All language subtitles for Origins

The Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.

It's hard to imagine a Christmas in New York without it.

But like many Christmas traditions,

the tree is a relative newcomer to the Christmas story.

Only since the early 19th century

has the decorated tree been an important part

of the American Christmas celebration.

Hello, I'm Harry Smith.

Welcome to the History Channel.

Christmas trees, candy canes, even Santa Claus,

seem like they've been around forever.

But many of these Christmas traditions

are surprisingly recent.

Join us as we look back at how a holiday

that started in pagan Rome

became the centerpiece of the Christian year

and why this season is known as much for shopping

as the birth of the Christ child.

Stay with us for Christmas Unwrapped.

Christmas Unwrapped

Christmas Unwrapped

It is a story everyone knows.

After a rude refusal by a local innkeeper,

Mary and Joseph bedded down in a barn in Bethlehem.

The next day, Mary gave birth to a son,

the Son of God.

Those are the biblical origins of Christmas.

But centuries before Jesus walked the earth,

early Europeans were celebrating light and birth

in the darkest days of winter.

In the Norse country,

this winter celebration was known as Yule.

Around December 21st, the winter solstice,

fathers and sons would drag home

the biggest log they could find

and set it on fire.

The yule log warmed, but it also looked ahead.

Each spark was said to represent a pig or calf

to be born in the spring.

Also dragged inside were evergreens,

the one plant that could make it through a Norse winter.

Evergreens proved that life persisted in this dark time.

There's a natural attraction to that

which lives through the winter

when one is struggling to survive through the winter.

The evergreen is that part of nature

that seems impervious to the coming of winter

and the diminishing of the sun.

And so it's an absolutely natural symbol,

one which I think you react to almost without thinking about.

For as long as the yule log burned about 12 days,

feasting and revelry reigned supreme.

In fact, this was one of the few times

that meat was abundant

since cattle had just been slaughtered for the long winter.

There is a necessity to kill most of the cattle

because you can't keep them alive over the winter

where there's nothing to feed them on.

You keep a few alive for breeding.

But there is an opportunity for a great blowout,

for a great feast, time to party.

The party raged inside in defiance of winter's deadly howl.

There is a spooky feel about the northern yuletide festivals.

You may be all right there in the hall

with the blazing fires,

but outside there are demons, there are spirits.

In Germany, the pagan god Odin

lent his name to this midwinter holiday.

Early Germans were terrified of Odin,

whose nocturnal flights decided

who would prosper or perish in the coming year.

Later, we'd see another Christmas skyrider, Santa Claus.

But for now, staying inside became the smartest choice

at this frightening time of the year.

A thousand miles away in Rome, winter was less harrowing,

but the December festivals were just as elaborate.

One week before the winter solstice,

Romans began celebrating Saturnalia,

a month-long orgy of food and drink.

Named for the god Saturn, which meant plenty,

Rome's established order was turned on its head

and the year was over.

The Saturnalia celebrations were certainly times of revelry,

of turning the social order upside down,

of having the master pretend to be the slave

and the slave pretend to be the master.

Sort of a time out of time

in which one could celebrate

a kind of disorder in the universe.

One of the holiday celebrations

was a time of celebration.

A kind of disorder in the universe.

One of the holiday's important feasts was Juvenalia,

which celebrated the children of Rome.

Although these early festivals are not necessarily

about children particularly,

though they are about fertility,

children did have their particular place.

The indulgence of children, of course,

is very much a part of our model Christmas,

but it did have its place even in these

dry-balled, drunken festivals that the Romans had.

Among the upper classes in Rome,

solstice celebrations were significantly more sober.

Many influential Romans worshiped Mithra,

the god of the unconquerable sun.

To this small but powerful sect,

the birthday of Mithra was the holiest day of the year.

December 25th was the winter solstice

in that part of the world.

And it was also understood to be the birthday

of the sun god, Mithra.

And Mithra was said to be born from a rock.

Shepherds came to worship him as he was an infant god

born out in that pastoral place in the fields.

And many of those stories, of course,

have come into Christian tradition.

While Romans were worshiping the sun god,

a new religion was taking hold throughout the empire.

At first, Christians didn't celebrate the birth of Christ.

His resurrection was the essential fact of the new religion.

By the fourth century, however,

the question of the holy birth became impossible to ignore.

For Christians, the fact of his birth was settled,

but the date remained a mystery.

The Bible doesn't mention exactly when Christ was born,

but certain facts suggest it probably was not in December.

If you're going to sort through the runes of the scriptures,

Jesus was probably born in the spring.

If the shepherds are out in the fields

watching their flock by night,

we're not talking about one of the cold spells

at the heart of winter.

If pagan Rome was already celebrating the birth of Mithra

on December 25th,

it seemed natural to honor the birth of the Christ child

at the same time.

By the fourth century, the church made it official.

December 25th was declared the feast day of the Nativity.

But, of course, it's a very short step

from the feast day of the risen sun, S-U-N,

to the feast day of the risen sun, S-O-N.

So, in a sense, it's a very good choice that the symbolism is there

because the feast day of the unconquered sun was about fertility,

about birth, and so, obviously, it's the Christian Christmas.

The church knew it could not outlaw the pagan traditions of Christmas,

so it set out to adopt them.

The evergreens traditionally brought inside

were soon decorated with apples, symbolizing the Garden of Eden.

These apples would eventually become Christmas ornaments.

And holly, a traditional midwinter decoration,

was recast to represent Christ's crown of thorns.

People already had their own agenda for this season,

and that agenda was not one that was really radically changed

when the names got changed from non-Christian to Christian names.

The church pretty much had a policy of live and let live.

If people would call themselves Christians

and do lip service to the birth of the Savior,

then let them do anything that they wanted to do with it.

But on the other hand, by assigning the Nativity to that time of year,

the church really gave up the opportunity to control

the way that celebration took place.

The tension between piety and revelry at Christmas

would reach its logical and extreme conclusion in Puritan England

when the holiday would be considered so unchristian

it was done away with altogether.

Now back to Christmas Unwrapped, here on the History Channel.

By the Middle Ages, Christianity had largely replaced

the old pagan religions of Europe.

On December 25th, the faithful were called to Gothic cathedrals

like Notre Dame and Salisbury Cathedral in England

for Christ's Mass, soon to be called Christmas.

But out in the streets, the holiday was still more raucous than religious.

If you went to England around Christmas time, anytime before say 1800,

you'd probably feel pretty ill at ease.

You wouldn't think it was Christmas at all.

What would you think it was? Maybe Mardi Gras? Maybe New Year's Eve?

Maybe Halloween? Because Christmas in old time England was really a carnival.

The houses of London were littered with brawling drunken villagers

and couples engaged in the most unholy activities.

And each Christmas, a beggar or student was temporarily put in charge

after being crowned the Lord of Misrule.

The rest of the peasantry also got their once a year chance

to grab power from the ruling classes.

They would go around to the houses of the rich.

They would bang on the doors and demand entry.

And once they were let in, the Lord of the Manor had to give them

the best stuff that he had.

He had to give them his best food, he had to give them his best beer,

his best of everything.

But if he didn't, they would threaten or actually perform a trick.

One surviving Christmas song says,

if you don't give us what we want, then down will come butler, bowl and all.

The rules of Christmas would soon change, however,

as a wave of religious reform swept through England in the early 17th century.

Led by Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans overthrew the King's forces in 1645

and vowed to rid England of all that was decadent.

High on their list was English Christmas,

and in 1652 they outlawed it altogether.

Shops were ordered to stay open, churches were forced to stay closed.

The Puritans were always, I think, deeply attracted to those things

that they were most opposed to.

They had a fear that they might have too good of a time.

I don't mean to trivialize them, but there was a deep fear that

if these things were legalized, they themselves might enjoy them

and their souls would be lost.

The Puritans may have said good riddance to Christmas,

but the people never really stopped celebrating it.

The holiday merely went underground.

If Christmas pie was illegal, it began to be known as mince pie instead,

which was just as delicious.

The deeper need for Christmas in the human heart,

the need for celebration at a time of darkness,

those needs made the battle against Christmas,

gave it a few temporary wins,

but it couldn't possibly secure a final victory.

In 1656, the men of Kent and Canterbury passed a resolution

saying that if they could not have their Christmas day,

they would have the king back on his throne.

They soon got their wish.

The monarchy was restored with Charles II,

and Christmas was restored with him.

It seemed the English could live without a king,

but not without Christmas.

It has been argued that one reason for the restoration of the monarchy

is because by restoring the monarchy, you also restored Christmas.

You restored the proper English Christmas with its rituals,

its traditions, and its carousing.

Christmas is brought back, if you like, by popular acclaim.

The fight against Christmas may have been lost in England,

but the Puritans had high hopes for the new colonies in America.

In 1620, a small group of separatists came ashore at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Even more orthodox than their English cousins,

these men and women hoped to rid themselves once and for all

of the Christmas scourge.

In 1659, Puritans in Boston followed their English brethren

in outlawing Christmas.

Anyone caught exhibiting the Christmas spirit was fined five shillings.

Like in England, however, Christmas remained impossible to contain.

This 1719 Boston Almanac doesn't list a Christmas holiday,

but it does recommend that in late December,

you not let your children and servants run too much abroad at night.

Not all the colonies had such trouble with Christmas.

Captain John Smith, leader of the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia,

wrote that their first New World Christmas was kept with

plenty of good oysters, wild fowl, and good bread.

Jamestown settlers were also the first to drink eggnog as a Christmas drink,

the nog coming from the word grog,

which means any drink made with rum.

After independence, however, all things English fell out of favor in America,

Christmas included.

In fact, on December 25, 1789, the United States Congress sat in session

and continued to stay open on Christmas Day for most of the next 67 years.

At the same time, there are people who are writing in their books

and writing in their books,

at the same time, there are people who are writing in their diaries

that isn't it too bad we don't have any holidays.

So after the revolution, here is an entire nation that works hard,

has forsaken many holidays, has given up many holidays

because they were holidays that were mandated by the crown,

and it is time to start thinking about how to populate the calendar.

As the 19th century dawned, Christmas would be one holiday

that would pull the new nation together.

But it wouldn't be the Carnival Christmas of Old England,

nor would it be particularly religious.

America would invent its very own Christmas,

and in the process reinvent it for the whole world.

New York City, 1820.

Within the space of a generation,

New York had gone from a backwater port town

to the center of American commerce.

Great wealth came to a few during these years,

and moderate livings to the burgeoning middle class.

But the Industrial Revolution had also created a class

of the unemployed and unconnected,

whose very existence threatened the cozy world of New York's middle rung.

This was never more clear than at Christmastime.

Class conflict was emerging with the earliest stages of industrial capitalism,

and so what had previously just had an edge of menace,

a little bit of trick, but much more goodwill, much more treat,

now changed, and the menace became increasingly obvious.

And increasingly serious.

So that, by the 1820s, the Christmas season in cities like New York

was really a time of gang rioting, a really very, very nasty scene.

So nasty, in fact, that in the year 1828,

the New York City Council, for the first time instituted

a professional police force for the city as a direct result

of a particularly savage Christmas season riot the year before.

New York's upper class was worried.

So worried that a few of them set out to change the way the holiday was celebrated.

Washington Irving was America's best-selling novelist,

and in 1819 he used his expertise to write Brace Bridge Hall,

an enormously popular series of stories about Christmas

at an imaginary English manor house.

Here, the classes mingled effortlessly,

as squires welcomed friendly and grateful peasants into their homes.

And in 1843, England's most popular writer, Charles Dickens,

tackled the Christmas problem with A Christmas Carol.

It was a best-seller in London and America,

and the lessons of the story struck a powerful chord on both sides of the Atlantic.

Christmas Carol, I think, showed the Victorians

what could be the use and the meaning of Christmas in a society

which was quite pleased with itself in a way,

but which nevertheless had fears about inequality,

about too much materialism, about perhaps just too rapid change.

There have been countless treatments of this Christmas classic,

some in print and some on screen.

The television version is from 1958,

but the themes are straight out of the 19th century.

I think the character of Ebenezer Scrooge

is a very important lesson to middle-class people.

Because the Christmas season presented them with a real problem.

What do we owe to the different people in our world?

What do we owe to our families?

What do we owe to our employees?

What do we owe to the anonymous poor?

At first, Ebenezer Scrooge refuses to face those problems,

but after his visions of Christmas past, present and future,

Scrooge learns that family and charity cannot be ignored at Christmas time.

Merry Christmas, Bob!

Mr. Scrooge!

And Mrs. Cratchit, for you!

Mr. Scrooge!

My dear, that's for you!

It really is a convergent story.

It's a story about this hard-hearted man being reborn to Christmas observance.

And I'm going to raise your salary

and help your large family in every way possible.

That conversion story is important for Victorians

to be thinking about their own conversion to the holiday,

because it is very much that they are being reconverted.

So many of them had given up on the holiday,

so now they have to come to terms with their own reconnection with that,

and Scrooge has a way of doing that.

There's this lovely story of Dickens going around America

on one of his famous reading tours,

and this American factory owner going to a reading of Christmas Carol

and on the way home saying to his wife,

next year we shall close the factory on Christmas Day.

Nineteenth-century Americans were discovering Christmas

after a 200-year drought of Puritan disapproval.

But the holiday would never have taken hold if society wasn't ready for it.

One important shift was occurring right inside the family itself.

Before the 19th century, the family existed as what we might think of

as an engine of discipline designed to train children to work hard.

After 1820, 1830, the family was very quickly and perceptibly

becoming an agency that was designed to provide the emotional nursery for children

so that they could grow up being sensitive little people

who took a lot of pleasure in the family and in the world itself.

Christmas was tailor-made for this transition.

Now there was a holiday where attention could be lavished on children

without seeming to spoil them.

The moment of Christmas where parents started to pay attention to their children,

I sometimes come to think of this as the invention of quality time within the family,

parents would discover the joy that they could take

out of watching the joy in their children's faces when they gave their children presents.

Americans now knew why they were celebrating Christmas,

but they didn't know exactly how to go about it.

The old pagan revelry was clearly inappropriate for a Victorian home,

but some ancient traditions were perfect for reviving.

The Christmas tree has its roots in Germany

where decorated evergreens had always been a part of the winter celebrations.

But the tree might have stayed there if not for the royal marriage in 1840

of Victoria, the Queen of England, to her cousin, Prince Albert of Germany.

Albert brought his German ways to Windsor Palace, including the annual Christmas tree.

In 1848, the London Illustrated News published this engraving of the royal family

standing by the first Christmas tree most English had ever seen.

In just a few years, a decorated fir could be found in nearly every English home at Christmas.

Within a few years, if you look at Victorian diaries or letters,

people are saying, we had a Christmas tree as is customary,

or we had a Christmas tree as we have always had.

Of course, they hadn't always had one at all.

It's a custom which had started in the 1840s,

and by the late 1850s, people believed that the Christmas tree was part of the English Christmas.

Americans embraced the Christmas tree just as quickly as the English had.

In fact, its connection to the old world was one of its strongest selling points.

For a lot of Americans, these are going to be new holiday traditions,

not something their parents have done, especially in the case of the more austere Protestants.

So they're looking for a reason for what they're doing.

And one of the most convenient reasons they can have is they can say,

well, this is the way it's done in Germany, or this is the way it's done in England.

All of a sudden, Christmas traditions were popping up everywhere.

In 1828, Joel R. Poinsett, America's minister to Mexico,

brought back a green and red plant that seemed perfect for the new holiday.

And in 1843, the English firm of J.C. Horsley printed the first Christmas card.

A newly efficient postal service in England and America

helped make Christmas cards an overnight sensation.

It seemed as though every vestige of the old bacchanalian Christmas was gone,

but even the Victorians couldn't clean up Christmas completely.

Victorians were particularly keen on mistletoe,

because of course you could actually kiss a lady, or a lady could kiss a man,

but normally, in the normal course of events, she would not be allowed to kiss.

So in a society which was fairly strict,

one vestige of that licentious Christmas from earlier times

is the spring of mistletoe. New Victorian Christmas gathering was without it.

By mid-century, Christmas was everywhere in America,

in the streets, in the homes, in the marketplace.

The one place you could not find Christmas was in church.

Most Americans were Protestant, and the Protestant church had ignored Christmas for years,

but Protestant Victorians longed for official religion on this sacred day.

What a number of them do initially is say,

well, if we can't find a Christmas service on our Baptist church or our Presbyterian church,

let's go see what the Catholics are doing, or let's go see what the Episcopalians are doing.

And increasingly, that puts pressure on these latter-day Puritans to have Christmas services,

because there's a way in which laypeople begin to expect it.

Church services, mistletoe, and Christmas trees.

America's new holiday now seemed firmly in place,

but Victorian America had one last contribution to the Christmas season.

A jolly elf, who shimmied down the chimney,

would soon personify Christmas for generations to come.

Now back to Christmas Unwrapped, here on the History Channel.

Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!

Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane.

We borrowed the Christmas tree from Germany and the Christmas card from England,

but one Christmas icon was developed right here in America, Santa Claus.

Hang your stack and say your prayers, because Santa Claus comes tonight.

Long before Santa, however, there was St. Nicholas,

a Greek Orthodox bishop who became one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages.

On December 6th, St. Nicholas Day, good children woke to gifts from the kindly saint.

Bad children sulked away with nothing.

In Holland, he was known as Sinterklaas,

and when the Dutch came to this country, they brought tales of their gift-giving Nicholas with them.

This quaint custom caught the imagination of Clement Clark Moore,

a well-heeled Episcopal minister in New York City.

In 1822, Moore wrote a poem for his children about a good-natured saint

who came down the chimney on Christmas Eve.

It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house,

not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas would soon be there.

Moore dreamed up Dasher, Dancer, and the rest of the reindeer,

along with Santa's entrance through the chimney.

But at first, he was embarrassed by the poem.

He worried it was too frivolous for a man of the church.

Clement Moore was a minister.

Here, a minister, who should be on the other side,

is promoting a secular Christmas with reindeer and all the rest of it.

But there was no mention in the poem of anything religious.

In fact, that's why he didn't reveal who he was.

In the beginning, he didn't reveal the authorship.

Moore soon owned up to the poem when it became clear

that every child in America was scanning the horizon for reindeer on Christmas Eve.

Less clear was what exactly this Santa Claus looked like.

At first, Santa came in all shapes and sizes,

a pagan sorcerer, a frightening gnome,

even a drunkard on a turkey-driven sleigh.

Then, in 1863, Thomas Nast, a cartoonist for Harper's Weekly,

settled the matter once and for all with his version of the Christmas saint.

Nast Santa was rounder and jollier than his austere Catholic cousin.

He looked, in fact, like a man of his times,

a man who would fit right in with the rotund bewiskered robber barons

of the late 19th century.

But Santa was a robber baron in reverse.

Instead of taking from the less fortunate he gave to the less fortunate,

he gave to people regardless of whether they'd done something or not.

In other words, he gave to children.

Instead of gathering together wealth, he gets rid of wealth, and he does it yearly.

A captain of industry with a heart of gold.

It's no wonder that by the 1840s Santa Claus was an irresistible image

to America's retailers.

Here was a guy who could sell anything at Christmas,

but make it seem like you were not buying gifts at all.

Santa Claus provided a way for both children and parents to pretend

that Christmas presents were not in the realm of the commercial marketplace,

that Christmas presents existed in the realm of pure domestic affection.

So Santa Claus played a very important role for both parents and children.

He took presents out of the realm of commerce.

If the image of Santa could sell merchandise,

retailers soon figured that a real-life Santa would boost sales even further.

Santa has been showing up in department stores since the mid-1800s.

It makes perfect sense for us to have our national saint in a department store.

That's commercial sense for us, dollars and cents.

Author and humorist Gene Shepard immortalized this rite of passage in A Christmas Story,

an autobiographical account of one boy's Christmas.

You know, I'd been thinking for weeks what I wanted for Christmas.

I figured the best thing to do is to tell Santa Claus about that.

And I looked up at that Santa Claus and he had these big watery blue eyes

and a huge beard and all, and he's looking at me right in the eye.

And he was so impressive that my mind went blank.

It's like if all of a sudden you're sitting on the president's lap

and he says, what would you like me to pass in legislation, Sonny?

I mean, your mind's going to go blank. You can't remember any of this stuff.

And so at that point Santa Claus looked at me and he says,

all right, how about a football, kid?

How about a nice football?

A football? I wanted a BB gun.

So he pushed me off his lap and this elf grabbed me

and threw me down a slide that went down into the snow.

And I laid there for a minute and I knew that I was not a fit person to talk to the great.

Santa Claus was obviously a star.

A celebrity of this magnitude obviously needed a sidekick.

In 1939, Robert May, a copywriter at the Montgomery Ward Department Store,

dashed off a promotional children's book to lure Christmas shoppers into the store.

May's story told of an ostracized reindeer with a big red nose.

Poor Rudolph. Where most reindeer's noses are brownish and tiny,

Rudolph's was red, very large and quite shiny.

This physical, shall I say, disability turns out to be an asset because it's a foggy Christmas Eve.

This fog would be hard to get through.

And this light on the nose enables poor old stumbling Santa Claus to get through.

So you have this handicapped sort of child figure helping the benighted parental figure make Christmas possible.

Rudolph brought Christmas full circle.

It was now the children who really made Christmas possible.

Only they understood the meaning of this enchanted day.

From Washington Irving to Montgomery Ward, a battle for Christmas had been fought and won by kids.

By the 1920s, few vestiges of the Carnival Christmas were left in America.

One exception was this Christmas parade in New York City where a glimpse of Santa Claus was worth the all-day wait.

But by the 1950s, Christmas was strictly a family affair with eggnog by the fire,

bing on the hi-fi and a load of presents under the tree.

The joy of opening up gifts is one of the things that makes Christmas worth the wait.

The joy of opening up gifts is one of the things that makes Christmas worth the wait.

The joy of opening up gifts is one of the things that makes Christmas worth the wait.

The joy of opening up gifts is one of the things that makes Christmas worth the wait.

The joy of opening up gifts is one of the things that makes Christmas what it is.

It's the mystery of all these packages.

I think that's why we wrapped them.

It's exciting to have a package lying there with silver paper on it and you don't know what's in it.

And they opened it up and there it is. It's something that's really great that you really want it.

But to give presents, you have to shop for them.

And shopping has long been at the heart of the Christmas season.

Critics say this yearly buying frenzy obscures the real reason for Christmas,

to celebrate the birth of the Christ child.

To celebrate the birth of Christ and the gift that God gave us,

as much as the gifts we give our children on Christmas Day.

But she wants all the toys, right?

I think a lot of it is more commercialized than when I was younger.

I remember going to church and having family dinners being more of an important aspect of it.

It's difficult because the children don't grow up realizing what the real meaning is.

People say that Christ has been lost in Christmas.

What's implicit in that is the idea that Christ had ever been totally the center of Christmas.

And as Christmas has been celebrated ever since it was instituted as a feast of the nativity,

there has always been other ritual, other ceremony, other activity associated with Christmas, in addition to Christ.

At the All Souls Church in New York City,

Christmas Eve services give the secular side of the holiday some stiff competition.

At All Souls we sing carols.

We bring in choir and orchestra who do great music from the Christmas tradition.

Certainly today, most churches revel in the celebrations as completely as do the corporate malls.

That's not a bad thing. It actually goes back to the sources of this kind of holiday,

where we recognize that people have deep needs at this time of year to connect with that,

which is very important, but also to celebrate.

I think it's 50-60% of the population going to one kind of Christmas religious service or another.

So clearly, a lot of people haven't lost sight of the religious meaning.

But what seems to be the concern here is that there's a struggle, a competition over what the real meaning is

and a sense that the religious meaning of Christmas is still there.

And I think that's a very important point.

But what seems to be the concern here is that there's a struggle, a competition over what the real meaning is

and a sense that the religious is not competing effectively with all these other competitors.

But perhaps Christmas in America is more a combination of the sacred and the secular,

and less a competition between the two.

I think that if people had Christmas with just Christ in it,

it would not be a holiday that would come out into the streets the way that it does,

because the trees, the carols, the shopping, all of that becomes the cultural material that holds the religion in place.

This cultural material is everywhere.

Certain songs and movies have become as much a part of Christmas as the tree.

Certain songs and movies have become as much a part of Christmas as the tree.

I don't want to get married to anybody, you understand?

I want to do what I want to do.

And you...

Movies such as It's a Wonderful Life, our hunger for them, our delight in them,

reflects a deep potential goodness in the human soul.

But these are good movies.

People do good things and they get rewarded for them.

To my big brother George, the richest man in town.

Oh!

Someone might say that this was a trivialization of Christmas.

I think it probably is coming a little closer than many of the things we do

to tapping the true Christmas spirit in the broadest sense of that word.

That's a Christmas present from a very dear friend of mine.

Look daddy, teacher says, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.

That's right, that's right.

And a boy climbs.

Nowadays, kids watch new films and new TV shows.

Why Mr. Scrooge, Merry Christmas!

And they will grow up thinking that that was the way Christmas always used to be.

You leave me no alternative but to give you...

Toys!

Yes, toys. No, no, no, no. I'm giving you a raise.

We always reinvent and every time we reinvent,

we think that what we're reinventing is something that has no beginning.

You can reinvent Christmas or celebrate it the way your great-grandparents did.

The only thing you cannot do is ignore Christmas.

To not catch a glimpse of a Christmas tree or hear a note of jingle bells

would be nearly impossible.

And since 98% of Americans celebrate Christmas in some form,

it looks like that won't change for quite some time.

Something touches America somewhere down deep in his belly button about Christmas.

He can't really explain what it is about Christmas that he enjoys so much.

He just knows that when all those red and green lights go up on the street

and you see Santa Clauses walking around with their bells,

something happens to you. You enjoy it.

Now you can be cynical all you want, but you still enjoy it.

Charles Dickens and Washington Irving may have invented our idea

of the nostalgic Christmas, but the images worked.

Somehow a holiday that celebrates the domestic pleasures of children and family

was just what we wanted.

It's as though the spirit of Christmas has always been with us,

and perhaps it always will be.

For the History Channel, I'm Harry Smith. Thanks for watching.

When it comes to snack food, we've got a mouthful of historical facts.

Did you know the pretzel is 1,400 years old?

And the potato chip was created because a diner complained her French fry was too thick.

The ingredients was anger and revenge.

More snack food tech on Modern Marvels tonight at 9 on the History Channel.