Justin Fox, Columnist

Christmas Was Invented in New York

The strange but probably true tale of how Washington Irving and a few contemporaries created the modern holiday in the early 1800s.

December 13, 2019 at 12:00 PM UTC

By Justin Fox

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

The center of the Christmas universe.
Photographer: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

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Christmas as we know it today got its start in the pages of Salmagundi, a short-lived early-1800s precursor to Mad magazine and the Onion that was billed as “The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others” but was actually the work of precocious New York literary talent Washington Irving, one of his older brothers and a friend.

At least, that’s one theory, and as a New Yorker I’m all for promoting it.