People all across the world love celebrating Christmas but only few of them know the idea behind celebrating Christmas. Very few people know that the idea of celebrating Christmas dates back to the 4th Century. The festival was started by the Catholic Church because the rival pagan religion was threatening the existence of Christianity. At that time there were different religions who were trying to survive and celebrating a special day was the best way of grabbing the attention of the people.
Have you ever thought why 25th of December was kept as the date of Christ’s birth. The only reason why Christ’s birthday was celebrated on the 25th of December is that the Catholics wanted to compete with the Romans. The Romans used to celebrate the birth of their sun god ‘Mithras’ in order to encounter them the church leaders decided to celebrate the birth of Christ at the same time of the year. The date 25th December was as it collided head on with the rival Pagan religion.
But once Pagans were subsided Christianity spread like wild fire. Soon after people all across the world were seen celebrating 25th December as the birth date of Jesus Christ. But nowadays the Christmas celebrations are quite varied but there is a reason behind each tradition.
If you want to understand the secrets behind some major Christmas traditions then you must read the following pointers:
- Santa Claus is one of the major characters related to Christmas and you will be surprised to know that Santa Claus originated in Turkey. His actual name was St Nicholas who was very pious and devoted his entire life to Christianity and helping the poor.
- Christmas tree holds a lot of importance in the festival as well. But you will be amazed to know that the Christmas tree originated in Germany. It is also believed that Martin Luther was the first person to light a Christmas tree. But the most amazing thing is that the Christmas tree was not widely used in Britain until the 19 century AD.
- The hard candies is one of the another very famous Christmas item. It is believed that hard candies have been around for several hundreds of years but the truth is that these were introduced in the early 1900’s. These were initially provided to the children in order to keep them quiet during church services.
Each and every Christmas celebration item has a story behind it which is quite interesting but only very few people know about it.
