Christmas is a truly global phenomenon. Its popularity as a cultural celebration which can be conveniently detached from its religious roots has helped it to spread around the world. There are only a handful of countries, like North Korea, where Christmas has been absolutely prevented from gaining a foothold. In December 2022, for example, Santa’s slow march to every corner of the map achieved a significant new victory: the Riyadh-based newspaper Arab News published its first Christmas edition, advising its readers on the best ways to “fuse Western ingredients with traditional Arab fare” in dishes like turkey molokhia. Those Saudi Arabians who took the opportunity to experiment with the customary elements of Christmas were also taking part in a ritual as old as Christmas itself: reinventing the holiday for their own purposes and in their own context.
What can often seem the timeless and ubiquitous ingredients of a traditional Christmas celebration—Christmas tree, Christmas cards, roast turkey, stockings filled by a jolly gift-bringer who owns a set of flying reindeer and descends chimneys—are largely Anglo-American creations from the 19th century, disseminated back and forth across the Atlantic and beyond through perennially popular literary texts like The Night Before Christmas or A Christmas Carol. Still today, powerful cultural engines like Hallmark’s Christmas movies help to project this vision of the holiday through global distribution networks. Yet for many, Christmas looks very different from Hollywood’s imaginings. While the moment of Christ’s birth has long been an occasion marked by feasting and communal merry-making, gift-giving, and perhaps even some spiritual reflection, the local expressions of those impulses have taken on some remarkable forms.
Holiday helpers
If the Three Wise Men were the first to deliver presents around the Christmas period, they certainly weren’t the last. Santa Claus might dominate our contemporary sense of Christmas gift-giving, but his modern form was clearly inspired by the figure of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra (now in Turkey) in the fourth century. Saint Nicholas Day on 6 December has long been the occasion for gift-giving in a number of countries, particularly the Netherlands. Other saints have also been positioned as festive gifters: in Greece and Cyprus, Saint Basil does the honors on New Year’s Eve, while Saint Lucy brings presents to Italian children on 13 December. Of course, it’s not just saints who perform this important role: in other parts of Italy, the task falls to Befana, a witch who distributes goodies on the eve of Epiphany. In Spain, the Apalpador pats the tummies of sleeping children to see how many chestnuts to leave them. Germany boasts a plethora of festive gift-bringers and their companions, from the angelic Christkindl—a figure promoted by Martin Luther—to the intimidating Belsnickel, draped in furs and carrying a stick to beat those not deserving of gifts!
Indeed, not all Christmas visitors are as benign as Santa Claus. Iceland’s cast of Christmas characters range from the terrifying—the ogres Grýla and Leppalúði who cook children in a large cauldron, and the Yule Cat who devours those who fail to procure new clothes before Christmas Eve—to the annoying: the Yule Lads, thirteen mischievous boys who threaten domestic chaos across the festive period. Krampus—the demonic figure who first terrified children in Germany as a spooky foil to St Nicholas—has spread well beyond his origins to become another global figure associated with the darker side of the festive season.
Holiday helpings
From Britain’s Christmas puddings and mince pies to Scandinavian pickled herring, regional Christmas food variations are even more numerous than the wild array of Christmas gift-bringers. Take Ethiopia, for example: on Christmas Day, after a 43 day fast, you’re likely to enjoy some doro wat, a spicy chicken stew topped off with boiled eggs, followed by a festive game of Gena—a type of field hockey whose name is also the Ethiopian word for the festive period. Or if you’re in Tokyo on Christmas Day, there’s one traditional festive food that you have to try: a KFC Christmas bucket. The Japanese association between the holiday season and fried chicken is probably the most famous example of a modern seasonal food tradition—dating back to a 1970s advertising campaign—that confounds popular expectations of what the festive table should look like. Just make sure to get your order placed months in advance.
If nothing else, the fact that Christmas generates billions of dollars of spending across the world, connecting countries through networks of trade, is enough to maintain the holiday as a global force in the 21st century. Never mind Lapland, some say that the real Santa’s workshop can be found in the Chinese city of Yiwu, where roughly two-thirds of the world’s Christmas ornaments are manufactured. Some in the west may fear a war on Christmas, but as the Christmas trees go up in Riyadh again, the holiday’s global reach, in all its manifold forms, makes it seem like the war has already been well and truly won.