A royal tree and the first Christmas card
Decorated evergreen trees were a German tradition long before they were British. Queen Charlotte, the German-born wife of King George the Third, set one up at Windsor around 1800, but the fashion really took off in 1848, when a newspaper printed a picture of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their children gathered round a tree hung with candles, sweets and ORNAMENT decorations. Within a few years families all over Britain and America wanted one too.
The first Christmas card was commissioned in 1843 by Henry Cole, a busy civil servant who had too many friends to write to by hand. He asked an artist to design a card showing a family raising a toast, printed a thousand copies and sold the ones he did not need. Our Victorians page covers the age that invented so much of the modern Christmas.
The year Christmas was banned
In 1647, during the English Civil War, Parliament, led by Puritans who thought the feasting and drinking had nothing to do with the Bible, banned the celebration of Christmas. Shops were ordered to stay open and churches to stay shut. People held secret services and protested in the streets, and Christmas came back when the monarchy was restored in 1660.
Some traditions are much older than Christianity. MISTLETOE and HOLLY, which stay green in the dead of winter, were already used in midwinter celebrations, and kissing under the mistletoe was a popular custom by the 1700s. The first Christmas itself, with the manger and the shepherds, is on our Nativity page.
Rudolph was written for a shop
RUDOLPH the red-nosed REINDEER was invented in 1939 by Robert May, a copywriter at the Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago, for a colouring book given away to children. The store printed millions of copies. May's brother-in-law later turned the story into the song. FROSTY the SNOWMAN arrived in a song in 1950.
A popular belief says that SANTA wears red because of Coca-Cola adverts. The company's paintings of a jolly, plump Santa from 1931 onwards certainly fixed his look, but he had already been drawn in a red suit by magazine artists for decades. JINGLE Bells was written in the 1850s, and in December 1965 it became the first song played in space, when two astronauts on board Gemini 6 surprised mission control with a harmonica and sleigh bells.
Tracking Santa's sleigh
In 1955 a department store printed a phone number in a newspaper advert for children to call Santa. One digit was wrong, and the calls went through to the operations centre of the United States air defence command in Colorado. The officer on duty, Colonel Harry Shoup, told his staff to give every child an update on Santa's position. Its successor, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, has tracked the SLEIGH every Christmas Eve since, now with a website and thousands of volunteers answering the phones.
A ballet, a fairy tale and the rest
The NUTCRACKER ballet, first performed in St Petersburg in 1892, became a Christmas favourite, and our classical music page tells the story of its most famous sound. The GINGERBREAD house became popular in Germany after the Brothers Grimm published Hansel and Gretel. A STOCKING hung by the CHIMNEY, a CAROL, a WREATH, TINSEL, a GARLAND, EGGNOG, a CANDYCANE, a STAR, an ELF, a SNOWFLAKE and a pile of PRESENTS finish off the season.