Each year millions of people around the world celebrate Christmas in a myriad of ways. There’s no denying this holiday and its significance to so many people, and for us, this is one of many times a year where we make more of an effort to appreciate others and remember to be more open-hearted.
To celebrate the holidays this year, we’ve hand-picked special collection of stories and articles on Christmas from the Wiley Blackwell collection and elsewhere. Test your knowledge by taking our quiz, read about the history of the holiday, and explore how the phenomenon of Christmas has spread around the world in the most interesting ways.
Please enjoy, and whatever you may believe, happy holidays to you and yours!
Take Our Christmas Quiz!
Fun Facts about Christmas
History of Christmas – History.com
Ten Ages of Christmas – BBC
How Christmas Went Commercial: A Brief History – Fast Company
Enjoy our special collection freely through January 31.
Evolution of Christmas
Christmas: A Candid History – by Bruce David Forbes
The Historian | Richard Chapman
“Arguing that Christmas has ever been a blend of beliefs, practices, and purposes, Forbes likens it to a snowball that collected and discarded items pell-mell as it rolled along.”
A Child’s Christmas in America: Santa Claus as Deity, Consumption as Religion
The Journal of American Culture | Russell W. Belk
“Although various treatments have attempted to trace the Santa Claus myth to the 4th century Lycian Bishop of Myra, Saint Nicholas’, as well as to European mythical figures including the Dutch Sinterklaas, French Pere Noel, Swedish Santa Lucia and Jultomten, Russian Babushka, German Christkindlein and Knecht Ruprecht, Spanish Three Kings, Italian Befana, and the earlier Roman god Saturn, the modern American Santa Claus bears little resemblance to any of these older myths and legends.”
The Strange Birth of Santa Claus: From Artemis the Goddess and Nicholas the Saint
The Journal of American Culture | Bruce Curtis
“Long ago and far away, so say the legends, there lived a Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor, a bearded Father of the Catholic Church named Nicholas. This Patriarch won his way into the hearts of the people, recently converted from idolatry to Christianity, by destroying the temple of Artemis, a many-breasted goddess of the sea and of grain, a pagan Earth Mother who had a long and distinguished career as a midwife and protector of women.”
History | Douglas Reid
“Despite some serious resistance and much non-compliance with the Puritan regime, it seemed to late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century writers that Christmas observance and festivities had received a damaging blow: the talk was of decline and decay.”
Philosophy
Female Spirituality and the Infant Jesus in Late Medieval Dominican Convents
Gender & History | Ulinka Rublack
“Dominican Christmas sermons, however, encouraged their audiences to become ‘mother of Christ’ and to let their souls give spiritual birth to Christ.”
Pacific Philosophical Quaterly | Fred Adams & Laura A. Dietrich
“The names ‘Santa’ and ‘Father Xmas’ share similar causal histories. They both come out of the same Western cultural tradition. They are both associated with the same lore – the same set of descriptions.”
Existential Scrooge: A Kierkegaardian Reading of A Christmas Carol
Literature Compass | Shale Preston
“A Christmas Carol is indeed historically important, so much so that it may have influenced or even inspired Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety (1844).”
Christmas—Philosophy For Everyone | Cindy Scheopner
“In a state with no racial or ethnic majority, religious views also demonstrate a variety uncommon on the mainland US. at a time when they seem most acute.”
Religion
The Circumstantial Evidence of the Virgin Birth
The Muslim World | Albertus Pieters
“To my mind, so far from the Virgin Birth being a byproduct of Christian imagination, or a thing that while true, was unnecessary and uninfluential in the origin of the Christian religion, it underlies the entire development.”
Are Angels Just a Matter of Faith?
The New Blackfriars | Dominic White OP
“I argue that a philosophically viable Catholic angelology would not only help many people within and outside the Church to make sense of their religious experience, but would offer a much richer conception of creation and God’s saving work.”
The Star of Christ in the Light of Astronomy
Zygon | Aaron Adair
“Although there were centuries of astrological speculation, this overview shows that naturalistic theories of the Star are a late innovation that began with apologetic attempts in the nineteenth century and not long after left the mainstream of biblical scholarship, leaving mostly astronomers to give credibility to this tale.”
Migration
The Christmas Cake: A Japanese Tradition of American Prosperity
The Journal of Popular Culture | Hideyo Konagaya
“For Japanese, Christmas continues to provide an arena to rehearse American values.”
Translation Acts: Afro-Peruvian Music in the United States
Journal of Popular Music Studies | Heidi Carolyn Feldman
“…the track “Panalivio” is based on the music of black Christmas. This Catholic festival, the legacy of slavery and Christianization, takes place in rural Chincha, Peru, a town mythologized during the revival as the cradle of black Peruvian music.”
History Compass | Thomas Adam
“The trimming of Christmas evergreens emerged as part of the modern form of Christmas celebration among wealthy families in Germany during the Romantic period. From here it quickly spread across Europe and even to the New England states in the 1830s and 1840s.”
Literary Criticism
Herrick’s “Christmas Carol”: A New Poem, and Its Implications for Patronage
English Literary Renaissance | Tom Cain
“The religious and secular celebration of Christmas had been under increasing political thread in England and Wales since the Solemn League and Covenent was made with the Presbyterian Scots in September 1643.”
Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity: The Virgilian and Biblical Matrices
Milton Quarterly | Donald Swanson & John Mulryan
“This wedding of the Virgilian and biblical matrices reminds us once again that Milton was the most learned poet of his time, even at the early age of twenty-one, when he composed this astonishingly precocious poem.”
Creative Writing – Enjoy these original works of Christmas fiction from our journals
Critical Quarterly | Robert Cremins
Critical Quarterly | Yaba Badoe
The Yale Review | Sheila Kohler
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