SOUTH BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Local police said it was a typical holiday Grinch

tale: A home was broken into on Christmas Eve, and wrapped presents were

stolen off a kitchen table.

Little did they know the culprits were kids.

Authorities said Friday that a 9-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy used a

gift card to pick the lock on the back door of a home a block away. They then

took about $200 in wrapped presents that were located on a kitchen table,

including Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers CDs.

The couple who lived in the home returned from some Christmas Eve shopping to

find the house broken into, and the presents gone, South Brunswick police

Detective Jim Ryan said.

One of the children’s relatives who also lived in the neighborhood spoke with

the couple and realized the gifts matched some mysterious extra presents the

children appeared to receive on Christmas.

The relative contacted the children’s mother, who got the truth out of them

on Wednesday, and then contacted police.

“A 9- and 5-year-old would never be on our suspect list. For a burglary?

Maybe for taking a bike or something like that, but not for a burglary,” Ryan

said.

The children’s names were not released, and charges are not planned.

Christmas traditions have a way of feeling timeless — you may have seen the same ornaments, sung the same songs and eaten the same foods for your whole life. Some Christmas traditions are, in fact, ancient. They have pre-Christian roots and originate from pagan winter-solstice celebrations or Roman festivals. Other traditions are relatively modern–either rescued from oblivion or conjured up in the surprisingly recent past. Some significant holiday traditions include decorations, activities and food.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
The flurry of holiday consumerism extends beyond December 25th as shoppers search for post-Christmas sales.
 
Christmas decorations
With Americans spending about $8 billion annually on Christmas decorations, it’s clear that tinsel, green trimmings and electric lights are an important part of most peoples’ holiday [source: ABC]. Evergreen trees and garlands were used as decorative symbols of eternal life by ancient Egyptians, Chinese and Hebrews; European pagans sometimes worshiped evergreen trees. By medieval times, western Germans used fir trees to represent the Tree of Paradise in mystery plays about Adam and Eve. They decorated the trees with apples and later with wafers to symbolize the host. The trees grew increasing popular in Germany and settlers introduced them to North America in the 17th century. Many people also decorate with holly, mistletoe and ivy. Decorators started lighting up their trees with electric bulbs in the 1890s. Since then, lights have become an integral part of Christmas decorating.
Christmas activities
Outdoor light displays and other decorating traditions have created Christmas activities of their own. Decorators sometimes compete over the most ornate lighting displays and spectators walk or drive through neighborhoods to marvel at the exhibits. Schools and churches often stage Christmas pageants that reenact the Nativity. Saint Francis of Assisi started this custom in 1223, believing a life-size staging of the Crèche would make Jesus’ story clear and accessible. Christmas pageants might also include traditional carols which are still sometimes sung door to door by groups of friends or neighbors.
Christmas food
Traditional Christmas food often gets a bad rap — there’s green beans soaked in mushroom soup, potentially primordial fruitcake and blob-like figgy pudding that, for some reason, made carolers sing “we won’t leave until we get some.” But Christmas fare is also a delicious combination of harvest feast foods, like turkey, squashes and potatoes; winter festival foods like roasted meats and an array of baked goods that outdoes any other time of year. Many novelty treats mimic other Christmas traditions: the Bûche de Nöel imitates the Yule log, gingerbread houses copy well-trimmed colorful chalets and cookie cutters turn out legions of trees, stars and Santas.
Of course, Christmas traditions center on the assumption that Jesus was born on Christmas Day — the 25th of December. In the next section, we’ll learn the history behind the nativity’s date.

 The first harbingers of Christmas arrive in October when jarring sales and decorations follow fast on the heels of summer. But by December, Christmas’s true heralds are out: twinkling lights lining streets, the smell of balsam and spice cookies wafting through the house and visits from friends and relatives. The season’s spirit drives people to the mall, to the kitchen, to midnight mass and to festive gatherings.
Christmas Tree Image Gallery

Christmas is a mixture of secular and religious traditions. In New York City, crowds gather to watch the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.
See more Christmas tree images.
 
But how did people celebrate Christmas before the advent of shopping malls and electric lights? What’s the history behind the tradition? At its core, Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus. The holiday’s connection to Christ is obvious through its Old English root of “Cristes maesse” or Christ’s Mass. For Christians, it is the time to renew one’s faith, give generously and consider the past. But Christmas is also a secular celebration of family–one that many non-practicing Christians and people of other religions are comfortable accepting as their own. The secular nature of Christmas was officially acknowledged in 1870 when the United States Congress made it a federal holiday. Federal and state employees and most private businesses observe the Dec. 25 by not working.
Christmas is also a fascinating miscellany of traditions: one that combines pre-Christian pagan rituals with modern traditions. Every family that celebrates Christmas has its own customs–some surprisingly universal, others entirely unique–but all comfortably familiar in their seeming antiquity.
In this article, we’ll learn about the history of Christmas from its pagan roots to its modern incarnation as a shopping blitz.
 

It would be easy enough to imagine Christmas as a simple continuum of tradition dating from the birth of Christ. You’d begin with the nativity story, apply the December 25th date to Jesus’ birth, establish the gift-giving precedent of the magi and work from there. Over the centuries, classic Christmas traditions would accumulate: perhaps beginning with the yule log, followed by the Christmas tree and finally winding up in the present day with giant inflatable snowmen and icicle lights.

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images
Modern pagans still celebrate the winter solstice at Stonehenge in England.
 
The history of Christmas, however, is hardly a continuum. It is a varied and riotous story, one that actually predates the birth of Christ. Early Europeans marked the year’s longest night — the winter solstice — as the beginning of longer days and the rebirth of the sun. They slaughtered livestock that could not be kept through the winter and feasted from late December through January. German pagans honored Oden, a frightening god who flew over settlements at night, blessing some people and cursing others. The Norse in Scandinavia celebrated yuletide, and each family burnt a giant log and feasted until it turned to ash.
In Rome, people celebrated the raucous festival of Saturnalia from Dec. 17 to Dec. 24 in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture. The celebration consisted of a carnival-like period of feasting, carousing, gambling, gift-giving and upended social positions. Slaves could don their masters’ clothes and refuse orders and children had command over adults. Two other Roman festivals, Juvenalia, a feast in honor of Rome’s children, and Mithras, a celebration in honor of the infant god Mithra, also fell near the solstice.

By the fourth century, the church decided that Christians needed a December holiday to rival solstice celebrations. Church leaders selected Dec. 25 for the Feast of the Nativity. Christmas gained ground over the next several hundred years, becoming a full-fledged holiday by the ninth century, although it was still less important than Good Friday and Easter.
Early Christmas, however, was not the peaceful, albeit busy family holiday we know today. Christmas’ proximity to Saturnalia resulted in it its absorbing some of the Roman festival’s excesses. Christmas in the middle ages featured feasting, drinking, riotous behavior and caroling for money. Religious puritans disapproved of such excess in the name of Christ and considered the holiday blasphemous. Oliver Cromwell went so far as to cancel Christmas when he seized control of England in 1645. Decorations were forbidden and soldiers patrolled the street in search of celebrants cooking meat. Puritans in the American colonies took a similarly dour view of Christmas: Yuletide festivities were outlawed in Boston from 1659 though 1681.
But by the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, Christmas began to take on the tame associations it has today. New Yorker Washington Irving wrote popular stories about Christmas that invented and appropriated old traditions, presenting them as the customs of the English gentry. Queen Victoria’s German husband, Prince Albert, introduced a Christmas tree to Windsor Castle in 1846. An engraving of the couple with their children in front of the tree popularized the custom throughout England and the United States.
In the 20th century, the focus of Christmas became increasingly commercial. In the next section, we’ll learn about traditions involving presents and the history of Christmas gifts.

At Christmastime, you might notice signs amid residential light displays or on church boards that merrily proclaim “Happy Birthday, Jesus” or announce that “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Of course, such messages are merely meant to remind people of the sentiment behind Christmas. But the signs do raise questions about the accuracy of Biblical dates and the history of the Church year.

Because the Bible offers no date for Jesus’ birth, the placement of the nativity is up for debate. However, the presence of shepherds “keeping watch over their flock by night” [Luke, 2:8] suggests the birth may have actually occurred in the spring during lambing–the only time of year shepherds watched their flocks both day and night. During the centuries immediately following Jesus’ life, Church leaders made no effort to correctly date the nativity. They focused on deaths and feast days, dismissing births as secondary.
But by the early fourth century, Church leaders decided they needed a Christian alternative to rival popular solstice celebrations. They chose December 25th as the date of Christ’s birth and held the first recorded Feast of the Nativity in Rome in A.D. 336. Whether they did so intentionally or not, Church leaders directly challenged a fellow up-start religion by placing the nativity on December 25th. The Cult of Mithras celebrated the birth of their infant god of light on the very same day.

Church leaders may have also had theological reasons for choosing the date of Dec. 25th. The Christian historian Sextus Julius Africanus had identified the 25th as Christ’s nativity more than a hundred years earlier. Chronographers reckoned that the world was created on the spring equinox and four days later, on March 25th, light was created. Since the existence of Jesus signaled a beginning of a new era, or new creation, the Biblical chronographers assumed Jesus’ conception would have also fallen on March 25th placing his birth in December, nine months later.

Elesha Coffman

It’s very tough for us North Americans to imagine Mary and Joseph trudging to Bethlehem in anything but, as Christina Rosetti memorably described it, “the bleak mid-winter,” surrounded by “snow on snow on snow.” To us, Christmas and December are inseparable. But for the first three centuries of Christianity, Christmas wasn’t in December—or on the calendar anywhere.

If observed at all, the celebration of Christ’s birth was usually lumped in with Epiphany (January 6), one of the church’s earliest established feasts. Some church leaders even opposed the idea of a birth celebration. Origen (c.185-c.254) preached that it would be wrong to honor Christ in the same way Pharaoh and Herod were honored. Birthdays were for pagan gods.

Not all of Origen’s contemporaries agreed that Christ’s birthday shouldn’t be celebrated, and some began to speculate on the date (actual records were apparently long lost). Clement of Alexandria (c.150-c.215) favored May 20 but noted that others had argued for April 18, April 19, and May 28. Hippolytus (c.170-c.236) championed January 2. November 17, November 20, and March 25 all had backers as well. A Latin treatise written around 243 pegged March 21, because that was believed to be the date on which God created the sun. Polycarp (c.69-c.155) had followed the same line of reasoning to conclude that Christ’s birth and baptism most likely occurred on Wednesday, because the sun was created on the fourth day.

The eventual choice of December 25, made perhaps as early as 273, reflects a convergence of Origen’s concern about pagan gods and the church’s identification of God’s son with the celestial sun. December 25 already hosted two other related festivals: natalis solis invicti (the Roman “birth of the unconquered sun”), and the birthday of Mithras, the Iranian “Sun of Righteousness” whose worship was popular with Roman soldiers. The winter solstice, another celebration of the sun, fell just a few days earlier. Seeing that pagans were already exalting deities with some parallels to the true deity, church leaders decided to commandeer the date and introduce a new festival.

Western Christians first celebrated Christmas on December 25 in 336, after Emperor Constantine had declared Christianity the empire’s favored religion. Eastern churches, however, held on to January 6 as the date for Christ’s birth and his baptism. Most easterners eventually adopted December 25, celebrating Christ’s birth on the earlier date and his baptism on the latter, but the Armenian church celebrates his birth on January 6. Incidentally, the Western church does celebrate Epiphany on January 6, but as the arrival date of the Magi rather than as the date of Christ’s baptism.

Another wrinkle was added in the sixteenth century when Pope Gregory devised a new calendar, which was unevenly adopted. The Eastern Orthodox and some Protestants retained the Julian calendar, which meant they celebrated Christmas 13 days later than their Gregorian counterparts. Most—but not all—of the Christian world now agrees on the Gregorian calendar and the December 25 date.

The pagan origins of the Christmas date, as well as pagan origins for many Christmas customs (gift-giving and merrymaking from Roman Saturnalia; greenery, lights, and charity from the Roman New Year; Yule logs and various foods from Teutonic feasts), have always fueled arguments against the holiday. “It’s just paganism wrapped with a Christian bow,” naysayers argue. But while kowtowing to worldliness must always be a concern for Christians, the church has generally viewed efforts to reshape culture—including holidays—positively. As a theologian asserted in 320, “We hold this day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the sun, but because of him who made it.”

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Produced by Sesame Workshop and Muppets. Executive producers, Carol-Lynn Parente, Kevin Clash, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein.

With: Kevin Clash (Elmo), Sheryl Crow, Jamie Foxx, Charles Gibson, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Hudson, Kevin James, Alicia Keys, Brad Paisley, Ty Pennington, Steve Schirripa, Tony Sirico, Ben Stiller.

Holiday specials have been kicking butt ratings-wise this year, perhaps as a temporary antidote to everything else that’s happenings in the world. Most of those have been classics, though ABC scored big with the new “Shrek the Halls” and follows it up with “Elmo’s Christmas Countdown,” a Sesame Workshop production that really is that rarest of commodities — fun for the whole family. Granted, a little of that grating Elmo voice goes a long way for anyone over 8, but for the most part, this is an old-fashioned Christmas variety spec, down to goofy numbers and occasionally painful use of big-name stars.

Ben Stiller has the most expansive role as the voice of a hyperventilating elf who misplaces the Christmas Countdown, and if he and Elmo can’t find it, the holiday won’t come. So with help from other fabric-covered friends, the pair go about recovering the squares — each triggering a little musical interlude, with the likes of Sheryl Crow or Anne Hathaway seeming to have a jolly old time interacting with the Muppets characters.

OK, so watching Jamie Foxx half-rap his number is awkward, and a comedic bit with “The Sopranos’ ” Tony Sirico and Steve Schirripa (trying to play Bert and Ernie) surely must have sounded better on paper. Another segment with Ty Pennington of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” feels more self-promotional than magical.

On the plus side, ABC News’ Charles Gibson proves Brian Williams isn’t the only hip anchor in town by lending his voice to reindeer newsman Charles Blitzen, and it’s grand hearing Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys belt out holiday tunes, even if they’re duets with fuzzy hand puppets.

Perhaps foremost, it’s nice to see a network spend a few bucks putting on something aimed at kids at a time when most of them have outsourced their Saturday-morning lineups by brokering the space to outside suppliers.

So an entire hour of network primetime devoted to a feel-good fantasy for tykes? As Elmo might say (repeatedly, in fact — until you want to stuff the little guy into a washing machine), “It’s a Christmas miracle!”

Co-executive producer, Joey Mazzarino; director, Gary Halvorson; writer, Mazzarino; music, Mark Radice, John Califra, Jamie Foxx. Running time: 60 MIN.

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I’m on staff at the Webb-Deane-Stevens museum in Wethersfield, CT. The museum is a small complex of three 18th century houses. The Webb House, built in 1752 by merchant/trader Joseph Webb, is the centerpiece, famous for 220 years as the place where George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau planned the campaign that ended the Revolutionary War. When I lead guided tours, I get to say, “George Washington slept here”, and mean it. He stayed for 5 days in 1781. Next door, the Silas Deane house, built in the late 1760’s, was the home of the controversial diplomat who accompanied Benjamin Franklin to Paris to solicit French military and financial assistance against the British. On the other side of Webb, the 1780’s Isaac Stevens house, which illustrates American life following the War for Independence, completes our little historic neighborhood.

This December, the WDS has teamed with the Wethersfield Historical Society, right across the street, to present a tour of historic Christmas decorations. The beginnings of the American Christmas that we celebrate today are represented in the Stevens House, while an elaborate Colonial Revival Christmas (early 20th century) is brought to life in the Webb House.The Webb House has long been known as Hospitality House. The pineapple has long been known as a symbol of hospitality, and a fresh pineapple graces the newel post of the main staircase in the center of the building. Another pineapple crowns the top of a lemon topiary in the center hall.

Rochambeau and Washington did not know in advance that the they would clinch their victory at Yorktown, but that is what actually happened. Wallace Nutting, who restored this house in 1915, had a series of murals painted on the walls of this room to represent the conference that took place in this building and various scenes from the battle itself. Today we refer to it as the “Yorktown Parlor”. For the month of December, however, the Revolution takes a back seat to Christmas.

Electric tree lights came into common use during the 1920’s and 30’s. Gift giving became more widespread at this time. Typical wrappings consisted of white tissue paper and ribbon ties. During this time, manufacturers began producing patterned paper, usually floral prints. No Santas or Rudolphs yet.

Across the center hall is an elegant dessert buffet. Jordan Almond and rock candy topiaries, nut trees, cookies, candies, tiered cakes, plum pudding, port, creme de menthe……..Hostesses in this era prided themselves on the magnificence of their table.