \u201cHardline Scottish Presbyterians never celebrated Christmas,\u201d says Cusack. \u201cAll that stuff was just pagan.\u201d Public festive impulses were redirected to Hogmanay, on New Year\u2019s Eve; Christmas Day wasn\u2019t an official holiday in Scotland until 1958.<\/p>\n The naysayers might have had a point. By the late 1700s, amid deepening class divides in industrialised cities, including New York, Christmas became \u201ca time for drunken mobs\u201d, says Bowler. \u201cThey\u2019ll go through the streets at night pounding on drums and garbage-can lids.\u201d The London press was full of accounts of festive debauchery. In 1831, a drunk and disorderly defendant asked a magistrate to forgive him because it was Christmastime, recounts Flanders. Every defendant seemed to think it their right, thundered the magistrate, \u201cto commit all manner of excesses with impunity at this festive season\u201d. The verdict? Guilty as charged.<\/p>\n A fresco in the Saint Nicholas Church, built in 540, in the ancient city of Myra, now Demre, Turkey. <\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images <\/cite><\/p>\n In 2017, archaeologists unearthed a section of tiled floor under the Church of St Nicholas, in southern Turkey. The stone church was built in 520 in the ancient city of Myra, after rising sea levels had swamped an earlier iteration. The floor, with its geometric pattern, would have been the very one Bishop Nicholas of Myra trod around the year 300 as he garnered a reputation for good works, whether finding food for villagers during famine or rescuing them from penury and even execution. He was known for secret gift-giving too, including slipping coins into shoes left by worshippers on the church\u2019s front steps.<\/p>\n Santa is the Italian word for saint, and Claus is a northern European contraction of Nicolaus. As the patron saint of merchants, children, travellers and sailors, Nicholas had broad appeal. \u201cThat makes him a lot more transportable than other saints,\u201d says University of Queensland\u2019s Amelia Brown, a historian and archaeologist. In fact, at times, adds Bowler, \u201cSt Nicholas was the most powerful saint of all next to the Virgin Mary.\u201d <\/p>\n His association with Christmas is helped by the date of his death too, December 6. \u201cIn some traditions people give gifts on Christmas, and in some they give them on St Nicholas Day,\u201d Brown says. In the Netherlands, gift-giving is often on the eve of December 5; a bearded Sinterklaas rides a horse around the streets. (Some Dutch people have traditionally dressed up as his helper, Zwarte Piet, or Black Pete, which has led to controversy in recent times.) Secrecy is part of Sinterklaas\u2019s jam too; gifts are left in sacks on doorsteps or in shoes left by fireplaces.<\/p>\n In southern Germany, Saint Nicholas and a scary Krampus step out to meet villagers, accompanied by\u00a0a local creature in straw called Buttnmandl or Shaking Man, who drives away evil spirits and wakes up nature.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images <\/cite><\/p>\n Mythical gift-givers emerged all over Europe; the witch Befana, for example, brought gifts to Italian children on January 6. \u201cSometimes they\u2019re saints, sometimes they\u2019re local woodsmen or charcoal burners, sometimes they\u2019re scary animals, goats in particular,\u201d says Bowler. In parts of Germany and Austria, an evil half-goat called Krampus accompanies Saint Nicholas in search of naughty children (the figure has spawned a modern horror movie franchise).<\/p>\n But the jolly bearded Santa we\u2019re familiar with was shaped by various 19th-century writers and illustrators, right around the time Christmas was getting out of hand in some places. Some historians argue the middle class \u201ctamed\u201d Christmas, shifting it from class dynamics to family relationships. \u201cThey want to bring it indoors, they want to diminish the class conflict, and they want to focus on children,\u201d Bowler says.<\/p>\n In New York, historian Washington Irving picked up on Dutch immigrants\u2019 stories of Sinterklaas, telling Manhattanites how children would hang stockings on chimneys on St Nicholas Eve that were \u201calways found in the morning miraculously filled\u201d. The gift-bringer appeared for the first time in a sleigh pulled by reindeer in a pamphlet intended as an 1821 New Year\u2019s gift for youngsters. Two years later, the reindeers had names such as Vixen and Blitzen in the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas<\/em> (more famously known by its opening line, \u201c\u2019Twas the night before Christmas\u201d), which scholar Clement Clarke Moore later claimed he wrote for his children. Santa smokes a pipe and laughs contagiously as he fills sacks with gifts.<\/p>\n \u201cOver the course of the century, he\u2019ll become more and more standardised,\u201d Bowler says. Santa\u2019s origins are often misattributed to Coca-Cola, which used him in advertising from 1930. But sugary drinks were far from all he sold. \u201cThere isn\u2019t anything that Santa has not advertised.\u201d<\/p>\n A Coca-Cola advertisement featuring Santa. <\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images <\/cite><\/p>\n In Australia, the land of kangaroo paws and flowering grevillea, we love to decorate our homes with northern European spruce at Christmas. Why?<\/p>\n One answer might lie with Adam and Eve.<\/p>\n In the Middle Ages, says Flanders, autumnal \u201cparadise plays\u201d were staged in the streets. As apple trees weren\u2019t in bloom, the fruits were tied to the branches of fir trees to symbolise the Garden of Eden. \u201cThe plays eventually went out of fashion, but people liked the trees \u2013 they were pretty \u2013 so the trees stuck around,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n And there\u2019s a reason we sing the carol O Tannenbaum<\/i>: it was German merchants who started bringing the trees inside <\/i>their homes \u2013 some were hung upside down, similar to mistletoe or holly and ivy. By the 1600s, the trees were decorated with candles, sweets and paper roses. Perhaps they staved off homesickness for German royals marrying into British nobility too, such as Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of King George III and nanna of Queen Victoria. \u201cWe know, absolutely, in 1800 Queen Charlotte did put a Christmas tree up,\u201d Flanders says.<\/p>\n Prince Albert, Queen Victoria and their children surround a Christmas tree at Windsor Castle, England.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n Despite this, much of the credit for the trees\u2019 popularity in Britain went to Victoria\u2019s German husband, Albert, after the couple were featured under an elaborately decked out tree with gifts in an engraving in the Illustrated London News<\/i> in 1848. \u201cThis became so well known that people began to say, \u2018Oh, well, it was Prince Albert who brought the Christmas tree to Britain\u2019,\u201d Flanders says, \u201cwhich was not true.\u201d Still, the romance lingers: visitors to Windsor Castle this December can view its seven-metre tree, cut from the nearby royal park, decorated with hundreds of twinkling lights.<\/p>\n Such images of fancy trees were able to \u201cgo viral\u201d after the invention of the penny post, a uniform method for sending letters, from 1840 in England (the US set up its own shortly after), and then, some years later, cheap colour printing. Eventually, images of Australian wildflowers and beach scenes were added to the repertoire of robin redbreasts, snowy country churches and children on sleds. By the end of the 19th century, Christmas cards were being sent in huge numbers. \u201cMost of what we do got invented many, many, many centuries after the events of the New Testament,\u201d says Cusack. \u201cIt\u2019s the juggernauts of the 19th century \u2013 the penny post and consumer capitalism in its nascent forms \u2013 that make it a present-exchanging festival.\u201d She adds: \u201cI mean, everybody probably did give gifts, and were nice to each other.\u201c<\/p>\n Christmas in Australia by Nicholas Chevalier, 1865.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>State Library of Victoria<\/cite><\/p>\n A table loaded with candles, some bottles of good red, salad and a turkey stuffed with sausage meat and olives. Cakes, cheese, nougat, and fresh and dried fruits. The kids eat so much they get tummy aches. The dogs and cats fight over the leftovers \u2026 It sounds like a suburban Christmas, but it\u2019s actually a description of a middle-class Christmas lunch in Avignon in the 1700s. Barbara Santich, the author of Eating in Eighteenth-century Provence,<\/em> notes the punchline: as they leave, each man uses a walking stick in case they miss their step, \u201call of them being in our Lord\u2019s vineyard\u201d. \u201cIsn\u2019t it lovely?\u201d she says. \u201cYou can imagine it. And what\u2019s different?\u201d<\/p>\n Treats from earlier, medieval times still make their way onto our Christmas tables too, says Santich, an emeritus professor at the University of Adelaide. She points to nougat, a Mediterranean sweet originally more like almond brittle. \u201cThe turkey tradition was pretty well across France,\u201d she says. \u201cBut Provence had this custom that is now called the 13 desserts: nuts, dried fruits, nougat, marzipan \u2026 The wealthier you were, the greater the variety, but everyone had something, even if it was just nougat.\u201d And dried fruit was imported to Europe in the colder months, expensive and luxurious, so used for religious feasts, she says. <\/p>\n In Britain, by Georgian times, plum pudding was served as an accompaniment to roast beef, says curator Jacqui Newling at Museums of History NSW, over time becoming a quintessential Christmas treat. Occasionally, a pig\u2019s head would cap off the feast. Queen Victoria was a fan of both roast beef and boars\u2019 heads but, then again, her family ate up to 20 courses for Christmas lunch, including exotic birds such as snipe or capercaillie, the curator of a Christmas show at Windsor Castle told the BBC. \u201cThey had swan on one menu.\u201d In his novella from 1843, A Christmas Carol<\/i>, Charles Dickens describes an employee of Ebeneezer Scrooge tucking into a festive goose. \u201cWhat he\u2019s actually saying,\u201d says Newling, \u201cis the [family] weren\u2019t terribly well-to-do and they were kind of daggy by having a goose, whereas proper middle-class people had started having turkeys.\u201c<\/p>\n \u201cIt was time for us to stop slaving over a hot stove and maybe have a barbecue or cook some seafood.\u201d<\/p>\n In the colonies, a turtle from Lord Howe Island was served at the governor\u2019s table for Christmas 1789 (convicts, if they were lucky, might have received a tot of rum). \u201cWhat surprised me,\u201d says Santich, \u201cwas how early were the calls to not reproduce the customs of the northern hemisphere; to have a distinctly Australian Christmas that was suitable for the climate.\u201d She cites the serving of cold ham as an early shift, and picnics, from Brighton to Brisbane, as a popular option. \u201cChristmas \u2026 as it is known and observed at home, cannot be transferred to the tropics, and it is no use trying to do it,\u201d declared the Brisbane Courier <\/i>in 1867.<\/p>\n Preparing Christmas dinner at the Pier Hotel in Coffs Harbour, date unknown.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales<\/cite><\/p>\n Far from being slim pickings, the variety of foods in the Antipodes might have given Queen Victoria a run for her money. In 1843, says Newling, lists at the Sydney Market for Christmas birds included fouls, Muscovy ducks, wild ducks, teal ducks, geese, turkey and pigeons. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting that turkey has crystallised as a classic Christmas dish,\u201d she notes. Pudding is a constant too, she says. One well-to-do family at Vaucluse in 1844 ordered 30 kilograms of dried fruit for Christmas cakes and puddings (they bought in their mince pies which, incidentally, in those days usually also contained meat).<\/p>\n And while Dickens describes a flaming pudding in A <\/em>Christmas Carol<\/i> \u201clike a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy\u201d, the origins of putting a sixpence in the pudding, a custom that continues in some households, aren\u2019t definitively known. Certainly, pudding \u201ctrinkets\u201d were being sold in Australia from the 1890s, says Newling.<\/p>\n A dried fruit dessert bonanza in 1965.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales<\/cite><\/p>\n And post-war tables were not short on dramatic flourishes, with everything from suckling pig to creme de menthe sorbet. \u201cIn the \u201950s and \u201960s, it was very much focused on having a gigantic feast,\u201d says Lauren Samuelsson, a food historian from the University of Wollongong. \u201cIt was traditional British food that was seen as quite classy; having the table set out with silverware.\u201d As refrigerators replaced iceboxes, puddings with jelly and ice-cream came into their own and there was a renaissance in aspic, an old method of preserving jelly made with meat stock, turned to colourful effect on all manner of meat, fruit and vegetables. \u201cQuite disgusting,\u201d says Samuelsson, \u201cbut apparently great for Boxing Day if you\u2019re going on a picnic.\u201d By the \u201970s, she says, \u201cIt was time for us to stop slaving over a hot stove and maybe have a barbecue or cook some seafood.\u201d <\/p>\n In countries such as Japan, where Buddhism and Shintoism are the main religions, the secular aspects of Christmas have taken off, including postwar food customs: families might gather to eat party buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken or strawberry-topped sponge cakes called kurisumasu keki<\/em> (try saying that out loud); while Christmas Eve is all about romance and candlelit dinners.<\/p>\n \u201cChristmas has grown to be a global phenomenon rather than just a Christian phenomenon,\u201d says Bowler, \u201cbecause it offers so many different meanings to people and all of those meanings are positive; they\u2019re very pro-social, encouraging generosity and imagination and hospitality and grace, and forgiveness. Things that we need in our everyday lives and that we carve out a time of the year to make room for.\u201c<\/p>\n Before Gregory Dohnt took his family in search of the perfect white Christmas, the holiday in Australia meant many things to him: hot-chicken lunches during childhood, lavish dinners, barbecues by the beach. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s those bigger memories that are there with Christmas,\u201d he says. His family has since returned to Lapland, and their Christmas trips \u201cwill live in the memory of my three teenagers for a long, long time\u201d. \u201cI love the fact we\u2019ve gone overseas and done that,\u201d he says. \u201cBut we didn\u2019t have to, we have plenty of amazing memories of things in Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
First, why December 25?<\/b><\/h3>\n
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What\u2019s not been to like about Christmas? <\/b><\/h3>\n
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Where did Santa Claus come from? <\/b><\/h3>\n
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Why the trees? <\/b><\/h3>\n
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Is it true plum pudding was once served <\/b>with <\/i><\/b>the roast? <\/b><\/h3>\n
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