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Other myths of the season What are some of the other traditions "Why is This A Holiday" examines? • The date of Jesus' birth. Forget those who tell you Dec. 25 is an arbitrary date, chosen to counter pagan festivals, and thank Pope Julius (337-386) instead. "He had access to the census documents of Judea that had been kept by the imperial governor in Syria and sent to Rome by Titus," Johnson said. "There's a letter from St. Cyril of Jerusalem asking specifically that the pope look to those documents, which at the time were only about as old as our Declaration of Independence is now." Others -- including St. Justin Martyr, Terrullian and St. John Chrysostom -- also made reference to census documents as pointing to Dec. 25 as the day Christ was born. • Santa Claus's history. St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children, brought gifts to children in Catholic countries. When the Protestant Reformation came, the children still expected treats, but parents could no longer say they were from a saint, Johnson said. So, Fr. Christmas was invented to replace St. Nicholas in Holland, and the areas in New York where the Dutch settled. Writer Washington Irving wrote of Dutch customs to explain them to wary Yankee settlers who wondered what the fuss was about. While Irving's prose was somewhat satirical, eventually the tradition of Santa Claus was looked on as charming, and adapted universally. • The author of "The Night Before Christmas." It wasn't Clement Clarke Moore, a dour New York clergyman and seminary founder, whose poems tended toward moral verse and cautionary tales, but really Major Henry Livingston, Jr., a Revolutionary War hero and the author of dozens of little ditties and illustrations, Johnson said. Although Moore initially was chagrined at being linked with the poem, as its fame grew, he decided he wanted to be known as its author, and, after Livingston's death, never challenged claims that he himself wrote it, although he couldn't say exactly when he did, Johnson said.

If the pending whirl of the holidays -- gift shopping, decorating, cookie baking, and tree trimming -- fills you with dread, publisher and author Kevin Orlin Johnson wants you to remember that the real feast of Christmas has nothing to do with any of those things.

Johnson, president and co-founder of Texas-based Pangaeus Press, is the author of an upcoming book, "Why is this A Holiday?: A Guide to American Celebrations of God and Country."

Many myths of Christmas that deal with festivities, from Santa Claus to decorated trees, have been wound around the holiday over the years, prompting belief that they must have some significance to the celebration, he said. After months of combing ancient books and records while researching holiday myths and traditions, however, he's uncovered a different view.

Take the Christmas tree, a cherished tradition that isn't rooted in religion. Some people trace its beginning with the Druids. Actually, there were no Druids, Johnson said, but instead a group of diverse peoples with no written language about whom virtually nothing is known. Others believe Martin Luther started the custom, yet the people in his part of Germany didn't know trees until years after Luther died.

So what is the story? In the 1830s, Christmas wasn't observed in Massachusetts -- a legacy from Puritan times -- so Boston abolitionists, many of them Unitarians who didn't celebrate Christmas anyway, used the day to stage fund-raising fairs for the abolition of slavery, Johnson said.

In 1834, Carl Follen, a Harvard professor, chaired the decorations committee for the Boston abolitionists.Follen, who came from Germany, remembered people in his native country using evergreens -- a symbol of remembrance -- as decorations with a twist; they would set up little fir trees and trim them with strips of paper printed with political slogans. So he set up a "Freedom Tree" at the anti-slavery fair. Shortly thereafter, a Unitarian minister named Adin Ballou, decided to celebrate Christmas at his Massachusetts farm, and thought he would use the trees he'd seen at Christmas Day anti-slavery fairs. Eventually other Protestant ministers followed suit, just assuming that trees were traditional, and a national custom began, Johnson said.

Many of Johnson's discoveries punch holes in the origins of sentimental, long-held holiday myths, and he acknowledged that some people are upset by his research into beloved symbols.

"There are a lot of surprises in 'Why Is This A Holiday,' and about half of them are shocking, but more than half of them are pleasant. They all open up whole new horizons of interest, of bright and noble American ideals. And all of them are fun."

Besides, he added, "Is it more meaningful to see Christmas trees as some hoary relic of pagan worship, or as they really are, American assertions that the Creator endowed all humans with certain inalienable rights, and that the Savior came to insist upon them-that no American should ever be a slave?"

It was people's great interest in holiday customs and traditions that spawned the 600-some pages of "Why is this a Holiday?" for Johnson, a former newspaper columnist, who noted that he has written all of his books in response to questions from readers.

While dozens of books have been written on the subject of holiday myths and customs, explanations from sociologists and anthropologists have often been less than satisfactory, he believes.

"A lot of books about the holidays just de-bunk the myths and stamp away, leaving people with crushed hopes and no fun at all. I'm more interested in finding out the truth about our holiday customs, and the truth always turns out to be more positive, more enlightening, and more fun than the vague and groundless myths that the other books give you," he said.

"The simplest and most useful fact that I found is that every holiday consists of two parts: the solemnity or actual commemoration of an event, and all the merry-making that goes with it, but the two have nothing to do with each other.

"In many cases, you can track down definite, documented, rational origins for the merry-making. Generally, what happened during the Protestant Reformation was that religious solemnities were abolished, and it became unlawful to celebrate Easter and Christmas. So people just kept on with the merry-making, but had no solemnity."

When the religious celebrations eventually returned, Americans found a "grab bag of merry-making, which they thought was overwhelmingly important," Johnson said. So the merry-making grew to be part of the way the holiday was celebrated, even though all the feasts, caroling and presents were simply ways to have fun.

The whole idea of entertaining at the end of the year came about around 1500 in northern Europe, when colder winters and snow pushed people indoors for months.

"By the end of December, you'd probably be stringing the dried fruit into endless garlands and singing incomprehensible songs, holiday or no," Johnson said. "Certainly having the neighbors in to sit around a blazing Yule log wouldn't cut into your workday. All of the extras that naturally settled around Christmas-which does come right at the winter solstice, the midpoint in winter-were not so much a burden as a welcome excuse for some social and physical activity, and the parties were a well-earned celebration of a whole year's work harvested and gathered into barns."

Social pressures today might make you feel you have to deck the halls, but it's the commemoration part that's obligatory, Johnson noted, so if you don't want to fuss with festivities that aren't fun for you, why bother? "The merry-making is meaningless in itself," he said. "So we're free to enjoy it or to enjoy not bothering with it at all.

He knows that, these days, already overworked people wear themselves out trying to create a perfect Christmas, and the whole point of celebrating Christ's birth is lost. But Johnson, a Catholic himself, who also wrote "Why Do Catholics Do That?" and "Rosary: Mysteries, Meditations, and the Telling of the Beads," sees Advent as the way families can focus on the real meaning of Christmas.

Like Lent, Advent is a roughly month-long preparation period for a holy season, but over time, its penitential nature has been lessened, sometimes letting the secular observances of Christmas crowd in, he pointed out.

"Advent fasting and almsgiving used to keep people aware of the proper use of material goods and of the need to offset other people's poverty with the excess from our own prosperity. If you take the penitential observances away, the secular celebrations can seem somehow obligatory, somehow the essence of Christmas.

"The penitential observances of Advent always had a festive character to them. The idea was to contain your excitement until Christ came, and to use that energy in getting ready. So people took on these penances joyfully. They'd pause in their celebrations to acknowledge their sins and to clean house, spiritually, overjoyed that Christ came to us at Christmas, but still aware of our unworthiness to receive him."

We can keep that anticipatory spirit alive in our families with Advent wreaths and calendars, and we can even turn to older traditions practiced by our ancestors, Johnson said, such as when children went door-to-door, trick-or-treat style, begging for alms for the poor in December, or families had penitential meals on Friday, and gave the unused food to the needy.

"Maybe we can still recapture this uniquely Christian attitude of joyful penance," he said. "Bring out that Lenten almsbox and add coins to it before a meatless Friday dinner, these Advent weeks, and sing a little carol as you do. Put the poor on your gift list: books and toys for the children, of course, but the whole family might save up for a bigger gift -- an overcoat or an operation, maybe, for somebody who couldn't otherwise afford it."

That's keeping meaningful traditions alive and making Christmas a true celebration.