For most of European history, winter was not so much a backdrop as it is today, but an active force that dictated how people lived. Days shortened, food stores shrank, work slowed and the natural world seemed to withdraw into itself.

The darkest point of the year carried a psychological weight that modern lighting and heating have largely erased. It was the moment when people needed reassurance that the cycle of life hadn’t broken.

Midwinter and the origins of Christmas

In the Roman world, Saturnalia arrived in December with feasting, gift-giving and a brief loosening of social rules. In northern Europe, Germanic and Scandinavian peoples marked Yule, a solstice festival bound up with fire, drink and the idea of the sun’s return. Across these cultures, evergreen plants were brought into homes not because they were pretty but because they were alive when most everything else was completely dead. They were proof of a sort; an assertion that life continued when the world was dark.

None of this had any root in Christianity. Humanity was yet to be saved. But it created a pattern that winter should be met with light, food, presents and shared ritual.

The Christian Christmas

When Christianity did spread its tendrils through Europe, it didn’t impose a festival on an empty calendar but attached itself to this already charged moment, when the harvest had been reaped and the ground was asleep. The decision to place the birth of Christ in late December was as much practical as theological. It was a time when people were already gathering, and when symbolic acts—light, food, ritual—carried particular weight. Over time, the Christian Christmas absorbed these ancient vestiges. Greenery, feasting and gift-giving all remained, they just had new raison d’être.

But the structure of Christian time changed how the season unfolded. In the liturgical calendar a day begins at sunset, which is why major feasts traditionally start the evening before. Christmas was no exception to this: Christmas Eve wasn’t an informal warm-up but marked the opening of the feast. Particularly in Catholicism, Midnight Mass (missa in nocte) marked the transition from waiting to celebration, darkness to light, etc. In much of Europe, especially north of the Alps, that timing mattered more than the following morning.

This is one reason why Christmas Eve still carries such weight in places like Germany and Scandinavia, where it isn’t just a cultural preference but the residue of how time itself was organized.

The Christmas Tree (Tanenbaum—”fir tree”)

The Reformation period deepened the emphasis on the home at Christmas. As Protestant reformers stripped churches of saints, images and elaborate rituals, religious life shifted inward. The household became the primary setting for celebration and, in German-speaking regions, gift-giving moved away from St Nicholas’ Day (something which dated as far back as the Byzantines) in early December and settled on Christmas Eve. The season grew quieter, more contained and more focused on atmosphere than on any kind of grand display. Protestants can be awfully squirrely when they want to be.

It’s here—gradually and almost without announcement—that the Christmas tree as we know it enters the story. It emerged in specific German contexts where an older reverence for trees intersected with Protestant domestic ritual.

Bringing a tree inside, lighting it with candles and decorating it with simple ornaments created a focal point that didn’t rely on clergy or doctrine. It was visually compelling, especially by candlelight, and it made a certain intuitive sense if you were the ancestral beneficiary of Scandinavian and Germanic paganism. At the end of it all, the tree survived winter; so too, presumably, would the people gathered around it.

Britain took longer to warm to the idea of a Christmas tree as a central focus. While English Christmas traditions did favor greenery—such as holly, ivy and yew—the Christmas tree only first appeared at the English court around 1800 under the Hanoverian Queen Charlotte (Sophia Charlotte of Mecklnburg-Strelitz). It wasn’t a fir imported wholesale from Germany but a yew, a familiar English tree associated with endurance and longevity. While the tree itself was not the same as the quintessential fir, the symbolic meaning behind it was.

Despite this initial introduction, the Christmas tree remained a curiosity for decades until the 1840s, when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (yet another round of Germanic British royals) revived the tradition; an illustration of the royal family gathered around their Christmas tree circulated widely. The image mattered more than the object itself because it presented the tree as part of ordinary family life rather than a foreign eccentricity, something which the British middle classes picked up on quickly. Within a generation, the tree lost its novelty and acquired the comfortable illusion of having always been there.

Christmas in the New World

Across the Atlantic, Christmas was evolving at a different clip. Early American culture, particularly in Puritan New England, had viewed Christmas with suspicion. Indulgent, sacreligious nonsense, if not something worse: blasphemy. The 25th of December was once a working day, and festive excess was frowned upon.

However, much like in many other areas, immigration changed the texture of American life. German settlers (Germans are still the most numerous ethnic group in the USA) brought the Christmas tree. Many emerging cities embraced public decoration. The notion of Christmas gradually loosened its religious specificity and became a seasonal, civic event.

The season also stretched in the New World, as Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years blurred into a continuous winter passage rather than discrete observances. The phrase “the holidays”—rooted in the older Christian idea of holy days—suited this extended calendar. It lingered in American speech because it was useful. And buy, buy, buy, the Americans would say; ever a people praising the dollar more than any true religious aspect.

Father Christmas vs. Santa Claus

The figures associated with Christmas shifted as well. In England, Father Christmas existed for centuries, though interestingly, he is not a figure descended from a saint at all.

He emerges in England in the late medieval period, first appearing in the 15th century as an allegorical figure rather than a character. In early texts and pageants, he was closer to a living emblem of the season itself, sometimes referred to simply as “Christmas,” a personification of a season, and one who could speak, admonish and preside.

This early Father Christmas had little to do with children or presents. He represented feasting and hospitality, and the idea that Christmas, as a time of plenty and social warmth, would be a time of retreating from hardship.

In that sense, Father Christmas marked a quiet shift in what the season was doing. Earlier midwinter customs had been acts of defiance, attempts to push back against the immediate reality of darkness and cold by lighting fires, sharing food and bringing living greenery indoors.

Father Christmas, by contrast, belonged to a society that had already learned to survive winter. What he offered was reassurance, and a reminder that the rhythms of communal life in an agricultural society where work was hard, gruelling and sometimes indicative of social divide between families and communities, would resume. He functioned less as a festive figure than as a memory or personification of social habits people feared might not return.

This may be why he proved especially resonant during the 17th century, when Puritan authorities discouraged or outlawed Christmas celebrations. It was then when Father Christmas was reintroduced as a prominent figure, and not as a jovial host but as a complaining old man, lamenting the loss of feasting and fellowship. His appearance varied, but he was commonly imagined as an older man, richly dressed, sometimes in green, sometimes with the green fur-lined, and more a host than visitor.

Santa Claus emerged from a different tradition entirely. His roots lie in St Nicholas, the 4th-century bishop from modern-day Turkey associated with secret gift-giving; his was a cult which spread across Europe. Through Dutch settlers, Sinterklaas arrived in America, where he gradually lost his religious undertones. By the 19th century, he had been reshaped into a nocturnal visitor rather than a saint, delivering gifts directly to children and then departing unseen. Poems, illustrations and, later, advertising fixed his role with increasing precision. He became a mobile, punctual and almost procedural figure; arriving on schedule, carrying a list and performing a defined task, with a sleigh the size of Manhattan.

Whereas Father Christmas was more a symbol yearning for social togetherness, Santa became a system suited to a world in which trade, consumption and organized exchange were playing a larger role.

When British culture encountered the American Santa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the two figures slowly converged. The older English name endured, but it attached itself to a figure who now delivered presents, wore red rather than green, and functioned less as the spirit of the season than as its logistics manager. What disappeared was Father Christmas’s earlier role as an emblem of hospitality and licensed excess.

The change happened gradually enough to feel natural. By the time it was complete, Father Christmas seemed always to have been Santa, and Santa always to have been Father Christmas. The older figure didn’t vanish so much as dissolve, leaving behind a hybrid whose origins were comfortably obscured.