Martin Luther has long been associated with Christmas. I had not realized, though, that scholars recognize his influence in the custom of giving Christmas presents.
He has long been associated with the origins of the Christmas tree, though that story of Luther decorating an evergreen tree with candles to illustrate the light of Christ is probably apocryphal. Northern Europeans had been bringing evergreen trees and branches into their homes for a long time. Luther might have made that custom a staple of Christmas celebrations, but there is no real evidence about this, just the legend. Though legends often contain a grain of truth.
It is certainly true, though, as we have been blogging about, that Lutherans were responsible for the Christmas tree custom taking hold in the English-speaking world, thanks to Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, in Great Britain and the Lutheran immigrants in America.
Luther did play an important role in the development of Christian music. Previously, music in church was sung by priests and choirs, but Luther introduced singing by the congregation in their vernacular language. This included Christmas music, which would also be sung outside of church. Luther wrote some of the foundational Christmas carols.
He did not, however, write Away in a Manger, which was first published in 1882 under the title Luther’s Cradle Song. I wonder if this was a confusion with the song that he did write about the baby Jesus in the manger, From Heaven Above to Earth I Come. Luther wrote this in 1534 specifically for family use.
But Luther’s influence on gift-giving at Christmas is well-attested.
New York University, no less, interviews one of its professors, Charles Ludington, a cultural historian, who outlines Luther’s broader influence on the holiday:
Many people assume that Christmas traditions are as old as Christianity itself, but gift-giving, for example, is a relatively recent Christmas invention within the history of Christianity. It is sometimes attributed to Martin Luther, the man who started the Protestant Reformation, who sought to end the gift-giving celebration of St. Nicholas’s Day and transfer the focus to Christmas and Jesus. But the custom of giving small gifts—often baked-goods, roasted meat, or candy—to friends and family on Christmas day did not extend much beyond Lutheran Northern Europe until the mid-19th century. In the English-speaking world, this custom began to pick up when Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a German and a Lutheran, arrived in Great Britain in 1840 to marry Queen Victoria. Along with establishing gift giving as an obligatory Christmas practice within his family, Albert also introduced the British to the Christmas tree, which gradually replaced the more traditional English Yule log as the requiredChristmas decor in the English-speaking world.
Fr Martin Henry, a Catholic priest and theology professor in Ireland, gives more details in his essay Would Christmas Be Christmas Without Martin Luther?
“It seems well established, in the West in any case, that the annual giving of presents, especially to children, was not originally connected, as is now the case, with the Christmas Season, but with the Feast of St Nicholas on December 6,” he writes. “Up until the Reformation children traditionally received gifts on St Nicholas’s Day, usually on condition that they had been well-behaved during the previous year.” The Reformation, though, put a stop to the elaborate celebrations of saints’ days.
Although he wasn’t keen on retaining the Feast of St Nicholas itself, there is evidence that Luther didn’t wish to abolish the idea of children receiving ‘Nicholas gifts’, to cite a term found in an account of his household expenses from the 1520s.
As the Reformation took hold over large swathes of Europe and as even prohibitions on holding traditional St Nicholas Day processions were formally issued in areas under Reformed control, Luther saved the day, so to speak, by transferring the time of giving presents to Christmas and making the Christ-child, rather than St Nicholas, the ultimate giver.
This change appears to have taken place in stages, during and after Luther’s own lifetime.
Luther himself mentions on one occasion the ‘Christ-child’ along with ‘Nicholas’, as the gift-bringer.
On other occasions he refers to a mysterious figure, the ‘Holy Christ’ or the ‘Holy Christian’, as the giver of gifts.
Some have tentatively identified this symbolic figure with an angel-like personage associated with the nativity scene.
Whatever its ultimate identity, the Reformer’s guiding principle in introducing it was, of course, to present Christ as the bringer of all good things to humanity.
Gradually, however, the Christ-child moved firmly and finally centre stage as the one bringing gifts to children.
So ultimately both the giver (the child Jesus, rather than St Nicholas) and the date (Christmas, rather than December 6) changed and henceforth Christmas became inescapably associated with the giving of gifts.
Catholic parts of Germany, of course, stayed with St. Nicholas. Eventually, though, the Catholic customs and the Protestant customs came together: Catholics accepted Christmas as the new gift-giving day, and Protestants accepted St. Nicholas as the giver. (Say “Saint Nicholas” fast and you get “Santa Claus.”)
Father Henry, rather unusually for a Catholic priest, is appreciative of Martin Luther’s “humanity,” in contrast to the harsh strictness of Calvin and Zwingli.
Irony aside, it appears fairly clear that Luther’s humanity, his desire not to deprive children of their gifts, has contributed to making Christmas the popular feast it now recognisably is.
His Reforming passion allowed him to combine imaginatively his overriding concern for what for him was the redemptive heart of Christianity with his desire to make the goodness of salvation palpable, and materially so, to the smallest of God’s children.
When we moved to Wisconsin, the first time we lived in a community with strong ethnic German ties, our children came home from their Lutheran school and told us that they were supposed to get gifts on St. Nicholas’ Day also! This was a custom they thought we should follow.
So on the night before December 6, they would put out their shoes and would find them the next morning filled with candy and other little treats.
To be sure, our Christmas gift giving has gone way overboard. Originally and until not that long ago, Christmas presents also consisted of sweets and maybe toys small enough to fit into a Christmas stocking. The English would put out stockings instead of shoes for St. Nicholas to fill, giving us the Christmas stocking. That used to be the sole receiver of Christmas presents. Today, we have both the stockings–a remnant of the old St. Nicholas Day observances–and the far more capacious area first under the Christmas and now in the general vicinity of the Christmas tree to hold much bigger, more numerous, and more expensive presents.
Today we often lament the commercialization and materialism that seem to displace the true meaning of Christmas. That’s a fair point. But gift-giving, properly, does signify the true meaning of Christmas.
It isn’t just that Christ came down from Heaven. He came down from Heaven for us. Christ is a gift. Our salvation is a gift. And, in our vocations, we are gifts to one another.
Giving and receiving gifts can be thought of as a spiritual discipline.
Illustration: Martin Luther’s Christmas Tree by J. Bannister – https://nantucketantiquesdepot.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/martin-luther-christmas-tree1.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54429700
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