Christmas wasn’t always the highly commercialized gift-giving festival it has come to be known as.

Highline history professor Rachael Bledsaw says it wasn’t until the holiday’s date was shifted by the Roman Catholic Church that it became associated with the traditions in practice today.

“Christmas’s religious history is a bit murky, but what is clear is that despite the biblical evidence of a spring or summer birth, the holiday was moved to align itself with the Winter Solstice and the Roman festival of Saturnalia,” Bledsaw said. “Both were already celebrated with parties, festivals, and gift exchanges.”

The move, Bledsaw said, allowed the Catholic Church to satisfy both Catholics, by giving them a reason to celebrate, and polytheist pagans, by permitting them to continue the celebration of their holiday.

“The early Catholic policy was, ‘If you can’t stop them, steal the holiday,’ she said. “So, the church moved Christmas so the pagans could still celebrate and the priests could say they were celebrating Christmas.”

After this change, Christmas came to develop something of a dual personality, Bledsaw said. By the late Middle Ages, the holiday’s two faces were rather conflicted.

“On the one side was the solemn, holy, and reverential side that focused on the birth of Christ,” she said. “On the other was the wild, ruckus parties with alcohol, food, songs, and stories.

Christmas eventually arrived in North America when the continent was still divided into colonies

“For the English colony of Jamestown, Christmas was celebrated in 1608,” Bledsaw said. “But the French colonies in eastern Canada and the Dutch colonies (in modern day New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey) were a few years earlier.”

Several colonies, however, did not celebrate the holiday in their early days. Puritan colonies such as Massachusetts refrained from Christmas celebration for some time, Bledsaw said.

“They believed the holiday was too pagan for them to celebrate. It was only after the Puritans lost control of the colony that Christmas was celebrated there,” she said.

But, before long, Christmas’s second face — the one that involved gifts, partying, and distinctly lively celebration — caught on in the U.S., Bledsaw said, first getting its start in the colonial South.

And it became even more secular as time went on. As it turns out, two people were almost single-handedly responsible for jump-starting Christmas’s popularity in the U.S.

“Christmas celebrations may have stayed a strange winter version of Halloween if not for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert,” Bledsaw said. “Victoria and Albert worked hard to be more relatable and act more like a middle-class family, focusing on their children and sticking to gender norms idealized by the 19th century.”

Part of that process of appearing normal ended up involving Christmas.

“They encouraged and celebrated the idea of Christmas as a family holiday, where all the ideals and dreams of children could come true,” Bledsaw said.

“They were adored for that in America, and Americans of all classes wanted to mimic them.”

Receiving that approval from such popular public figures brought more attention to Christmas than ever before, and played a large role in making the holiday as widespread as it is today.

Shortly after Victoria and Albert’s endorsement of the holiday in the 1800s was the birth of none other than Santa Claus.

“With that came the creation of Santa Claus, a combination of various saints and charitable spirits, who in America looks like a jolly white-bearded man in a red and white fur suit,” Bledsaw said.

“He was the creation of a poem whose authorship remains in dispute,” she said. “But, he was immediately a media darling.” 

While the U.S. did adopt a new Christmas mascot in Santa Claus, they also left one out: Krampus.

“Krampus was a goat-human-devil creature that went around and punished children,” Bledsaw said. “In some traditions he has his own night, Krampushnacht, and in others he rides with the Santa figure.”

But, though they may ride together, Krampus’ Christmas activities are far less jolly than the present-delivering Santa Claus.

“He will beat naughty children with reeds or chains, and will flat out kidnap the really naughty ones,” Bledsaw said. “In America, that’s up to Santa, who just leaves coal for the bad ones.”

Most of the Christmastime traditions Americans engage in today aren’t quite so violent.

But a number of them do have their own interesting backstories, often tracing back to the non-Christian cultures of the former Roman Empire.

“The traditions we know as Christmas developed from former pagan beliefs,” Bledsaw said.

One such tradition is the decorative use of both mistletoe and holly. Both of these, Bledsaw said, were plants sacred to the Druids, members of ancient Celtic cultures.

Another is the traditional dessert, the Yule log.

“Though now a cake featured on the Great British Baking Show, the Yule log was a large log brought in and burned,” Bledsaw said. “It warmed the house and the heat also stopped evil spirits and entities from sneaking into the house.” 

Even the humble Christmas tree, perhaps the most iconic Christmas tradition, originated from ancient pagan culture.

“The X-mas tree was an act of sympathetic magic practiced by the Celtic and Germanic tribes of Europe,” Bledsaw said. “They believed that if they cared for and protected one tree, the whole forest would be preserved and returned in the next year.”