World Traditions

Christmas as we know it today is a Victorian invention of the 1860s.  As probably the most celebrated holiday in the world,  Christmas today is a product of hundreds of years of both secular and religious traditions from around the globe. For more information about how various countries in the world celebrate this Yule Time Holiday and Feast, check out the A&E History Channel Site related to the Year End Holidays. 

The map below is from the History Channel Site  and shows the areas covered in the section on World Traditions. 

Most Canadian Christmas traditions are very similar to those practiced in the United States. In the far north of the country, the Eskimos celebrate a winter festival called sinck tuck, which features parties with dancing and the exchanging of gifts.

According to reports by Captain John Smith, the first eggnog made in the United States was consumed in his 1607 Jamestown settlement. Nog comes from the word grog, which refers to any drink made with rum.

 

Decorating evergreen trees had always been a part of the German winter solstice tradition. The first "Christmas trees," that is, trees explicitly decorated and named after the Christian holiday, appeared in Strasbourg, in Alsace in the beginning of the seventeenth century. After 1750, Christmas trees began showing up in other parts of Germany, and even more so after 1771, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited Strasbourg and promptly included a Christmas tree is his novel, The Suffering of Young Werther. In the 1820s, the first German immigrants decorated Christmas trees in Pennsylvania. After Germany's Prince Albert married Queen Victoria, he introduced the Christmas tree tradition to England. In 1848, the first American newspaper carried a picture of a Christmas tree and the custom spread to nearly every home in just a few years.