20 Christian Traditions That Started As Something Totally Different

It wasn’t until 1903, when Irish parliamentarian James O’Mara passed the Bank Holiday Act, that March 17 became an official Irish public holiday. The law also closed pubs throughout the country, a restriction that remained in place until the late 1970s. Parades and green beer weren’t part of the traditional celebration. They were imported from America, invented by Irish immigrants in cities such as Boston and New York, and only reached Ireland in the 1990s.

The Osterhase, the Easter Hare, makes its earliest recorded appearance in print in 1682 in a medical thesis written by Georg Franck von Franckenau, a physician at Heidelberg University. Among German Lutherans, the hare judged whether children had behaved: good kids got colored eggs nested in hats, and bad ones got nothing. German settlers brought the “Oschter Haws” to Pennsylvania in the 1700s, where it evolved into today’s candy-giving mascot.

Saint Nicholas, a 4th-century Greek bishop from Myra (in what is now Turkey), secretly tossed gold coins through a poor family’s window to provide dowries for three daughters, according to stories written after his death. That practice evolved into Sinterklaas in the Netherlands and was brought over to New York with the Dutch settlers. A poem published in 1823, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” gave him a sleigh pulled by reindeer, and Thomas Nast, the cartoonist, gave him his red suit decades before Coca-Cola’s ads started in the 1930s.

The monks of medieval Europe said all 150 biblical Psalms every day in Latin. The illiterate lay brothers, who could not read or understand Latin, replaced the Psalms with 150 Lord’s Prayers, counting them out on little pouches of pebbles or on knotted cords called Paternoster cords. Eventually the prayer became a Hail Mary, and in 1569 Pope Pius V settled on the 59-bead version of the Marian Rosary that remains today. The tale of St. Dominic, the 13th-century founder of the Dominican order, having received the Rosary in a vision was written centuries after his death.

Before 1840, Christian brides simply wore their best dress, in no particular color (frequently blue or red), and reused it for other events. Then, on February 10, 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in white silk-satin to display exquisite English lacework, not to signify her purity. Publications such as Godey’s Lady’s Book declared that it was an “ancient” custom, and white wedding gowns quickly became all the rage.

During the first four centuries of the Christian era, priests said Mass wearing normal everyday clothing: a linen tunic and a heavy wool cloak called a paenula, also known as a casula. Casula is Latin for “little house,” and it is the term that gave us “chasuble.” When Germanic culture changed men’s clothing to pants and short tunics in the 5th and 6th centuries AD, the church maintained the old Roman ensemble as vestments. Eventually, the leftover cloak became the chasuble we know today.

The Catholic church still remembers Valentine, a Christian saint martyred in Rome circa 269 AD at the behest of Emperor Claudius II. He was remembered with prayers on February 14, but nothing about love or romance. Then in 1382, English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a poem noting the betrothal of English King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia. It was Chaucer who invented the notion that on “Seynt Valentynes day” birds choose their mates. The nobility in Europe embraced the romantic notion from there.

The halo or nimbus was often used in Greco-Roman art to designate the sun gods such as Apollo and Helios. It also appeared on the coins of Roman emperors after they were deified. The early Christians rejected the halo because of its association with paganism and with the state religion. Following the Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity in 313 AD, Christian artists began using the nimbus to portray Christ by the end of the fourth century. The device soon came to be used for angels, the Virgin Mary, and the saints.

The Germans, at least during the late Middle Ages, celebrated the Feast of Adam and Eve on December 24, using “Paradise plays” as their holiday show. Their prop was a fir tree, hung with apples, representing the Forbidden Fruit. As the custom of bringing trees inside spread, a 1521 ledger from Sélestat in Alsace records paying guards to watch them, hundreds of years before Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, made the tradition fashionable in England.

From the 1st through 4th centuries, adult converts were fully immersed as they entered baptismal water, usually in large freestanding buildings known as baptisteries that included dressing rooms and pools you could walk down into. This practice continued into the 5th century, as seen in the Baptistery of Neon in Ravenna, Italy. But once infant baptism became the norm during the Middle Ages, Western churches replaced pools with small waist-high stone baptismal fonts, and by the 20th century the priest simply poured or sprinkled water instead. The Eastern Orthodox churches maintained the practice of full immersion.

For around 1,400 years, worshippers stood, knelt, or walked around the altars on bare stone floors. There was only one form of seating, a low stone bench built into the wall, available for the infirm and elderly. Wooden pews were not installed until the late 14th century, and did not become common until the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, when long sermons made standing untenable. The pews were then rented by wealthy families, providing income for the church into the early 1900s.

The original Roman custom for the exchange of a ring, anulus pronubus, was part of the legal ceremony, rather than a romantic one. The iron or bronze ring was given by the groom to the bride’s father as a pledge for the contract. Some rings contained keys that gave the wife access to parts of the household. Tertullian, an early Christian writer, mentions the church taking this Roman custom and transforming it into a symbol of fidelity.

In 835 AD, Pope Gregory IV designated November 1 as All Saints’ Day, thus making October 31 “All Hallows’ Eve,” a night to fast and pray. During the Middle Ages in Britain and Ireland, the poor practiced “souling,” going door-to-door asking for soul cakes in exchange for saying prayers for the dead. Irish immigrants brought souling to North America in the 1800s, as well as the practice of carving lanterns out of turnips. In North America, candy and costumes became dominant.

During the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, the underground church in Rome was concerned about infiltration by the empire’s spies. The Apostolic Tradition, a church document written by Hippolytus of Rome, ca. 215 AD, stipulates that adult converts needed a sponsor, a church member they could trust, to observe them for up to three years and testify before the bishop that they were not informants. The guardianship function developed later, when Christianity became a legal religion.

Meat, milk, butter, cheese, and eggs were forbidden by medieval canon law for the 40 days of Lent. Hens kept laying anyway, so families would boil the extra eggs hard and dye them in onion skins or oak bark, a way of designating them as “fast period” eggs that would keep for several weeks. Come Easter Sunday, the day the fast was over, families would eat their colored eggs, give some to the church as tithe, or distribute them to their servants.

Carnival is derived from the Latin phrase carne levare, which translates as “removal of meat.” During medieval times, Lenten law prohibited eating meat, animal fat, butter, or eggs for 40 days. To take advantage of these laws, families would hold banquets on the final days before Ash Wednesday to consume perishable goods before they went bad. Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, refers to this last feast. With time, these banquets evolved into street parades and costume parties.

In 1839, Lutheran pastor Johann Hinrich Wichern, who operated Das Rauhe Haus, an orphanage and rescue mission in Hamburg, Germany, grew weary of orphans repeatedly asking how many days there were left until Christmas. So he constructed a big wooden wagon wheel and put 23 candles on it: 19 small red candles for the weekdays and 4 large white candles for the Advent Sundays. The evergreen boughs were added later. Churches in the 20th century reduced the design to the modern, small four-candle ring.

During the Roman persecutions of Christians in the second and third centuries AD, fish became a way for Christians to identify each other. It was called Ichthys, which is Greek for “fish.” The letters of Ichthys spelled out a Greek acronym for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. According to church tradition, if two strangers met, they would write an arc in the dirt. If the other person completed the fish, it was all clear. This information isn’t taken from historical records, however. It comes from Christian tradition.

In 1592, under Queen Elizabeth I, London’s Clerk of the Markets, who oversaw city trade, banned bakers from selling spiced, cross-marked buns on ordinary days because people treated them as charms against illness, fire, or shipwreck. The buns could be legally sold by bakers on Good Friday, at Christmastime, or when bought for funerals. Anyone caught selling them would be required to give the goods away to the poor. The cross, of course, was a reminder of the crucifixion.

For almost 300 years, crucifixion was a shameful method of Roman execution, used only for slaves, insurrectionists, and common criminals. Early Christians preached openly about Christ’s death but left the execution device out of their art, with the Good Shepherd or the fish taking its place. Following the abolition of crucifixion by Emperor Constantine in the early 4th century, the cross became less an image of terror and more a public emblem of victory.

This content was created with the help of AI.