How Americans Celebrate Christmas Christmas is America’’ s most popular holiday. Some people will attend church and observe Christmas as the birthday of Christ. For others, Christmas is just a day of fun and celebration, a time for family and friends to gather together, exchange gifts and enjoy a huge holiday dinner. Christmas Day will need weeks of preparations. Since the last days of November American homes and stores have been decorated with Christmas trees and bright lights. Schools and churches have been presenting special holiday concerts. People have been going to parties, finding gifts and preparing special Christmas food. For a large number of Americans, Christmas is surrounded by more traditions than any other holiday. Yet, many of these traditions are not really very old ones in the United States. In fact, the nation’’s first settlers would have. been very surprised to see how Americans celebrate Christmas today. People in other parts of the world, of course, have been celebrating Christmas for many centuries. In fact, December was a winter holiday season in northern and southern Europe even before the birth of Christ. And the ancient Romans celebrated the New Year on December twenty-fifth. Some experts believe that is why the Roman Catholic Church set the birth of Christ on that day. Christians borrowed other Christmas traditions from ancient times. In the years before Christ, for example, people honored the evergreen tree as a sign of life after death. For Christians, it became a sign of Christ’’s birth. By the 16th century Roman Catholics in Europe were celebrating Christmas with lively parties filled with eating and drinking. Many of the first Europe an settlers in America, however, disapproved of such customs. They believed people should honor God in r, quieter ways, so Christmas became a day just like any other day for most people in America’’s northern colonies. In America’’ s southern colonies, however, the Church of England became the established religion. Its traditions were closer to those of Roman Catholic Church. So it became common for people on large farms in the south to celebrate Christmas with huge dinners and dancing. And in many parts of America, smaller groups of settlers from other western European countries observed Christmas with their own national customs. After 1,800, all these people began to mix together more and they began to borrow Christmas traditions from each other. Settlers from Ger many, for example, observed Christmas by cutting live evergreen trees and covering them with candies and fruit. By the middle of the 19th century, people all over America were putting up evergreen trees at Christmas. Dutch settlers in New York were most responsible for creating another popular American tradition--Santa Claus. The story of Santa Claus began hundreds of years earlier. During the fourth century, a Roman Catholic Church official called Nicholas of Myra became famous for his many good actions. Nicholas was made a saint (圣人) after his death and it became common in northern Europe to hold a celebration on December 6th, the day Nicholas died. All kinds of stories were told about Saint Nicholas and the Dutch brought one of these stories with them to America. They believed that each year the saint rode a white horse from home to home. He gave presents to children who had been good, and coal or straw to children who had been bad. Other Americans who lived nearby greatly enjoyed the Dutch celebrations. They decided to make Saint Nicholas part of their own celebration of Christmas. But he got a new name Santa Claus. It was taken from the Dutch words for Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus. The Dutch imagined Saint Nicholas to be a serious, even frightening person, who would punish as well as give gifts. But in 1822, an American named Clement C. Moore wrote a Christmas poem for his children. The poem, called A Visit From St. Nicholas, created a completely new Santa Claus. Dr. Moore described a short, happy, little man who rode in an open sleigh (雪橇). The sleigh was pulled from house to house by eight white reindeer (驯鹿). At each house Santa delivered gifts by dropping them down the chimney into the fireplace. Dr. Moore’’ s poem was published in a newspaper in New York, 1823. It soon became popular all over America and it became the source for the Santa Claus American children still believe in today. An American artist named Thomas Nast also played a part in creating Santa Claus. Beginning in 1860s, Mr. Nast drew pictures of Santa Claus for an American publication called Harper’’s Weekly. These pictures showed a fat, smiling old man with a red nose and white beard. He was dressed in a red suit with white fur and a black belt. Today, more than one hundred years later, that same Santa Claus can be seen everywhere at Christmas time. As Santa Claus became more popular, so did the custom of giving gifts on Christmas. Early in the 19th century, American schoolteachers liked to reward good students by giving them small books. Soon some storeowners were special books for the Christmas holidays. And by the 1850s, jewelers, toy makers, bakers and others were selling all kinds of special products at Christmas. By the 1860s, more than half the American states had made Christmas a legal holiday. Since that time, it has continued to grow into a bigger and bigger celebration. Some people say that Americans pay too much attention to Christmas. They say this interferes with the religious of those who are not Christians. Some people, for example, believe that Christmas religious music should not be sung in public schools. They say this is unfair to children whose families do not believe in Christ. Because of such criticism, many public schools now permit students to sing only Christmas songs that are not religious and they also observe the holiday season by teaching students about a Jewish celebration that takes place near Christmas time. This passage is about the origin of Christmas and how people in America celebrate it in the past and at present.