Trad Greetings: The reasons behind our most common Christmas customs

Santa, cards, holly, crackers and turkeys... ingredients for the traditional Christmas, but how did all these different customs come together? Here's how:

THE TREE: Possibly one of the oddest, yet most widely adopted Christmas traditions is our habit of bringing a living pine tree into our homes for a few weeks each year. When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, he brought with him from Germany the habit of decorating a tree, and the Victorians quickly adopted it. No one knows why the Germans started the tradition, but one story goes that in 722AD, St Boniface stumbled across a group of pagans who were about to sacrifice a child beneath an oak tree. He saved the child by cutting down the oak, and when a fir tree grew up in its place he declared it the tree of the Christ child.

THE TURKEY/MINCE PIES: There was a time when goose or boar were the traditional foods eaten at Christmas. However, in 1526, a trader from Bristol, William Strickland, imported six turkeys from America and sold them for tuppence each. Henry VIII was the first English monarch to sample the bird, and it quickly became popular because turkeys were cheap, domesticated and easy to fatten up quickly. As for mince pies, they're the modern equivalent of the Christmas pye, which was filled with shredded game, pigeon, ox or lamb mixed with fruit and sugar.

THE CHIMNEY: After the American revolution, New Yorkers were looking to rediscover their Dutch roots, and revived the feast of St Nicholas, and his legend. The writer Washington Irving took the mickey out of this revived cult in a satire published in 1809, called Knickerbocker's History of New York. In it, St Nicholas appears as a fat, jolly figure, dressed in fur, with a clay pipe and beard, who slides down chimneys. However, Santa coming down the chimney may also reach back to the tale of St Nicholas tossing coins down a chimney for a family when he found the window locked.

THE CHRISTMAS CARD: The traditional card has been around for 170 years. It was a civil servant named Henry Cole who invented the Christmas card in 1840. He had worked on the introduction of the first stamp, the Penny Black, the same year and had been too busy to write to all of his friends. He commissioned a designer to create a card which read: "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year To You". By 1843, the year that Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he was commissioning 1,000 cards, using a few and selling the others. In 2005, one card from the batch sold for 8,500.

THE CRACKER: The Christmas cracker can be traced back to the moment of its creation in 1847. In 1840, London baker Thomas Smith was in Paris, where he discovered sugared almonds wrapped in paper twists. He added a slip of paper with a love message and sold them as bon-bons. One night, inspired by the crackling of his fire, Smith created a 'snap' in a cardboard tube, and decorated the outside. A small gift was added and the name changed to crackers. Victorians added paper hats and the corny jokes evolved throughout the 20th century!

THE HOLLY/MISTLETOE: In ancient Rome, people used decorative wreaths at times of celebration, particularly after a victory, and from this came the custom of hanging a wreath on our front doors. The traditional kiss under mistletoe is linked to pagan fertility rites and the pretty plant with the white berries was actually banned from churches during the Middle Ages due to its connotations. Ancient Britons also used to hang mistletoe over a doorway as a symbol of peace. The needle-like points of holly leaves and the blood red berries were thought to resemble the crown of thorns Jesus was forced to wear before his crucifixion. This is why holly is now used in Christmas decorations and wreaths – which can also symbolise eternal life – and the very name 'holly' is thought to derive from the word 'holy'.

THE STOCKING: Nearly 1,700 years ago, a Christian bishop of Myra, in Asia Minor, was imprisoned under the last pagan Roman Emperor, Diocletian, but reinstated under Constantine. A cult grew up around him in Greece and spread farther afield, and he became the patron saint of children. One legend tells of a poor man who could not afford dowries for his three daughters, until bags of gold were tossed through an open window by St Nicholas, landing in the stockings drying in front of the fire.

SANTA CLAUS: Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle or just Santa, evolved from a figure in Dutch legend known as Sinterklaas, who, in turn, may be partly based on the historical figure Saint Nicholas – who was famous for the generous gifts which he gave to the poor. In Holland and Germany, there was a custom that St Nicholas was the secret bringer of presents for children on 6 December, his feast day. During the Reformation, the date for giving gifts in the Netherlands and Belgium changed from the 6th to Christmas Eve.

THE RED SUIT: In 1863, the cartoonist Thomas Nast began a series of drawings in Harper's Weekly, based on "The Night Before Christmas", in which Santa Claus, as he had now become known, could be seen with flowing beard and fur garments. Around 1869, he turned up for the first time in a bright red suit, with a white belt, but he was not invariably dressed in red until the mighty Coca Cola corporation appropriated him for an advertising campaign that began in 1931, and ran every Christmas for 35 years. In Britain, this American import merged with an older folk hero called Old Christmas, or Old Father Christmas, a fun-loving, heavy drinker who seemed to have arisen as a reaction to Puritanism.

THE REINDEER: On 23 December 1823, the Troy Sentinel, in New York State, published an anonymous 56-line poem variously known as "A Visit from St Nicholas" or "The Night Before Christmas" which fused the feast of St Nicholas with Christmas, and had him arriving on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer. The reindeer had names, but none was called Rudolf. He of the red nose was created by an advertising copywriter in 1939 named Robert May. May was asked to come up with a story which could be given away to children at a department store and so came up with the reindeer twist on the familiar Ugly Duckling story.

THE PRESENTS: One of the earliest known instances of present-giving around the time of the winter solstice was during the Roman festival of the Kalends, which was on the first day of January. High ranking officials of the Roman administration were expected to present gifts to their Emperor during the Kalends. Caligula took this tradition so seriously that he went to the extent of declaring an edict which obliged them to do so. Historically, these gifts took the form of evergreen branches taken from the grove of the goddess Strenia; Caligula, though, was not that keen on olive branches so his dignitaries began to give gifts of honey and cakes as symbols of their wish that the new year might be full of sweetness, and gold, and that it might bring prosperity.