The Backstory: When Christmas Was About Drinking, Dancing, and Sex
Elvis Duran and the Morning Show ON DEMAND
Elvis Duran Podcast Network and iHeartPodcasts
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We know all about the Christmas traditions we’ve grown up with, but where did they originate? We celebrate with Christmas trees, cards, lights, visits from Santa Claus, and lots of great food. But our ancestors were more likely to celebrate with drunken dancing, weird games, and street fights. How did Santa Claus, Christmas carols, and eggnog become a thing?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wow, it's amazing how quickly the Christmas season creeps up on us. There's so much to do, gifts, |
| 0:06.0 | food, parties, decorating. But where did all our Christmas traditions come from? Well, believe it |
| 0:12.2 | or not, 1500 years ago, celebrating Christmas meant drunken parties, bar fights, and sometimes orgies. |
| 0:20.0 | So what's with the Christmas trees in eggnog? |
| 0:22.6 | I'm Patty Steele, how Christmas did a 180. |
| 0:25.6 | That's next on the backstory. |
| 0:30.6 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:32.6 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:34.6 | The backstory is back. |
| 0:38.6 | Christmas, at least for the last couple hundred years, has been all about children, |
| 0:43.2 | gifts, food, parties, decorating the house, and of course the Christmas tree. |
| 0:48.3 | In fact, when you plunge deep into the Christmas season, you probably have a bunch of |
| 0:52.8 | traditions you trot out because, well, |
| 0:55.3 | it's just what you've done every year and probably what your family did before you, right? |
| 1:00.0 | But where did all those traditions come from? |
| 1:03.1 | What we do now is so not the way the celebration originated. |
| 1:07.7 | 1500 years ago, the Christmas celebration regularly included wild dancing, |
| 1:13.5 | drunken parties, bar fights, and the occasional orgy. Even 250 years ago, George Washington was |
| 1:20.5 | sharing his heavily spiked eggnog. Are you surprised? Well, let's go back and take a look at how |
| 1:26.3 | Christmas evolved. We all know that Christmas |
| 1:28.9 | is based on the 2,000-year-old story of the birth of Jesus Christ, which historians say happened |
| 1:35.0 | anywhere from 2 to 4 BC. But what did that have to do with Santa Claus, Christmas trees, |
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