Hello and welcome to the Historic Royal Palaces podcast, the podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

My name is Charles Farris and I'm a curator at the Tower of London. For this special seasonal episode,

we are re-releasing the fascinating festive discussion I had last year with two of my colleagues.

We'll answer questions like, where did Panto originate? Who was the Lord of Miss Rule? And what did

Elizabeth I get for Christmas? So, if you'd like to learn more about the history of Christmases at our palaces,

grab yourself a Tudor mince pie, a mold wine or a hot chocolate, and keep listening.

To kick us off, we're going to start with an obvious question, which I'm going to tackle

if you don't mind, and that is, what is Christmas? And of course, Christmas means lots of

different things to different people.

For some, it's a religious festival celebrating the birth of Jesus,

while for others it's very much more a secular celebration and all about family and togetherness.

And believe it or not, this is actually pretty appropriate when we consider its early history.

Now, many ancient cultures celebrated some sort of midwinter festival,

often focused around the winter solstice, that's the shortest day.

Sadly, literary sources don't tell us very much about this early history,

but fortunately when we get to ancient Rome, we are on sure ground.

And the Romans celebrated a number of different festivals

around the midwinter period, the most popular of which was Saturnalia, a festival in honour

of the God Saturn. Now we get on to the Christian part. The church in Rome began formally

celebrating, we think, Christmas on the 25th of December, all the way back in 336, during the reign of Emperor Constantine.

Now, the Bible accounts don't actually give us many details about exactly when Christmas was.

So they really had to just come up with a date.

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