Day began to achieve Europe-wide prominence after Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor on December 25, 800, by Pope Leo III in Rome. Charlemagne was a Frank and inaugurated the Carolingian Dynasty, laying the foundations for the modern states of France and Germany. (The Holy Roman Empire encompassed the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, present-day Germany, western Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Austria, Switzerland, as well as parts of eastern France, northern Italy, and Slovenia. It developed a complex legal and political structure. Its central figure was the emperor, whose position combined ancient Roman pretensions of universal and divinely sanctioned rule, with the Germanic tradition of elected kingship. By 1600 it was a mere shadow of its former glory, as its German heartland had been split into a mass of princes and states. It would continue in name until 1806 when it and its coalition of states were defeated by Napoleon.)
In Germany, Christmas was formally established by the Synod of Mainz in 813.
The synod or Council of Chelsea in 816 was called by the King of Mercia (the kingdom of Mercia incorporating all of Britain south of the Humber, minus Wales and the west of Cornwall). The Council enforced the observance of Christmas on December 25, this date formerly being called “Mothers Night,” a vigil in honor of the rebirth of the new sun. King Edmund the Martyr (of East Anglia) was anointed on Christmas Day in 855.
By the ninth century, priests, deacons, and choirs with antiphonal singing were acting the parts of the magi and shepherds during mass on Christmas Day, some churches even suspending a star from the roof which was then pulled to make it move!
Around 950, Christmas was adopted in Norway by King Hakon the Good. There had existed a pagan Yule feast that had been celebrated in the eighth century, if not earlier, and occurred in mid-January throughout most of Scandinavia. King Hakon transferred it to December 25th. King Æthelred of England, who reigned from 978 to 1016, ordained in his laws that Christmas was to be a time of peace and concord among Christian men, when all strife must cease. King William I of England (“the Conqueror”) was crowned on Christmas Day 1066. The anglicized word Christmas, a contraction of “Christ’s mass,” first appeared in writing in 1038 but did not assume common usage in Britain until after the Norman invasion. Prior to that, the festival was always referred to as “In Festis Nativitatis,” the Feast of the Nativity. (It has also been called Noël or Nowel. As to the derivation of the word Noël, some say it is a contraction of the French nouvelles (tidings), les bonnes nouvelles; that is, “The good news of the Gospel”; others take it as an abbreviation of the Gascon or Provençal nadaü, nadal, which means the same as the Latin natalis; that is, dies natalis, “the birthday.” Others say Noël is a corruption of Yule, Jule, or Ule, meaning, “The festival of the sun.” The name Yule is still applied to the festival in Scotland and some other places. Christmas is represented in Welsh by Nadolig, which signifies “the natal, or birth” and in Italian by Il Natale, which, together with its cognate term in Spanish, is simply a contraction of dies natalis, “the birthday.”)
In central Italy, St. Francis of Assisi in 1223 held a midnight mass on Christmas Eve with a nativity scene and live animals. The people in the plays sang songs or “canticles” that told the story during the plays. Although generally credited as being the first nativity play, as we have noted above, something similar had occurred in earlier centuries.
However, where biblical truths from the Apostolic era had been retained, in isolated groups in the region of the Alps such as those who subsequently became known as the Albigenses and Waldenses, Christmas was rejected. This became evident during the Inquisition by Rome, set up by Pope Innocent III around 1200 and initially enforced by Pope Gregory IX in 1233, in order to identify and eradicate “heretics.”
A Romish Inquisitor, in speaking of the Waldenses, tells us:
They . . . affirm that the traditions of the church are no better than the traditions of the Pharisees, insisting, moreover, that greater stress is laid on the observance of human tradition than on the keeping of the law of God.
Seisselius, Archbishop of Turin, states:
They receive only what is written in the Old and New Testaments.
Reinerius Saccho, who provided condemning evidence against them to the Inquisition in a 1254 report entitled, “Of the Sects of the Modern Heretics,” reports:
Whatever is preached that is not substantiated by the text of the Bible they esteem fables. They hold that none of the ordinances of the church which have been introduced since Christ’s ascension ought to be observed, as being of no value.25
The French Inquisitor Bernard Gui, writing in 1320, sweepingly describes the Waldenses as having rejected all the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, namely ecclesiastical authority, especially by their conviction that they were not subject to the pope or his decrees of excommunication. He goes on to complain how all Catholic feast-days, festivals, and prayers were rejected by them as man-made and not based upon the New Testament.26
King Richard II of England hosted a Christmas feast in 1377, at which twenty-eight oxen and three hundred sheep were eaten. “Misrule,” with drunkenness, promiscuity, and gambling, remained an important aspect of the festival.
Some of the customs of the Saturnalia carnival appear to have been transferred into Carnival in February, first celebrated in the thirteenth century and commencing after Candlemas is over (although in some countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, it commences at Martinmas in November). It is largely a Roman Catholic or Orthodox festival. The selection of modern Venetian Carnival masks, shows one feature of Carnival which remains to this day with its spread globally, which is that of “masking,” often as part of cross-dressing.
We noted above how the practice of parading naked in the streets formed a part of Saturnalia, whether the act was voluntary or forced at the behest of the Lord of Misrule. As part of Carnival, the Mardi Gras commences on Epiphany or the Twelfth Night (January 6 when traditionally all Christmas decorations are to be removed). Mardi Gras is French for “Fat Tuesday” and is synonymous for parades, immorality, and excessive partying and feasting immediately before the fasting period of Lent commences. We noted that in the Saturnalia, binge eating, including by force, was also an intrinsic part of the festival. In any event, in Rome in 1466 during Carnival, Pope Paul II forced Jews to run naked along the main street, the Via Lata, for the entertainment of non-Jews. An eyewitness account reports:
Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran . . . amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.27
(Interestingly, as part of the Carnival throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jewish rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in 1836 to Pope Gregory XVI, begging him to stop this annual abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.”)28
By 1500 the festival of Christmas was firmly established wherever the Roman Catholic Church held sway, including in Scotland. The annual indulgence in eating, dancing, singing, sporting, and card playing escalated in England and by the seventeenth century, the Christmas season featured lavish dinners, elaborate masques, and pageants.
