Christmas history: everything you wanted to know
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Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Did Oliver Cromwell ban mince pies? When did people first give Christmas presents? And why does Santa wear red? Well, in honour of the festive season, today we're bringing you a classic episode from our archive.
In it, I speak to George Goodwin, historian and author of Christmas Traditions, a Celebration of Festive Law, to answer listener questions all about the history of the festive period. Let's start with a question from Lavie Marie, who was one of our Twitter followers, who asked, when did people start gathering together for Christmas parties? Well, thank you very much indeed, Ellie. Well, we'll with that one, that takes us straight in to the fact that the celebration for Christmas really stems from the fact that there has long been a, and I should say for the secular part of Christmas, there has long been a celebration. of the shortest day of the year, the midwinter celebration, it's the the winter solstice and it goes all the way back to Saturnalia, the Roman festival of Saturnalia between the 17th and the 23rd of December.
And of course there were celebrations by the the Saxons and the Vikings, and that's where Yule comes from. And as for for Christmas, you know, people sort of gathering for celebrations for Christmas, well, the secular part of Christmas has a lot to do with saturnalia. and yule. And just to give you an idea of that, I've got a piece by the the Roman writer Lucian in the role of the priest of Saturn, a sort of kind of lord of misery, and this was written as early as the second century AD. And he says, during my week the Cirrus is barred, no business allowed.
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