Christmas in Scotland: From being banned to the first UK mention of Santa, how festivities have been reinvented down the centuries

Whether it’s a hand-me-down ornament for the tree, an item on the menu or an outing to see the lights, we always have something special that it wouldn’t be Christmas without.

Across history, Christmas and preceding winter festivals in Scotland have been celebrated in a variety of ways, with traditions both lasting and faded.

Of course, there were also around 400 years where celebrating it was illegal in Scotland thanks to the Reformation, and up until as recently as the 1970s December 25 was just another day.

For the first time, a new book brings together stories of Scotland’s Christmas spanning thousands of years. Dr Tom Christie, a researcher in popular culture, and archaeologist Dr Murray Cook explore how Christmas and other winter festivals have been celebrated, banned and reborn throughout our history and their cultural impact.

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“Christmas is a winter feast,” Murray explained. “The whole thing is really about driving away the cold, giving elements to the gods. Our native traditions get mixed up with Roman traditions which become Catholic traditions which become Christmas traditions.

“The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, and there were midwinter festivals all over the place. Scotland has monumental tombs like Maeshowe in Orkney, orientated on the mid-winter solstice, and we’ve got the world’s oldest lunar clock up in a field in Crathes, which is 6-8,000 years old.

“All of these are about tracking what’s happening to the sun. They could only keep so many animals over the winter, so you had to kill the rest and have a big feast.”

Christmas banned in Scotland

Traditions all melded together across the centuries from Celtic pagan festivals to the Vikings’ Yule and then Catholic-led celebrations towards the 16th century.

All of that, however, ground to a halt in Scotland during the Protestant Reformation of 1560, led by John Knox. In 1640, the Scottish Parliament made Christmas celebrations illegal.

“You had this tussle between people that want to party and the Kirk that wanted religious purity,” Murray said.

“Ministers were going door to door checking whether people are celebrating. They are interrogating bakers who make Yule loafs. There’s a fine if you’re caught singing a carol. It’s astonishing.”

Hogmanay and Halloween took some of the traditions we now associate with Christmas, but Yuletide celebrations behind closed doors began to ease back in from the 18th century.

They remained rare in public until December 25th finally became a public holiday in Scotland in 1958 as the commercialisation of Christmas across the world set in.

“In the early 20th century, we’ve got people working that day, strikes taking place, there were fatal accidents on Christmas Day in mines,” Murray said.

“The revolutionary communists sent by Lenin to Glasgow to ferment revolution were shocked at how miserable the city’s Christmas was and went off to buy a tree.

“I think people have forgotten. Anybody that endured that, won’t want to dwell on it because it’s not the good old days. They were miserable.

“Sometimes people say ‘you don’t know how good you have it’, but nobody says that about Christmas, it’s the other way round. They’re happy we don’t endure that anymore, that their kids, their grandkids, have a good Christmas.

“Ultimately, the whole thing is about cold and dark. What keeps you warm? It’s family. It’s friends. It’s eating. Those things are constant and found across the northern hemisphere.

“We’re not unique in celebrating them, but we are unique in having tried to ban them and taking over 400 years to actually get it back.

“We have 10,000 years of tradition to draw upon and can do what we want with our Christmas because for so long the Kirk told us exactly what we couldn’t do.”

Santa’s first appearance

The book also covers a number of larger than life characters that have come to be associated with Christmas, none bigger than Santa Claus himself.

Before his modern image first appeared in cartoons in the US, he was namechecked in an edition of The John O’Groat Journal in 1852.

“Scotland was the first place in the UK to mention Santa Claus,” Tom said. “The journalist had gone out to see the kids in Wick and had been speaking to them about this character giving presents in their stocking.

“There’s still a copy of this in the British Library, and it predates people like Thomas Nast and his Santa Claus caricatures during the Civil War era.”

Tales of a more sinister character have also been passed down the generations, particularly in the Western Isles.

There, it’s said the Chimney Demon terrorises children by whispering ominously down into fireplaces.

“Anywhere else, if you want to frighten the kids it’s a warning to be good, otherwise Santa won’t come and you’ll get a lump of coal,” Tom said.

“We discovered an oral history project in the 60s with elderly women who’d been kids in the 19th century. They were still terrified of the Chimney Demon. It left such an indelible mark on their psyche. The book’s full of interesting stories like that.”

Scottish Christmas on film

Also of particular interest to Tom was how a Scottish Christmas is portrayed abroad on the big screen.

Netflix’s 2021 film, A Castle for Christmas, saw Brooke Shields play an American author who journeyed to Scotland and fell in love with a castle and, eventually, Cary Elwes’ grumpy laird. Scotland has also recently been the setting for numerous festive romance movies.

“For a long while, if you thought about Christmas cinema in Scotland, you think about Comfort and Joy, the Bill Forsyth film,” Tom explains.

“It’s a really fascinating time capsule of the early 80s. But since about 2018, there’s been this vast explosion of American made Hallmark TV movies set in Scotland.

“It fascinates me to see the American take on our traditions. It sometimes works better than others. I saw one in which we’re eating ‘Smokey Arbroathies’, so their research was not 100%!”

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Scotland’s Christmas: Festive Celebrations, Traditions and Customs in Scotland from Samhain to Still Game is available now from Extremis Publishing