Do All Our Traditions Make Sense Anymore?

January 2025

I love the holiday season. I love the anticipation, the merriment, and the getting together with family and friends. I love having holiday decorations on display. But I no longer look forward to putting up and taking down boxes and boxes of them. Never-the-less, I’ve always put them up—the whole ever-loving lot of them–every single year, because it’s “tradition.”

According to Wikipedia: “A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past.”

As a little one, sixty-some years ago, I loved it when my parents put up the few Christmas decorations we had. It always meant Santa would be coming soon.  Yet born and raised as a Christian, my favorite part of Christmas was and still is the story passed down through the centuries of the virgin birth of the Christ child, when a wondrously bright star inspired lowly shepherds and three wise men bearing gifts from the east to follow the light to the place where the divine infant laid in a manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes.

So how is it that these venerable Christian beliefs morphed into a tradition of dragging a fresh or fake pine tree into your house, stringing it with lights and ornaments, and hanging giant stockings on a mantle in hopes that some old man named St. Nicolas will magically flash across the night sky in a sleigh led by eight flying reindeer, to land on your roof and patiently wait while the jolly old elf would slide down your chimney with a bag full of toys to be placed under that pine tree you drug in?

Can you even imagine trying to explain this “tradition” of having an in-house Christmas tree—in hopes that a sleigh-driving elf and eight flying reindeer will land on your roof—to an alien being from another planet as the perfect example of American cultural norms?  

As a pragmatist, I find it odd that I never even considered questioning why we continue this rather bizarre ritual every year…until recently. It only crossed my mind when my husband and I made plans to travel for most of this past December. Given we would hardly be at home, I found myself oddly relieved at the thought of eliminating the holiday decorating “tradition” from my December to-do list.

When our travel plans ultimately fell apart due to a variety of reasons, I was naturally disappointed that we would not be flashing across the night sky ourselves to deliver gifts to family members. But most of all, I was more disappointed that staying home meant I’d now have to spend hours putting up a tree and decking the halls. That’s when I realized the blessedness of the holiday season wasn’t so much about setting the scene, but about the “tradition” of being with beloved friends and family.

It was only then that I came to question what caused our lovely Chistian Christmas traditions to morph so radically from the adoring story of the nativity to the commercialized frenzy it became over the past century. That’s when I decided to do some research into how we acquired such convoluted habits. Here’s what I discovered:

Harking back to the days of yore, the mysterious Druids—the priests of the ancient Celts—adorned their temples with evergreens as a traditional symbol of everlasting life. In many regions, people believed that evergreens and the then-sacred mistletoe plant kept away witches, ghosts, evil spirits, and illness.

Fast forward to about 500 years ago in Germany, when the practice of decorating evergreen trees with cookies, apples, nuts, and sugar sticks became a part of the Christmas tradition. The first documented appearance of a Christmas tree in the United States traces back to 1747 in Bethlehem, PA. That first humble “tree” stood within the confines of the Moravian Church settlement to symbolize the festive spirit of the community. It was fashioned from a wooden triangle adorned with evergreen branches.

The first known written account of reindeer in association with the legend of Santa Claus appeared in 1821 when a New York printer named William Gilley published a poem by an anonymous author in the form of a sixteen-page booklet titled A New Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve. Part III.  

The tradition of in-store Santas began in 1841 at a store in Philadelphia which featured a life-size model of Santa Claus to attract children. This inspired a trend among other shop owners to provide a chance for children to meet a real “live” Santa. R.H. Macy, the owner of Macy’s in New York City, was one of the first to create special holiday displays. In 1862, Macy’s was the first to have an in-store Santa for kids to visit. 

Christmas trees, as we know them, became fashionable in Britain and along the east coast of America during the mid-19th-century after a London magazine pictured Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their family gathered around a Christmas tree.

In 1880, F.W. Woolworth introduced the first hand-blown glass tree ornaments to the US mass market. Purchased from the German cottage industry, this first batch of glass ornaments purchased for Woolworth’s variety store in Lancaster, PA, sold out in two days.

The tradition of strung Christmas lights was introduced in 1882 by Edward Johnson, a friend and partner of light-bulb inventor Thomas Edison. The few who could afford them replaced their former one-time-use wax candles—individually wired to a Christmas tree to signify “the light of Jesus”—with a single-wire string of eight bulky, pear-shaped red, white and blue-colored electric light bulbs. This early set of eight bulbs would have cost an average buyer about a week’s wages—equivalent to about $80 today. US President Grover Cleveland helped make these lights more popular after he used them to light a Christmas tree in the White House in 1895.

In the early 1900s, during the Art Nouveau rage, Christmas trees began to be draped in tinsel and ornamented with lovingly painted glass bulbs. In the 1920s, General Electric’s pre-assembled lights became more accessible and cheaper for the masses to purchase.

Up until the early 1900’s, Santa Claus was a rather spooky-looking character. In 1920, when Coca Cola conducted a well-executed holiday marketing campaign featuring Santa in the Saturday Evening Post, it became apparent that a more wholesome looking Santa would be more desirable. In 1931, Coca Cola commissioned an illustrator named Haddon Sundblom to create a more cheerful Santa Claus that was featured in American publications like National Geographic, Ladies Home Journal, and the New Yorker.  

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was born in 1939 from a massive marketing campaign for Montgomery Wards. Rudolph was featured in a book written by a company advertising copywriter named Robert L. May. With the intention of drumming up newspaper coverage, May’s book, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, was given away for free, with more than 2 million copies being distributed.

Believe it or not, the term “Black Friday” was first documented back in 1961 in a statement by Denny Griswold of the Public Relations News: “In Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday.” Hardly a stimulus for good business, Griswold recommended a more positive approach to kick off the holiday shopping season and pushed more consumers into stores by converting the terms “Black Friday” and “Black Saturday” to “Big Friday” and “Big Saturday.” The term “Black Friday” never caught on until the 1980’s when retailers began to divulge that the term referred to the day after Thanksgiving as the first day profits for the year would move from the red into the black.

The term “Cyber Monday” was coined in November 2005 through the marketing efforts of the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org stated: "77 percent of online retailers said that their sales increased substantially on the Monday after Thanksgiving, a trend that is driving serious online discounts and promotions on Cyber Monday this year." Cyber Monday has since become the online equivalent of Black Friday.

So, there you have it. Our holiday traditions, originally born from the nativity story, have morphed over the past 200 years into a season of commercialization and retail frenzy thanks to the advent of technology and the evolution of mass retail marketing. As the Big Bad Wolf—from the Little Red Riding Hood story—might have potentially said, “All the better to extract your money with, my dear!” 

Becoming more enlightened, I’ve since put the brakes on some of those holiday “traditions” that no longer make sense to me. No more ritzy-glitzy trees. No more spending long hours putting up and taking down boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations. No more standing in long lines to mail precious, yet likely unappreciated gifts via a Postal Service that’s lately perfected better disappearing services than delivery service.

This past Christmas I enjoyed putting up (and taking down) just a few sentimental collections of lighted porcelain Christmas houses along the mantle and entry hall credenza, and a small pre-decorated tree atop our entry hall table. Meanwhile, we cherished hosting warm and welcoming dinner parties for those dearests of friends who had lost their special loved one with whom they had shared their life.

To me, that’s the true spirit of Christmas and these are the kinds of traditions worth keeping.