Advent is my favorite season of the church year. It makes me feel connected to the past in ways that other times of the year do not. As a historian and something of a romantic, that feeling of connection touches a deep place in my heart.

Yet oddly enough, growing up, our family had no traditions associated with Advent. There were a few Christmas traditions, though. We had a manger scene on top of the television and one on our front lawn; my mom made over 100 pounds of cookies, many of which were from family recipes from Central Europe; we had some special foods on Christmas Eve and opened gifts after dinner; and there were a few less formal things on Christmas morning. That was about it. Even church was more or less optional.

I didn’t even learn much about Advent until I met my wife, whose German Lutheran family was far more active in church than my family was and had Advent customs I had never heard of. I think it was then that I began to grow in my love for the season.

As I looked into the history of our Advent and Christmas traditions, I was surprised to discover how recent so many of them are. I had assumed that many went back to the middle ages, but the only ones that do are Christmas trees, crèches, and caroling. I wrote about the history of the Christmas tree here. In this post, we’ll look at crèches and caroling.

History of the Crèche

Although there is a painting of the nativity in the Catacomb of St. Valentine in Rome that dates to c.380, the first seasonal nativity scene was a performance by St. Francis of Assisi in Greccio in central Italy in 1223. It was very simple: Francis had a manger with straw and a live ox and donkey—not the Holy Family, the baby, the shepherds, angels, or magi. It was essentially a visual aid for his sermon. But it was the first manger displayed for Christmas outside of a church.

Soon statues of the nativity were being produced with a more complete cast of characters, including made for Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome around 1290 by Arnolfo de Cambio. The surviving pieces include the Holy Family, the magi, and part of an ox and ass.

Crèches became very popular in Italy and then spread to other parts of Europe where they were adopted by many Protestants as well as Catholics for use in homes as well as outside of churches. As they spread, they took on many different forms suited to the artistic skills and tastes of the different regions and even the theological purposes of the displays.

For example, the Moravians began building Christmas putz, elaborate Christmas villages designed to tell the story of salvation from Isaiah’s prophecies through the nativity, the arrival of the magi, and the flight to Egypt.

These could grow riotously complex, with Noah’s ark and all sorts of other biblical stories woven into the putz. The putz was adapted for wider consumption in a simplified form as the miniature Christmas villages sold in stores today, which generally owe more to Dickens than to the original putz or nativity scenes that inspired them.

Here We Come A-Caroling

Caroling (not to be confused with wassailing, which was an English custom done around Twelfth Night, January 5) is another Advent and Christmas tradition with medieval roots.

A carol was originally a circle dance accompanied by singers. They were popular from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century, at which point they began to be used for religious festivals and mystery plays. They also began to be associated more closely with Advent, Christmas, and Easter. Folk carols were popular all over Europe.

With the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther encouraged congregational singing during worship, which was done in the vernacular rather than Latin. He translated Latin hymns into German and also composed Christmas songs and encouraged caroling outside of the liturgy. Other Protestant regions followed suit, including England.

But because of the riotous way Christmas was celebrated in England, when the Puritans came to power they banned both the celebration of Christmas and caroling, using as an excuse a stricter reading of the Regulative Principle (i.e. you can only do in worship what is expressly commanded in Scripture) than anywhere else in the Reformed world. As a result, carols all but disappeared in the English world until the late eighteenth century into the Victorian era, when antiquarians rediscovered old carols and new carols like Charles Wesley’s “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” were written. In fact, most of the “old” carols we sing are no older than the eighteenth century.

Since then, the romantic era’s love of the middle ages led to some new carols being composed using medieval melodies (e.g. “Ding, Dong, Merrily on High” by George Ratcliffe Woodward using the medieval dance tune “Bransle l’Official”) or in a quasi-medieval style (e.g. “Masters in This Hall” by William Morris).

By the early twentieth century, churches began holding full-scale carol services, the most influential of which is the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, started in 1918 at King’s College Cambridge.

Other countries have their own carol traditions, including the French Noël (originally sung and danced). Some French carols are well known in the English-speaking world, such as “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella,” “Il est né le divin Enfant,” and “Noël Nouvelet.”

The revival of carols in the nineteenth century paralleled the development of new Advent traditions intended to build anticipation for Christmas. We’ll look at those in the next post.