Local Lore: Old Christmas

The Christmas holiday has more or less been the same for the past couple hundred years, drawing celebration inspiration from Christian and pagan tradition alike to create the season as we know it today. But in coastal North Carolina, you’ll likely find a few people still celebrating Christmas as it once was — before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.

“Old Christmas,” sometimes referred to as “Little Christmas,” was once a well-known holiday in the Outer Banks. As the initial settled area of North Carolina, the coast was home to some of the first colonists, colonists who elected to move to the “new world” as a way to seek religious freedom. Highlighting the strong schism between Protestant and Catholic faith, these colonists rejected the formal adoption of the Gregorian calendar mandated by the British Empire in 1752 — choosing instead to stick with the established Julian calendar.

The Julian calendar was inefficient and inaccurate compared to the revised Gregorian model, but many colonists resisted its adoption on both religious grounds and because of perceived problems with the 11-day difference between the two. The Christmas holiday took place on December 25 in both calendars, and thus January 6 became “Old Christmas.”

“Adoration of the Magi” by El Greco, 1568

Traditional Old Christmas celebrations retained a great deal of the yuletide season’s pagan roots, with “Old Buck” being the symbol of the season, often represented by a bovine head mounted on a pole carried in front of a crowded, masked – and often drunk — procession. Revelers moved from house to house, playing instruments, singing, dancing and partaking in food and drink. Of course, feasting is standard across many major holidays, and Old Christmas was no exception as friends and neighbors gathered together to share in the bounty of the previous year. Other Old Christmas traditions included the exchange of gifts, the blessing of fruit trees, rising at dawn to silently observe livestock and contemplate the nativity — and the setting of an empty dinner table by girls and unmarried women who hoped to see ghostly visions of seated future husbands appear during the dark of night.

The first recorded Christmas celebration was in Rome in the year 336, but the holiday was gradually overshadowed by Epiphany, the holiday that would eventually line up closer to the Old Christmas celebrated in the colonies. When the Gregorian calendar was adopted for universal use in countries around the world and the dates for a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ were split between Eastern and Western churches, the solution was to declare the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany as one holiday — a decision that led to both Christmas as a festival holiday as we now know it and gave us “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

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