From 1931 to 1964, illustrator Haddon Sundblom created a new Santa each Christmas for Coca-Cola magazine advertisments. This fat, jolly, red-suited and white-bearded man is the Santa we know and love today. For a history of Santa Claus through the ages, see Page D3.

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Christmas begins with Christ. On this, historians agree.

Everything else — the tinsel and the lighted trees, the fat guy in the sleigh and the nine airborne reindeer — all come later.

“People like to think of things as always having been,” says Edward O’Donnell, an associate professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. “But they’re not.”

Most Christmas traditions, according to O’Donnell, a regular church-going and choir-singing Christian, are manmade creations or “opportunistic inventions.”

O’Donnell specializes in urban and ethnic history, more particularly, New York City and Irish-Americans. Both, he says, factor prominently into Christmas as we know it — or don’t know it, as the case may be.

Here, in Dickensian fashion, O’Donnell introduces us to Christmas past, present and future. He tells us what we know about the auspicious occasion, and one nagging detail we don’t: its actual date.

Christmas past

“Christians believe Jesus was born at a certain time and place,” O’Donnell says. “But there’s no certainty about what day of the year it was.”

So Christians made a choice, a strategic one, according to O’Donnell. They chose a date near the end of the year to compete with pagans who in the darkness of December were positively giddy celebrating the prospect of more sunlight: the winter solstice.

Several centuries later, Christmas divides Christians.

“There is no mention of Dec. 25 in the Bible,” O’Donnell says. “Christmas to the Puritan mind was pure invention in the same way some orthodox Jews regard Chanukah as a purely manufactured holiday.”

The Puritans fled to the New World “to establish a Christian utopia,” according to O’Donnell. However, one of the Puritans apparently smuggled the idea of Christmas on board one of the boats. This prompted the Puritans to officially ban Christmas in 1659.

“Before that it was absolutely frowned upon. People were thrown into jail if they were singing or enjoying themselves on that day. Christmas was the ultimate symbol of imPuritanism. They feared it would inevitably lead to deadly sins of gluttony, drunkenness, materialism and everything else.”

In 1681, O’Donnell says, Puritans conceded defeat to the growing popularity of Christmas and repealed their ban. A little more than a century later, the secular floodgates of Christmas opened wide.

From Scandinavian culture came the lore of St. Nicholas, who became the patron saint of New York, according to O’Donnell, and who looked nothing like his modern-day depictions.

“He existed as a fairly nondescript bishop in what is now Turkey,” O’Donnell says. “He looks like a stern church father.”

St. Nicholas gained a reputation for generosity, supposedly tossing a bag of gold into the house of a family that was so poor the parents were contemplating selling their children.

“That’s where people make the connection of St. Nicholas as gift-giving.”

In Scandinavian culture, St. Nicholas arrived by horse, boat or sleigh pulled (not flown) by reindeer.

“He would give gifts, usually in children’s shoes.”

Somehow that mutated into stockings by the fire, in a room decorated with a tree adopted from Germanic culture.

“The forces of multiculturalism and secularism were already at work,” O’Donnell says. “People like to have fun and to make money.”

The early Santa depictions vary widely. Sometimes he has a full beard, sometimes a trimmed one, and sometimes none at all.

In the early 1820s, Clement Clarke Moore, a resident of New York City, wrote ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, giving names to Santa’s reindeer, of which there were just eight, which Moore characterized as “tiny,” pulling a “miniature” sleigh. And, most notably, Santa was very short, essentially a dwarf, “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf.”

This description lost out to an 1863 depiction by Thomas Nast, another New Yorker who, in an illustration for Harper’s Weekly, showed Santa as a large, full-grown man, with a fur coat and pipe.

“In the modern day, Santa Claus has given up smoking and lost a little weight,” O’Donnell says.

The modern-day Santa, taken largely from Nast, is benevolent. However, his predecessor was sometimes malevolent.

“In his bag of toys you could see a schoolmaster’s whip,” O’Donnell says. “He wasn’t just going to put coal in your stocking. He was going to thrash you. The naughty and nice image was much more severe. Thomas Nast turned him into your grandfather.”

Meanwhile, with the 19th century came the full commercialism of Christmas.

“If you go back to the mid 1850s, people are really complaining about how they’ve lost the Christ in Christmas and it’s all about shopping. You can see retailers have figured out this is a fabulous time to push merchandise.”

All the gifts given all around the world made some children suspicious about the existence of Santa. In 1897, Virginia O’Hanlon, an 8-year-old Irish-American girl living in New York, asked the New York Sun newspaper, which prompted a published reply reprinted annually over the next 50 years of the paper’s existence: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

Santa’s appearance was fine-tuned and further popularized in 1931, when Coca-Cola used an illustration of a jolly bearded man in its ads. The figure, with his fur trimmed red suit and pink cheeks, has remained the iconic image of Santa Claus.

Next came the melodies and what O’Donnell calls “the grand American tradition of Christmas songs written by Jewish-American songwriters.” In the early 1940s, Irving Berlin, a Jewish-American living in New York, wrote “White Christmas,” popularized by Bing Crosby. And in 1949, Johnny Marks, another Jewish-American New Yorker, wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” adapting a poem produced by his brother-in-law Robert May for the Montgomery Ward department stores.

“It started out as a booklet and it was purely commercial,” O’Donnell says. “It was a door prize essentially.”

Christmas present

Christmas isn’t just for Christians. It’s for anyone who wants in on the Santa fantasy and the epic gift-giving experience.

“Every year it becomes ever more commercial and ever more secular,” O’Donnell says. “All you have to do is go to Japan where there are very few Christians and Christmas is absolutely everywhere. Who doesn’t like Christmas? It’s pretty colors and bright lights and you give gifts to each other.”

There’s much about Christmas today that O’Donnell doesn’t much like, particularly the increasingly bigger and bolder decorations.

“About five years ago the American landscape became blighted by inflatable Santas. Now you see inflatable Santas playing poker with the reindeer, and they’re 11 feet tall. People realized how much energy it takes to run the blower to keep them inflated. One Santa near me the people keep up by tying a rope around its neck. That’s fine when it’s inflated. But when it’s not, it’s a Santa lynching.”

Whatever’s new for Christmas seems interesting and compelling to people, according to O’Donnell. And the year after the haves have it, the have-nots will.

“Ten years ago it was a big deal if someone had lighted reindeer on the front lawn. The next year, they’re in Wal-Mart for $2 each. It’s the democratization of luxury and the pursuit of the next thing.”

Christmas future

The secular, tacky and unbridled commercialism of Christmas will go on.

“It’s here to stay,” O’Donnell says. But, he says, when the situation becomes excessive, some people will withdraw, retreating to an earlier time and Christmas tradition, whatever that means.

“People will look for ways to emphasize what this holiday is really about.”

And for those who would like to forge a new future for Christmas, O’Donnell has a plan.

“The ultimate way to stop the commercialization is to buy less. Don’t start buying early and don’t spend as much. Set limits. Everyone can do all kinds of things to reclaim Christmas.”

brourke@projo.com