From the earliest days, Christmas has been a curious, eclectic mix of the sacred and the secular. Not always competing but often overlapping and overwhelming: indulgence and incarnation, revelry and reverence. Much impressive scholarship has been undertaken in recent decades into the history of the holiest and happiest day of the year, among them Judith Flanders’s fascinating Christmas: A Biography (2017), which one reviewer described as having “more footnotes than there are presents under a Rockefeller Christmas tree”. Another is Penne L. Restad’s Christmas in America (1995).