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The United States of America has many different traditions and ways that people celebrate Christmas, because of its multi-cultural nature. Many customs are similar to ones in the UK, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland and Mexico.
The traditional meal for Western European families is turkey or ham with cranberry sauce. Families from Eastern European origins favour turkey with trimmings, keilbasi (a Polish sausage), cabbage dishes, and soups; and some Italian families prefer lasagne!
Some Americans use pop-corn threaded on string to help decorate their Christmas Tree. Making gingerbread houses is also popular to make and eat at Christmas! Eggnog is a ‘traditional’ Christmas drink in the USA.
Many Americans, especially Christians will go to Church to celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas. Many churches have special Christmas Carol services and events where the story of Christmas is told.
In New England (the American States of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine), there are shops called ‘Christmas Shops’ that only sell Christmas decorations and toys all the year round!
Americans also send out Christmas Cards, like Carol singing and there’s the unusual custom of the Christmas Pickle!
People in America like to decorate the outsides of their houses with lights and sometimes even statues of Santa Claus, Snowmen and Reindeer. Some cookies and glass of milk are often left out as a snack for Santa on Christmas Eve!
Towns and cities often decorate the streets with lights to celebrate Christmas. Perhaps the most famous Christmas street lights in the USA are at the Rockefeller Center in New York where there is a huge Christmas Tree with a public ice skating rink in front of it over Christmas and the New Year.
Christmas Trees were first put up in the USA by German immigrants in Pennsylvania. There were some community trees as early as the 1750s.
The first recorded tree in a home in the USA was set-up in 1832 by Charles Follen of Boston – who was a German political refugee. We know about it because of his wife’s memoirs written 10 years later. There are more records of early American trees in diaries and letters from 1842 in Virginia, 1847 in Ohio and 1851 in South Carolina and Mississippi.
The first recorded Christmas Tree lot selling trees in the USA was in New York in 1851 when Mark Carr loaded two sleds with trees from the Catskill Mountains and sold them in the city. By the 1890s the Catskills were providing over 200,000 trees a year to the New York area!
The first Christmas Tree in the White House was set up in 1856 when Franklin Pierce was president. The first electric lights on a tree at the White House were in 1895 when Grover Cleveland used them. The tradition of having a tree on the lawn of the White House was started in 1923 by Calvin Coolidge.
Trees became more popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s when more people had them in their houses and cities started having communal lighted trees. There was a tree in San Diego in 1904, in Pasadena in 1909, in New York, Boston and Cleveland in 1912 and in Philadelphia in 1914.
Source: whychristmas.com
