9 People Who Shaped Christmas

Christmas celebrations may vary by household, but a lot of holiday festivities share a number of common traditions. Some rituals have been around for a long time, while others are surprisingly newer developments. But all traditions, regardless of their age, started somewhere—or in this case, with someone. Here are nine people who, in a variety of different ways, influenced how we celebrate Christmas.

1. Queen Charlotte 
2. Washington Irving 
3. E.T.A Hoffman 
4. Clement Clarke Moore 
5. Charles Dickens 
6. Henry Cole  
7. Thomas Nast 
8. Christina Rossetti 
9. Gerhard Lang 

Queen Charlotte 

Christmas trees have become inseparable with the image of Christmas itself, but they were not a common feature outside of Germany until the 19th century. The tradition’s spread from Germany to England (and beyond) is often credited to Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, but it actually goes back a little further. 

It was actually Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who became Queen Charlotte following her marriage to George III, who introduced Christmas trees to England. She arranged for a tree to be brought to the royal family’s court for a Christmas party in 1800; the tree was to be lavishly decorated and adorned with lights. It was a hit, and inspired the wealthy to have similar trees of their own at home at Christmas time. Prince Albert would further influence their popularity later in the 19th century.

Washington Irving 

The American writer Washington Irving is known for his short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which is most certainly not a cozy holiday yarn. But he created a few concepts that have become integral to the image of Christmas, too. Irving was the first to pen the idea of St. Nicholas flying in a vehicle in the sky and also popularized a number of festive traditions he had read about in a book during a visit to Europe. In his 1809 book A History of New York, he describes a dream in which “the good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children.” 

E.T.A Hoffman 

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, better known as E.T.A Hoffman, was a German Romantic writer who penned a number of supernatural and fantastical tales. One of his stories has had a lasting impact on modern Christmas festivities: Hoffman published The Nutcracker and the Mouse King in 1816, which Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky later adapted into the ballet The Nutcracker. (Hoffman’s tale is much darker than the ballet it inspired.) The ballet’s music has become a ubiquitous soundtrack to the holiday season.

Clement Clarke Moore 

The writer Clement Clarke Moore created some of the most lasting impressions of Christmas in just a single poem. He composed the first version of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” to entertain his children for Christmas in 1822, drawing from Dutch stories of the saint delivering gifts to kids during the festive season. The poem begins with the famous lines“ ’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”  and goes on to name eight of Santa’s reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen—names that are still used today. The poem introduced the tradition of St. Nicholas delivering presents on Christmas Eve rather than on December 5 (the night before his feast day). It also described Santa as the jolly, plump man he’s depicted as today.

Charles Dickens 

Charles Dickens did a lot to shape our perception of Christmas. His 1843 novella A Christmas Carol was particularly influential. Dickens’s anger at the unfairness of Victorian labour, and worker exploitation in general, inspired him to write the piece. The arc of the miserly businessman Ebenezer Scrooge becoming a kinder and more compassionate man to his workers and everyone around him was Dickens’s way of drawing attention to these issues. 

The story cemented a number of now-popular elements of Christmas, including the idea of serving a turkey for the holiday’s main meal (a much less common thing to do at the time it was written). We can also thank Dickens for introducing the word Christmassy and for associating Christmas with snow: The concept of a “white Christmas,” depicted in his writing, was inspired by the number of unusually snowy Christmases he had experienced in his earlier years.  

Henry Cole  

The Christmas card industry owes Henry Cole a big one. He was the first to commission a commercial greeting card.

Changes to the postal service in Britain in 1840 made it much easier to send cards and letters by mail—which led to an increasing amount of letters and therefore pressure to reply to them all. Cole (who later became the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) was a well-connected man who received a lot of correspondence. In 1843, he decided to deal with this issue by sending multiple versions of the same card to his social circle at Christmas. Cole asked the British painter John Calcott Horsley to create an image of a festive scene, which he accompanied with a generic seasonal greeting. He then had 1000 of these Christmas-themed cards printed and sent a selection of them to those he knew. Any leftover cards were available to be sold to the public.

This began a tradition of mailing commercial Christmas cards. The paper product’s popularity further increased thanks to improvements in the printing processes later in the 19th century, and sending (and receiving!) the seasonal mail remains a core component of the holiday season today.

Thomas Nast 

The legend of Santa Claus is a lot younger than the mythology surrounding Saint Nicholas, but that hasn’t stopped the jolly old elf from becoming an integral part of the holiday. One man in particular is responsible for shaping the image of Santa Claus as we know it. 

Thomas Nast was a prolific political cartoonist, who, among other things, helped solidify the donkey and elephant as U.S. political symbols. He also illustrated Santa Claus. His depictions of Santa as plump man with pale hair and a snow-colored beard, as well as his choice of a red suit trimmed with white, defined the iconography of this Christmas figure. Nast is also the one who decided that Santa lived at the North Pole.

Christina Rossetti 

“In the Bleak Midwinter” has become one of the most popular Christmas songs: In 2008, a survey of over 50 music directors in the U.S. and UK even named it the best Christmas carol. Its words were actually written by the English poet Christina Rossetti, who first published it as a poem under the title “A Christmas Carol” in an 1872 issue of Scribner’s Monthly. It was later set to music by both Harold Darke and Gustav Holst, with the former’s version becoming especially popular over the years.

Gerhard Lang 

In Christianity, advent refers to the period leading from the end of November (or in some years, very early December) until the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day. And while advent is believed to have been celebrated since around the 5th century, the concept of treat-filled calendars to mark the days in question arises much later. There are records of 19th-century advent products in Germany, but advent calendars as we know them didn’t take off until the early 1900s. 

German publisher Gerhard Lang is credited as the inventor of the modern, commercialized advent calendar—he popularized the mass printing and sale of the product. Lang also created the first chocolate advent calendars in 1926, as well as the first for blind people in 1930.

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