What Christmas was like before it was "domesticated by the Victorians":
Christmas was for many centuries a very politically charged season, defined by inversions of the normal social order. Clement Clarke Moore’s famous 1822 Christmas poem “The night before Christmas” includes the line “out on the lawn there arose such a clatter/I sprang from bed to see what was the matter.” At the time the poem was written, disturbance on the lawn on Christmas Eve would have been not magical, but threatening, likely caused by drunken youths roaming the neighborhood, demanding gifts from respectable householders. This was an echo of older traditions, also subversive, which saw tenants and serfs demanding gifts and being given law-like powers in this “season of misrule.”
I've long been amused by the whole idea that real Christians should be defending "Christmas" in its traditional form. The Puritans banned it – even in England, where the climate and darkness all but demand you get shitfaced around December 21. The embrace of Christmas materialism by the Christian right is about as theologically persuasive as their embrace of the Prosperity Gospel and the torture of terror suspects.
The Dish 