Where did the Christmas tradition originate?
If you mean the ‘traditional British Christmas’ then Charles Dickens and his ilk are largely to blame. Snow, robins, turkeys, decorations, HOLIDAYS, puddings, presents, cards, and all the rest of the garbage, were scarcely known before the middle of the 19th century. Previously, churchgoers might not have worked on Christmas Day, in the same way as they might not have worked on Good Friday or other Christian festivals. As other respondents have indicated, the ‘turning of the year’ festival taken over by the Christians had been in existence for centuries, and locally, some people might have raised a glass to the returning daylight, but all the Dickenian baggage, no that is a fairly recent invention. Allen.
