A Brief History of Christmas

And there's a lot of this you WON'T see in a Hallmark movie

Christmas did not begin as Christmas.

That is usually the first surprise. We picture a stable, a star, a baby, a chorus of angels who apparently rehearsed. But the holiday we recognize today is a layered thing, built over centuries — like an old town where every generation just kept adding streets and buildings, eventually making traffic accidents and bu…