Christmas carols, for example, started out as a pagan winter ceremony called “wassailing” to help fruit trees survive the winter and insure a good harvest the following year. By the middle ...

Although today's commercialized Christmas is considered distinctly American, the festival was banned in the nation's earliest days. New England's Puritan leaders considered it a pagan or papist ...

Historian Lucy Worsley traces the roots of Christmas by exploring the Anglo-Saxon tradition, wassailing where people sing to the apple trees to celebrate the winter solstice. Watch the full ...

In many countries, Easter is still the day of days. But in America, we're all about Christmas -- divested, mostly, of its religious trappings.

Take a drive along the Avalon Peninsula’s Cape Shore or Killick Coast this May, and you may come upon an unfamiliar type of ...

But compared to Christmas, with its presents, trees, lights, stockings ... to some extent — rebranded versions of existing pagan holidays. Christmas borrows its merrymaking and gift-giving ...