Christmas is the most magical time of the year,
the one day when you can eat chocolate, nuts and sprouts
and watch television... apart from all the other days you can do that.
Whether you're a Christian or a Jew, a Muslim or a Hindu,
a Jedi or a Womble, Christmas is everywhere.
On television, in the high street,
even in normally sacred places like churches.
Christmas is such a big deal that even Richard Dawkins probably does it
and he thinks God's a twat who isn't even there!
But what is Christmas anyway?
Do we still need it in 2016?
I'm going on a journey right up Christmas to discover
whether the true meaning of Christmas has any meaning today,
or whether that meaning snapped off somewhere along the way,
leaving it meaningless whatever that means.
I'll be talking to experts about every single Christmas
that's ever happened, as well as finding out where
Christmas traditions and giant tubes of Jaffa Cakes come from.
How do they make chickens into turkeys?
Turkey and chicken are two separate birds.
- You're joking me. - No.
So join me, Philomena Cunk, as I step into Christmas and back out again.
Christmas, isn't just tinsel and a long Doctor Who
it's a festival with traditions stretching back
across hundreds of years and almost as many Christmases.
It's hard to imagine now, but, when Christmas first began,
Christ wasn't even in it.
Psycho Danny Dyer hasn't always been in EastEnders,
even though he feels like part of the furniture
especially when he's trying to act.
Centuries before Jesus arrived,
late December was already a time of celebration for the pagans,
who existed so long ago there aren't any YouTubes of them,
so we've had to make do with this picture.
To find out what the pagans were, I spoke to an expert.
Were there pagans before there were humans?
No. You've got to be a human to do anything.
Pagans are just people who lived in Europe before Christianity arrived.
How difficult was it for the pagans to get about on all fours?
They didn't travel on all fours, they travelled upright like we do.
The pagans worshipped nature, just like Chris Packham,
and their calendar revolved around two big annual events,
also like Chris Packham.
One of these events took place in late December and was known as the
winter solstices-es.
What was the winter soltits?
It's the winter solstice.
Stols... stolstice?
- Solstice. - Stolestice.
- Solstice. - Solstice. - You've got it.
It's that magical time, midwinter and midsummer,
when the sun seems to stand still.
To the eye, it appears to stop moving along the horizon.
Well, you're not meant to look at it, are you?
Because it hurts your eyes.
You can look at it when it rises and you can look at it when it sets,
- then you can... - No, you can't. It makes you go blind.
You can. Believe... trust me, you can.
You can't. That's probably why you've got glasses.
As well as blinding themselves,
the pagans celebrated the solstice by cutting down holly and ivy and
dragging it into their homes,
along with a giant Yule log which they'd set fire to.
It sounds rubbish, but with no App Store to speak of,
killing trees and plants was as good as entertainment got,
even at Christmas.
Of course, for most people,
it wasn't really Christmas until the birth of Jesus Christ,
an icon who was almost as revered back then as Beyonce is today.
Jesus's mum was this woman, the Virgin Mary,
who one night got visited by an angel
and told she'd been gotten pregnant by a Holy Ghost.
Of course, actual ghosts jizz ectoplasm, which only contains ghost sperm.
But Jesus wasn't born a phantom,
leading experts to believe Mary wasn't impregnated by a real ghost,
but by a man in a sheet, like in Scooby-Doo.
Mary's husband Joseph didn't mind his son being God's rather than his
because he knew God would probably buy Jesus loads of toys
and have him on weekends, which would take the pressure off.
As the birth neared,
Mary and Joseph travelled to O Little Town Of Bethlehem
only to discover the inn they'd booked had no rooms in it,
so, instead, they were put up in a stable.
Today, that'd lead to one red star on TripAdvisor.
Back then, it led to one big star in the sky,
which God put there, probably so they could see the baby coming out.
Mary had to give birth here on the floor,
like a crack addict, and then lay him in a manger.
Manger is another word for trough
and it's where we get the name for modern sandwich chain Ready To Trough.
The baby Jesus wasn't an ordinary baby.
He was born with a big yellow circle around his head,
which must have been hell for Mary to push out,
especially when you think nothing had ever been in or out of her down
below before. If only he had been born a ghost after all,
then he could've just floated out, clanking chains and going woo.
Why do you think it's important that Jesus was born?
Would it have been more interesting if he'd been built, like R2-D2?
It would have been more interesting,
but the important thing is that he can identify with us
and he was a real human being.
- It makes him more sort of relatable, I suppose. - Yes, very much so.
But then, if he's meant to be like an ordinary bloke and he wanted to
come across as an ordinary bloke, how come he had all, like,
angels and kings at his stable on his birthday?
Well, that was a bit weird, wasn't it? Although, of course,
I would want to say that angels are around all the time.
You don't necessarily see them, there and then, but sometimes
you catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye,
or maybe you smell a nice fragrance...
- Vanilla? - Maybe.
How many three wise men were there?
Who knows?
And I think only one of the Gospels refers to there being three.
It's just three is a good number, isn't it?
- Yeah. - It looks good.
But there could have actually been 15 three wise men?
Quite possibly, yes.
It's humbling to think that Jesus started out with nothing,
born not in a palace, but in a stable,
just the ordinary son of an ordinary woman and an ordinary man,
and God Almighty.
Incredibly, the day he was born was only the beginning of Jesus's life.
As a young man, he kept a low profile in the wood industry.
But, when he was about 30, his career took off.
He went on to appear in a number of
thrilling and controversial paintings, windows and films.
Today, Christ lives in the hearts of millions of believers,
but still spends Sundays here, in his dad's house,
so let's go and see if he's in.
No-one was in, as usual,
probably because the Church Wi-Fi isn't as good as Starbucks'.
But standing in this old, creaky building
gives you a real sense of history.
Thanks to Jesus's popularity,
Christmas was celebrated for hundreds of years,
celebrated by people who were buried long ago
but are still alive in the form of drawings of themselves,
some dating back as far as the Middle Ages.
In the Middle Ages, did they know it was the Middle Ages,
or did they just think, "This is now"?
You know, how did they know that they were halfway through time?
They thought "this is now"
and they thought they were incredibly advanced,
this is the greatest moment that society would reach to.
It'd be amazing, wouldn't it, to get a Tudor back that we could resuscitate...
- Yes. - ...cryogenically or something...
..and then show him what had happened since he died?
- It would blow his mind, wouldn't it? - It would. The internet...
- The internet. - The internet.
- Google. - Cars, aeroplanes...
- Fitbit watches. - Fitbits.
One thing our time traveller would recognise
is the tradition of getting drunk and acting up at Christmas,
which, back then, was known as wassailing.
So, what was wassailing?
Is that like a, sort of...
- A bit like bantz now? - What's bantz?
Bantz, it's like when someone's acting like a prick.
Really? What it is is basically a group of people,
usually a group of men, go around from house to house
with a big bowl of drink
and they knock on your door and they sing songs and the idea is that
you're going to swap a drink from their bowl for a gift.
So it was a bit like trick or treating then, was it?
It was very like trick or treating.
And what sort of costumes would they do?
Because there were already covered in shit, weren't they, with, like,
slugs on them and mud and everything?
They didn't usually wear costumes.
It was also a way of creating community cohesion,
going from house to house,
it was something that was supposed to be fun as well.
So that's really the very early beginnings of
going from house to house singing carols.
Because the history lady said that, we've now cut to this
some boys singing carols in a church... on earth.
OK, OK, I get it, yeah, thanks.
How do you get the music into the words?
Like, how do you attach the music to the words in your throat?
We tend to attach the words to the music instead.
You attach the words to the music?
- Yeah. - As it's coming up through your throat?
So does it feel like...? Where does the music come from?
Does it feel like it's coming from your stomach,
like you're going to be sick?
But it's, like, nice sick?
Kind of, I guess.
Not all Christmas songs are quite so religious.
In the 1970s, groups like Slade reinvented the carol,
appearing on our TV screens,
showcasing a new form of singing called shouting.
This music was loud, probably to keep Jimmy Savile away.
For years, having a Christmas number one was the ultimate music industry
badge of honour, right up there with choking to death on your own sick.
More recently, songs released from glossy TV shows like X Factor
took over the Christmas number one slot.
What's clever is that these songs
have got absolutely no Christmas in them whatsoever,
probably because if Simon Cowell touches anything
to do with Christ, he catches fire.
Meanwhile, back in the past,
by the time the Tudor era arrived and the music all sounded
like what you're hearing now, Christmas had become an excuse
for gastronomic indulgence.
Tudor feasts were huge and often included roast goose or swan or peacock,
basically a big bird roasted whole.
That might sound traumatic, but, in the days before television,
they didn't know big birds have a person inside.
To find out more about Tudor eating habits,
I spoke to food expert Jay Rayner.
So, what sort of things did Tudor people eat at Christmas?
They ate things like peacock, didn't they?
What goes with peacock?
What kind of gravy?
There is evidence that they ate very exotic things,
but that would have been the very, very richest people.
I suppose the best thing about them as well is that tail
and that's not going to taste of anything, is it?
- No, that's purely for display. - Yeah.
A Tudor Christmas, then, they'd have peacock, like you say...
- No, I think like YOU said. - The Royals had peacock?
I don't know how much peacock was eaten in Tudor days, I'll be honest.
How did that affect their bowels, you know,
what comes out of their back holes?
I don't know. I suppose, if they were eating too much,
it would have caused certain bowel issues.
I suppose meat, lots of meat...
- Lots of meat can... - ..compacted together.
Can compact, yes.
And make sort of big, hard stools.
It would have been uncomfortable, I imagine, but I'm only guessing.
See, that would've been the first bit that I'd have gone to
if I was a food expert.
Just when our ancestors were getting well into Christmas indulgence,
history shat out someone who was allergic to fun, Oliver Cromwell,
king of the Puritans.
Cromwell was a Member of Parliament who wouldn't wear smart clothes and
never smiled, a bit like Jeremy Corbyn.
And, just like Corbyn, he wanted to change the country.
But instead of sitting down on a train,
he got off his arse and did something about it by starting a Civil War.
Civil War is like a real war, but not abroad, so it's cheaper,
and that meant ordinary people could start one, not just kings.
The English Civil War divided the country down the middle,
like a sort of tooled-up Brexit.
Cromwell won and cut the king's head off,
which meant he couldn't be the king any more,
even if everyone changed their minds.
Now the British public had taken back control.
No longer did they have to do whatever the king said.
Instead, they were free to do whatever Cromwell said.
It turned out Cromwell hated all of the things kings like,
like feasting and burping and music and throwing chicken legs over his
shoulder and laughing, and that was just the tip of the turnip,
because, in 1647, Cromwell banned Christmas.
According to the Puritans, Christians shouldn't celebrate
Christmas because it's not in the Bible.
Instead, they should be inside a church, which isn't in the Bible,
reading the Bible, which isn't in the Bible.
The ban on Christmas continued until after Cromwell's death,
but, by 1660, we'd found a new king, up a tree.
The new king even had a head,
although it looked a bit like it belonged to Boycie
off Only Fools And Horses.
And now the monarch was back and the Puritans had buggered off,
Christmas was free to become more festive and less religious.
For years, Jesus H Christmas was the number one face of the festive period,
very much the Captain Birdseye of Christmas Day,
but his rule over his mighty tinsel kingdom was to be threatened by
this man, Father Christmas, street name - Santa Claus.
Like Jesus, Father Christmas is used as a bribe to make children behave,
although, in his case, the prize isn't eternal salvation, but presents.
No wonder the moment Santa came on the scene it was game over for Jesus,
who had to accept a lower ranking job in the global icon industry.
So, where did Santa come from?
If you're thinking the North Pole,
that's because your parents lied to you.
He actually stepped out of the pages of history.
Where did Father Christmas come from?
Father Christmas comes from Saint Nicholas
and he is a fourth-century Greek saint and bishop,
and he was very renowned for giving presents to the poor
and particularly he gave presents to these three girls.
If he hadn't given them the money,
they would have had to go off and be prostitutes.
So why was he knocking about with these prostitutes?
I don't think he knew them very well, it's just that...
Well, well enough to give them gifts.
..give them money. I don't think...
I think he just wanted to save them from the horrors of...
- I think because basically... - They all say that, don't they?
- They do. - How come shops have Father Christmases,
but they don't have Jesuses?
Is Jesuses the right term?
- Is it Jesi, or...? - I think we'd say figures of Jesus.
Figures of Jesus.
I think that Father Christmas himself would probably have
preferred there to be figures of Jesus because, in fact,
there is a medieval story that Saint Nicholas got in a punch-up
about whether or not God or Jesus was greater and was thrown into prison,
so he was obviously very exercised about the purity of religion.
It's all coming out, isn't it?
You know, because, like, I didn't know that he used to hang about with
prostitutes or get into fights.
Now I'm feeling less... happy with him coming down my chimney.
Despite being the stuff of nightmares,
Santa is the world's most popular home intruder, probably because,
unlike other home intruders, he doesn't leave a turd
on your living room carpet, but a pile of gifts.
Santa has a list of good and bad children.
The good children will get lots of presents and so, it turns out,
will the bad children.
In fact, the only ones who won't get very much are the poor children
that's because Santa judges a child's goodness
based largely on parental income.
The sense of magical wonder on a child's face as they open their presents,
which allegedly makes Christmas worthwhile,
can last for up to ten seconds.
That's why, for many, Christmas is synon-nonymous with little ones.
Adults lose the ability to see Father Christmas,
so, if you want to know more about him, you have to ask small adults,
which are known as children.
- Hello, who are you? - I'm Archie, who are you?
Philomena. Have you ever met Father Christmas?
I have.
Where did you meet him?
I met him... next to Westfield.
And what was he doing there? Was he shopping or something?
I think... I'm not quite sure if Father Christmas is rich.
I don't think he is.
How did he get all the presents in, like, lots of times?
I think he just shoplifts.
OK.
Do you think Father Christmas has ever met Batman?
In my opinion, Batman's not real.
In my opinion, Batman's not real it's just a man called Bruce.
So you don't think they've met?
I think Superman and Father Christmas have met.
Do you think that Father Christmas will still be allowed in the country after Brexit?
Yeah, he'll still be allowed in the country.
- Will he? - Yeah.
Because the police don't know where he's in the air.
Like David Bowie, Santa experimented with many different looks,
finally settling on the familiar fat jolly laughing man look
in the late 1800s.
The Queen Victorians were batshit for Christmas
and popularised many of the traditions we still do
for no good reason today.
For instance, Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert,
did what his fellow Germans had been doing for years and had a tree
installed in his lounge.
Albert's tree would remain the most heavily decorated piece of wood to
grace Buckingham Palace until the day Roger Moore was knighted.
The Christmas tree is still the centrepiece of most festive decorations.
It's covered in lights, chocolates and baubles,
which is what circles are called at Christmas.
There are also these characteristic vines
from the most festive plant on earth - tinsel.
Tinsel became a decoration because you can't do anything else with it.
It's horrible in salads and won't boil down for soup.
For years, the best Christmas decoration was the Blue Peter Advent Crown,
which took a load of coat hangers and tinsel and cleverly transformed
them into a load of tinsel round some coat hangers.
Now, you'll see how it all fits together.
Today, some people choose to turn the outside of their homes
into a giant Advent Crown.
A jolly house covered in electric lights may be expensive
and use a lot of power,
but it's the perfect way to cheer up a world worried about climate change
and dwindling resources.
Of course, in Queen Victorian times,
only the super rich had fancy decorations.
Ordinary, poor people had to celebrate Christmas
by coughing and counting their surviving offspring.
Life in Queen Victorian times was hard.
The streets were full of urchins and rippers, and there was so much
poverty that people used to go to prison just to get some bread.
But there was one man who cared
the greatest prime minister Britain ever had Sir Charles Dickings.
Charles Dickings wanted people to be generous to those in greater
need, like the poor, the homeless or the dead,
so he wrote something called A Christmas Carol,
which was something called a book.
As seen in this powerful and evocative adaptation,
A Christmas Carol is about Ebenezer Scrooge,
a character almost as fully realised as Disney's superior Scrooge McDuck.
Unlike Scrooge McDuck, he's human.
And unlike most humans, he hates Christmas.
But then, in a terrifying development,
he starts getting visited by ghosts,
like his house is built on some sort of Indian burial ground.
The ghosts take him forward and backwards in time to see different
Christmases, like that thing on Facebook that shows you old haircuts
and people you don't talk to anymore.
One ghost shows him the future, but it's only by a year,
so it's still a Victorian future.
As it is, he sees a future in which everyone's delighted he's dead.
This convinces him that Christmas is actually brilliant, which,
to be honest, the ghost could have done
by giving him a Chocolate Orange nobody can argue with that.
After the Victorian era, good will to all men caught on so much
that it was almost 12 whole years before everyone on the planet
decided to kill each other in the mud.
Although it was scheduled to be over by Christmas,
the war with Germany lasted four years.
Mechanised conflict is the most horrifying legacy
of the 20th century, as anyone who's seen Robot Wars will agree.
But at Christmas 1914, there was a brief ceasefire.
The fighting stopped.
Soldiers got out of their holes and joined together in a place called
No Man's Land, showing that, even at moments of peace,
men will still divide into two sides and try to beat one another.
The Great War claimed over 17 million lives, making it the
worst incident of football-related violence of all time.
After the First World War, Christmas spirit once again reigned supreme,
until the Second World War.
We don't know if Christmas happened during Second War Two
because there simply aren't any records.
But there's no footage of Hitler or Churchill in Santa hats either,
so it's safe to assume it was parked while they twatted each other.
Once Hitler had defeated the Nazis by blowing his own brains out,
Christmas returned with a bang
and a second period of food-loving indulgence dawned.
The modern Christmas dinner soon became an important
cultural cornerstone of both society and gravy adverts.
Mum made the gravy.
Could you talk me through what makes a perfect Christmas dinner?
Once you've got the right people round the table,
you need a light starter.
- If you give people too much... - Not prawn cocktails?
No... Well, I don't know. A good prawn cocktail is a lovely thing.
- I don't like prawns. - Do you not?
No, they're bottom feeders.
OK, I tend to do platters of charcuterie, salami and ham,
and maybe some pickles and things for people to pick up.
- I won't have that. - You wouldn't have that? No? OK.
And then you come to the main event,
so maybe a three-bird roast or a roast goose
- bread sauce, gravy. - But I don't understand bread sauce.
It's a great way of making a really savoury sauce.
Bread and sauce are two completely different things, aren't they?
Well, they are, but you can grind the bread down
and then cook it in milk to make a really good sauce.
It just looks like, sort of... jizz.
Thanks to all this food-based indulgence,
scientists now believe that 80% of all burps occur at Christmas,
threatening to put a hole in the oz-one layer at precisely the
moment the sky is full of vulnerable reindeer.
Eating aside, the other popular form of Christmas indulgence
is gift-buying from shops.
Critics say Christmas is too commercialised
and that the Bible has being replaced by the Argos catalogue,
just because it's got a better selection of hair straighteners.
Recently, Christmas shopping has started to look less like a
Supermarket Sweep Christmas special
and more like a civil war with carrier bags.
No wonder more people than ever stay indoors shopping on the computer.
So, is Christmas all just about buying stuff these days?
How much money gets made at Christmas?
Altogether, I'm sure we spend hundreds of millions of pounds at Christmas.
And how big a cut does the Church get?
The Church doesn't get anything.
- They don't get anything? - No. No.
The supermarket near me has got about 30 tills.
How many tills does Amazon have?
They must have loads.
- They don't have any tills. - What?
They have a computer.
- One computer? - Yeah.
Because no-one goes there. They just...
I know, but I thought they still had to ring it through.
No, the computer does all that.
So there's one man at a computer, just going...?
No, I don't think there's a man.
No, no, it just goes automatically. You do that. You're the till.
Making money is so important at Christmas
that shops pull out all the stops to fill the screen with jolly images of buying things,
and their adverts have evolved from cheerful animated catalogues
full of famous people smiling at you
to heart-warming present-day mini movies about infested trampolines.
Adverts aren't the only programmes on at Christmas
there are also programmes on at Christmas.
For decades, Christmas television has been an enchanting place,
a magical land where people danced and sang in a doomed attempt
to convey the sheer magic of Christmas.
A time in which newsreaders cavorted with comedians,
and real live snowmen were gathered from the wild
and encouraged to sing their haunting traditional songs in the studio.
But perhaps the most reassuring Christmas programme is EastEnders,
which for years has provided an important public service
by depicting worse families having an even shitter time than yours.
You're lying!
- What are you doing? - Bianca!
What are you doing?!
Films are a mainstay at Christmas
and one familiar film is the searing musical The Sound Of Music,
which is about a woman who sings to hills about hills in the hills.
It's always on at Christmas,
probably because it's got nuns in it so you think about Jesus.
And also Nazis,
so you think about The Great Escape, which is probably on on Boxing Day.
But the most Christmassy film of all time is also the most exciting,
Die Hard.
People think Die Hard is a gripping and exciting action film,
just because, as you can see, it is,
but it's also a heart-warming Yuletide story
full of the magic of Christmas.
It's got everything... 'Singing...'
'a man up a chimney...'
Warming himself in front of a roaring fire...
Shit!
'..while the snow flutters down outside.'
Brotherly love...
'Hey, look, I love you... 'So do a lot of the other guys.'
..cranberry sauce, excessive sherry drinking...
God, that man looks really pissed.
..season's greetings... Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
..your dad conked out in a chair wearing a Santa hat in his Christmas jumper,
angels majestically soaring through the air and, of course,
Jesus Christ Powell.
Jesus Christ, Powell!
TV's becoming a thing of the olden past, like sundials or ploughs,
because, today, everyone has their own little screen,
so they can ignore their immediate surroundings on an individual basis
instead of as part of a collective effort.
We're often told to feel sorry for those who are alone at Christmas,
but these days that's all of us and it's brilliant.
Best of all, this kind of technology
is set to become more immersive than ever.
For instance, this man from the year 2018
is enjoying a virtual Christmas with a family
of characters from the Nintendo universe.
Meanwhile, this man is experiencing the true meaning of Christmas by
giving birth to a virtual baby Jesus in a stable made of polygons.
Today, the true meaning of Christmas is a mystery,
wrapped up in sherry and Monopoly and monkey nuts,
but at least, at this time of togetherness and warmth,
we can all agree what the true spirit of Christmas is...
Baileys.
Merry Christmas and a very New Year.