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So it's Christmas Eve. Today I wanted to talk about how Christmas was celebrated by history's most notorious villains.

This turned out to be a little bit harder than anticipated.

The first real question I ran into was, did Pirates even actually celebrate Christmas?

Now that has a complicated answer, but not terribly.

First of all, though, obviously not all Pirates were Christian and wouldn't have celebrated the birth of Christ.

We can fairly safely assume that Madame Ching-She didn't have a Christmas tree on board her

ship in the South China Sea. The Muslim barbery pirates in the Mediterranean

probably weren't celebrating either. Even in the Caribbean, not all the pirates would

have been Christian. The Jewish Jamaicans were celebrating Hanukkah, which we know due to a menorah found in the ruins of Port Royal, and we can probably assume that the pirates among them were celebrating as well.

But what of the English, Irish, French, and Dutch sailors on the account?

They came from Christian families usually, but they were vilified as enemies of the whole

human race. It's hard to picture these violent scallywags,

praying, singing hymns, and opening presents. To get to the answer, we need to look at two basic things. First there are a few firsthand

accounts of Pirate Christmases we can look at but perhaps equally as important

is the religious environment of the pirates world.

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