Despite inflation and environmental concerns, it remains, for many families, difficult to envisage not to offer (or receive) gifts at Christmas, especially when there are children. The practice has not always been so obvious or widespread.
by Gaétan Supertino and Anne Chemin
The custom consisting in offering gifts at the beginning of winter is far from recent. According to legend, its origin would go back … to the VIII e century before our era, at the very moment of the birth of Rome. Tatius, which was according to tradition the first “co-king” of the eternal city with Romulus, would indeed have established this use around 745 BCE.
After the war between his people, the Sabins, and the supporters of Romulus, the two camps would have exchanged presents as reconciliation. Among these: branches from a grove devoted to Strena, goddess of force and health, which will probably give its name to the Entrennes. Touched, Tatius would then have decided to last this custom.
In ancient Rome, the exchange of gifts was rather in early January, accompanied by memorable festivities and drinking. This then took place in a vast period of commemorations celebrating the extension of the days, the return of light and life within nature. Towards the end of the i e er century BC, with the establishment of a new calendar by César, it was also an opportunity to celebrate the new year and Janus, the god of (re (re ) beginnings.
The gifts then had “a religious value at the same time as a social function. (…) Hence, very early on, criticisms which aimed at the practices of clientelism, insofar as these presents became an obligation. The Dependent offered his boss hoping to obtain from it a more important gift. As for the donations between powerful, they were used to flatter the ego “, explain the historians Alain Cabantous and François Walter in Noël. Such a long history (Payot, 2016).
a practice that disappears for centuries
There are also gifts in certain traditions of the Celtic world that has become Christian, difficult to datable. Children who died before baptism then became elves. The distribution of gifts during the Christmas period was a way to keep them in a vitality harmed since the fall (the Halloween party by constituting the dramatic moment).
Have these practices inspired ours? If it is not excluded, specialists remain shared, because, after the Christianization of the Roman Empire, tradition seems to have disappeared for centuries on a large part of the European continent. In France, we find some traces from the 15th century e century only, in the form of charitable donations (in particular food) made at Christmas time, in hospitals for example, or master to servant. A manuscript of the Strasbourg hospital of 1412 specifies that “for the Christmas party you have to give a large gingerbread or two small to each leper patient”.
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