Christmas Eve
<p>Late on the night of 24 December 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force, dug into the waterlogged trenches of Flanders, heard something carrying across the few dozen yards of mud that separated them from the German lines. It was singing. The Germans were working their way through “Stille Nacht,” and along their parapet they had set out small fir trees, lit with candles, that the Kaiser had sent to the front. The British answered with carols of their own. Over the following hours, in places where the opposing trenches lay only thirty to fifty yards apart, soldiers climbed out into no man’s land to swap chocolate, tobacco and buttons, to bury their dead, and in a few spots to kick a football about. The shooting that had killed so many of them resumed within days, but for one evening the war stopped, and it stopped on Christmas Eve.</p>
<p>That such a thing could happen at all says something about the particular weight this night carries. The 24th of December is not the feast itself; it is the threshold before it, the held breath. And for an enormous part of the Christian world it is the threshold, more so than <a href="/specialdate/christmas-day/">Christmas Day</a> that follows, where the real celebrating is done.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-night-before-matters-at-all">Why the night before matters at all</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>The habit of starting a feast on its eve is older than Christianity. In the Jewish reckoning that the early Church inherited, a day began not at midnight but at sunset, so the observance of any holy day naturally opened the evening before. The “vigil” of Christmas grew out of that logic: the watching and waiting through the dark hours until the dawn of the feast. What started as a liturgical technicality acquired, over many centuries, a character entirely its own.</p>
<p>The reason a December date exists to keep vigil over is itself a tangle worth pulling apart. There is no record of Jesus being born on 25 December, or in December at all, and the Gospels give no date. Two broad explanations compete. One is that the Church planted the feast in mid-winter to occupy ground already held by Roman festivals of the season, the riotous Saturnalia and the sun-cult of Sol Invictus, whose own feast fell on 25 December. The other, the so-called calculation hypothesis, runs through arithmetic rather than rivalry. The writer Sextus Julius Africanus, around AD 221, fixed the conception of Jesus to 25 March, the Roman spring equinox, which the Church would later keep as the Feast of the Annunciation. Count nine months of gestation forward from 25 March and you arrive, exactly, at 25 December. The idea that the date was reached this way was given its clearest modern form by the French priest and historian Louis Duchesne in 1889. Africanus himself, it must be said, never offered a birth date, so the chain is suggestive rather than proven. Either way, the evening before that date became the vigil, and the vigil became Christmas Eve.</p>
<h2 id="the-poem-that-built-santa-claus">The poem that built Santa Claus</h2>
<p>For English speakers, much of what Christmas Eve looks like in the imagination, the sleigh on the rooftop, the reindeer, the round and twinkling visitor coming down the chimney while the household sleeps, can be traced to a single piece of light verse. “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” now better known by its first line, “‘Twas the night before Christmas,” appeared anonymously in the Troy Sentinel, a newspaper in Troy, New York, on 23 December 1823. It had reportedly been sent to the editor by a friend of the author’s, copied without his knowledge.</p>
<p>The poem is usually credited to Clement Clarke Moore, a professor of Oriental and Greek literature, though he was slow to claim it. His name was attached only when it appeared in the New-York Book of Poetry in 1837, and he formally acknowledged it as his own when he included it in his own collection, simply titled Poems, in 1844. Whoever held the pen, the verse did extraordinary work. It gathered up scattered folk material about St Nicholas, gave the figure eight named reindeer and a specific itinerary, and pinned the whole performance to a single night: the eve. The modern picture of children sent to bed early so that a nocturnal benefactor can do his rounds owes more to those few stanzas than to any church or catalogue.</p>
<h2 id="the-first-star-and-a-place-set-for-the-absent">The first star, and a place set for the absent</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>Move east across Europe and the evening becomes the centrepiece of the season outright. In Poland the supper called Wigilia does not begin by the clock; it begins when the first star is sighted in the sky, in memory of the star of Bethlehem, and a child is often sent to watch for it. The meal that follows is meatless and traditionally runs to twelve dishes, one for each apostle, with beetroot soup, carp and dumplings among them. Wafers called opłatki are broken and shared around the table with wishes for the year ahead, and in many households an extra place is laid, the seat left empty for an unexpected guest or for those who cannot be there. Similar suppers, opening when the first star appears, are kept across much of Central and Eastern Europe.</p>
<p>In Germany and Austria the evening, Heiligabend, is when the tree is finally revealed and gifts are exchanged, rather than the following morning, so that Christmas Day itself becomes the quieter, more churchgoing half of the holiday. In the Spanish-speaking world Nochebuena, the “good night,” draws extended families to a late meal that often runs straight into the small hours and on to a midnight service. In Italy some households keep a meal built around fish on the 24th. The common thread is the choosing of the eve, not the day, as the hinge of the whole celebration, and a meal eaten in anticipation rather than fulfilment.</p>
<h2 id="mass-the-yule-log-and-the-long-burning">Mass, the Yule log and the long burning</h2>
<p>The grandest fixture of the night is the midnight service. The custom of gathering for Mass as the 24th turns into the 25th reaches back deep into the medieval Church, and the candlelit carol service that fills churches with people who appear only once a year is its descendant. The point is to mark the exact turning, to be awake and present at the moment the vigil ends.</p>
<p>Older still, and pagan in origin, is the Yule log. The midwinter festival of Yule, kept by Germanic and Norse peoples around the winter solstice, contributed the practice of selecting a large log and burning it slowly through the holiday, sometimes for the full twelve days, as a charm of warmth and light against the longest nights. The log was meant to be kindled, in some tellings, from a fragment saved of the previous year’s, so that the fire carried forward unbroken from one winter to the next. The dessert that now bears its name, the rolled and iced bûche de Noël, is a nineteenth-century French confection that turned the burning log into something edible once central heating made the original redundant.</p>
<h2 id="welsh-dawn-and-the-watch-through-the-dark">Welsh dawn and the watch through the dark</h2>
<p>Some of the most distinctive Christmas Eve customs survive in pockets rather than across whole nations, and Wales keeps one of the oldest. The Plygain is a service of carols, sung unaccompanied by solo voices, small groups and choirs, traditionally held in the church between roughly three and six in the morning. The word is thought to derive from the Latin pullicantio, the crowing of the cock at dawn, and the service is believed to have replaced the pre-Reformation Latin Mass at cockcrow; its earliest recordings reach back to the thirteenth century. Welsh churchgoers would stay up through the whole of Christmas Eve, in some districts called Noson Gyflaith, Toffee Night, making slabs of toffee at the fire, telling tall tales, and decorating the house with holly and mistletoe before the candlelit procession to church before daybreak. At the service there is no programme and no announcer; each carol party walks forward in turn, and it is a point of honour never to repeat a carol already sung that night. The tradition thinned during the Victorian era but never quite died, surviving especially in north-east Wales and reviving in recent years.</p>
<p>That image, families staying awake through the small hours of the 24th by firelight, is the night distilled: the deliberate refusal to sleep through the most charged hours of the year. The same instinct that lights a single candle in a window as a sign of welcome runs through all of it.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>A folk belief recorded across several European cultures holds that animals are granted the power of human speech at midnight on Christmas Eve, though it is considered unlucky, or simply impossible, to be present to overhear them.</li>
<li>The 1914 Christmas truce involved perhaps as many as 100,000 men along the Western Front, yet the public in Britain and Germany only learned of it because the neutral New York Times broke the story on 31 December 1914, after both governments had tried to suppress it.</li>
<li>Clement Clarke Moore was a serious scholar of Hebrew and Greek who compiled a two-volume lexicon, and he was initially reluctant to be associated with the comic Christmas poem that made him famous.</li>
<li>In the Polish Wigilia, an extra place is laid at the table for an unexpected visitor, and tradition holds that no one should be turned away on this night.</li>
<li>The “bûche de Noël” cake exists only because the actual Yule log fell out of use; the pastry was invented to preserve the symbol of a custom that central heating had quietly killed.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>What runs underneath every one of these customs, the Flanders football match, the Polish empty chair, the Welsh refusal to sleep, the reindeer on the roof, is the same human bargain: that the night before a thing can matter more than the thing itself. The deepest pleasures are nearly always in the approach rather than the arrival, and the 24th of December is anticipation given a fixed address on the calendar. It is no accident that the night the guns fell silent in 1914 was this one and not the day after. There is something about a shared threshold, a feast not yet begun, that disarms people in a way the feast rarely manages. The morning will bring its presents and its dinner and its inevitable small disappointments. The eve promises only that they are coming, and that, it turns out, is the better part. From here the year tips over towards its own conclusion, and within a week the world will be keeping watch again on <a href="/specialdate/new-year-s-eve/">New Year’s Eve</a>, holding its breath in the dark for a slightly different reason.</p>
Advertisement
Related Content
Advertisement
