Christmas Gifts!

Gifts. Tons of gifts. Billions of gifts. Some may think that Christmas and its gift-centric celebration is a modern phenomenon. Yes, we do give very different gifts now in 2015 than were given in 1915, or even 1315, but gifts have always been given on Christmas. 

It all started with the Three Wise Men bringing gifts to baby Jesus. Remember them?  Then when Christianity became a religion and people celebrated the birth of Christ, they also gave gifts.  It started as a way to imitate the wise men and their celebration of Jesus’s birth.  Now obviously, with the advent of Santa Claus, things took a more dramatic turn.

Saint Nicholas was a saint who lived in the 4^th century in Myra in present-day Turkey.  He got his reputation as a gift-giver because of a story about three young women and their poor father who could not provide a dowry for them. Without said dowries, the girls would not be able to get married and they might have ended up as “ladies of the night” to make ends meet, if ya know what I mean. So Nicholas, under the cover of night so as not to embarrass the family by directly giving them charity and to be modest himself, threw pouches of gold coins through the home’s open window.  Saint Nicholas Night is the tradition that came from this story and is celebrated worldwide, but most popular in Europe. The English-speaking world gets the name Santa Claus from a mispronunciation of the Dutch “Sinterklass,” which also happens to be a mispronunciation of “Saint Nikolaos.”

So we all give gifts on Christmas because of a dude in Turkey who was super nice and threw money in people’s windows. #blessed #localhistory

So as you are getting ready to ship loads of gifts to friends and family across the globe, take a minute and check out the history of gift giving. Here is a picture of just a small amount of Christmas gifts and mail going through the mail in New York City to the American Expeditionary Forces in 1918:

So maybe send a little something to someone in the Armed Forces this Christmas season like these folks were doing in 1918.

Sources:
Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer Collection, National Archives.
http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/who-is-st-nicholas/