Christmas carols, for example, started out as a pagan winter ceremony called “wassailing ... transport minerals from the soil into the roots of the pine trees, who return the favor by ...

Who invented Christmas? Historian Lucy Worsley traces the roots of Christmas by exploring the Anglo-Saxon tradition, wassailing where people sing to the apple trees to celebrate the winter solstice.

Although today's commercialized Christmas is considered distinctly American, the festival was banned in the nation's earliest days. New England's Puritan leaders considered it a pagan or papist ...