The German religious reformer (1483-1546) is credited with a number of Christmas innovations and certainly altered the course of Christmas history
Legend says that Martin Luther, inspired by the starry sky on Christmas Eve, was the first to put lights on a Christmas tree. He is also said to have been the first to put a small crèche under the tree. The Christmas carol “Away in a Manger” was attributed to him. The first two of these claims are extremely unlikely while the third is utterly false. Luther however did play an important role in the development of Christmas in other ways.
Unlike other Reformers who broke away from Rome in the sixteenth century, Luther was by no means willing to shed Christmas as a popish invention. He loved the holiday and continued to celebrate it all his life. He wrote five Christmas carols; the most famous, “From Heaven Above”, was probably written for his own children. Some of his finest sermons were delivered at Christmas time and were devoted to making the Nativity real in the eyes of his listeners — Luther described what Mary lacked at the birth in Palestine in terms of what might have been found in a German home; he described the distance from Nazareth to Bethlehem as being that from Saxony to Franconia. He spoke to those in his congregation of the predicament of the Holy Family in the stable:
Think, women, there was no one there to bathe the baby. No warm water, nor even cold. No fire, no light. The mother was herself midwife and the maid. The cold manger was the bed and the bathtub. I am amazed that the little one did not freeze. Who showed the poor girl what to do? Do not make of Mary a stone. It must have gone straight to her heart that she was so abandoned. She was flesh and blood, and must have felt miserable — and Joseph too — that she was left in this way, all alone with no one to help, in a strange land in the middle of winter. Her eyes were moist even though she was happy, and aware that the baby was God’s Son and Saviour of the world. She was not stone. For the higher people are in the favour of God, the more tender they are.
There are some of us…who think to ourselves, “If I had only been there! How quick I would have been to help the Baby. I would have washed His linen. How happy I would have been to go with the shepherds to see the Lord lying in the manger!” Yes, we would. We say that because we know how great Christ is, but if we had been there at that time, we would have done no better than the people of Bethlehem….Why don’t we do it now? We have Christ in our neighbor.
Luther also played a destructive role in his attitudes toward Christmas. He was an opponent of the cult of saints at a time when Christmas was rife with the presence of saints and their holy days. He criticized the veneration directed toward the Magi and sneered at their relics in Cologne which he had seen and which he said had no claim to authenticity. As late as 1531 he mentioned St Nicholas as the Gift-Bringer and the one to whom German children looked when putting out their stockings, but in the long run his attack on saints led to the replacement of Nicholas by the Christ Child and, later, the Weihnachtsmann as the nation’s supplier of Christmas presents.