Christmas of the Past Was Metal As Hell

Christmas has gained a somewhat unhip reputation as a “soft” holiday. Between Mariah Carey, Hallmark movies and Match the Fam pajamas, you’re as likely to drown in cheese as figgy pudding. But Christmas wasn’t always so sickeningly sweet. In the good old days, it was closer to a Slayer album cover.

It starts, of course, with the fairly bloody story of Jesus, but even on a secular level, Christmas has always carried an air of death. Winter celebrations in general throughout history were partied with acknowledgement of the destruction that the cold often brings, and the Victorians who invented modern Christmas were obsessed with it. Today, we decorate our Christmas cards with wholesome family photos, but back in the day, they used dead relatives and animal carcasses. Telling ghost stories became a winter tradition as soon as we invented fire to huddle around, but they took it to the next level with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, James’ The Turn of the Screw and the other James’ collections of short stories. Have you ever wondered why “there’ll be scary ghost stories” in “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”? Even through the ‘60s, Christmas and ghosts went hand-in-hand.

Even the less-morbid Victorian Christmas traditions wouldn’t be out of place at a goth basement party. One popular Christmas party game, called “snapdragon,” involved pouring booze over dried fruit, lighting it on fire and trying to pluck it up and eat it, probably just to feel something. People went to see live performances on Christmas like they do now, but it was less likely to be a nativity play or The Nutcracker than a biting satire or scientific lecture. One popular program was a performance of Handel’s Messiah accompanied by displays of microscopes powered by burning gas that projected huge images of tiny objects and demonstrations of laughing gas. Music, science and drugs? That’s a Black Sabbath concert.

Meanwhile, today’s Christmas tree is mostly a bothersome plant that has to be onerously hauled in and out and painstakingly cared for in between, to say nothing of the tinsel and lights that must be maddeningly untangled each year, but Christmas tree decorations used to be much more hardcore. The idea of tinsel is believed to have originated with an Eastern European story about a spider that honors a family by decorating their tree with beautiful, shimmering butt yarn. And those lights? Before electricity, they were just candles. You think it’s hard to keep your tree from burning your house down now? Try decorating it with actual fire.

Speaking of heat, the Christmas plant of choice was once not the poinsettia but bouquets of chili peppers. Since they ripen in the winter from green to red, they were a natural (and tasty) holiday adornment. But the poinsettia also had an intense journey to our windowsills, being stolen from Mexico and bred by force using X-rays and “torture chambers” where they were deprived of light and water. 

That’s right: Flower torture chambers. Ho, ho, ho.

To put it all together and have a truly authentic Christmas, that means you need to waterboard a plant, set something on fire, make a spider friend, send your loved ones pictures of dead animals and do drugs. If anyone asks what the hell you’re doing, lecture them on the spirit of Christmas: a literal one.