Christian Symbols of Christmas and What They Mean

The Christian symbols of Christmas all point to the birth of Jesus. The nativity scene shows him laid in the manger. The star recalls the light that led the wise men to him, and the angels recall the news sung to the shepherds. Candles and lights stand for Christ the light, and evergreens for the life he gives.

Christmas is a feast we keep with our eyes and our hands, and that suits what it celebrates. God came to us as someone who could be seen and touched. The first letter of John begins with that very thing: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). So Christians have long welcomed signs. A box of hay, a paper star, a candle in a window: each one says, in its small way, what John said.

Which are the main Christian symbols of Christmas?

Most of them come straight from the Gospel story of the birth: a manger, a star, angels, three gifts. The rest grew up in Christian homes and churches over many centuries, and Christians read each one in the light of that story.

Why do Christians set up a nativity scene at Christmas?

Christians set one up to see what the shepherds went to see. When the angels had gone, the shepherds “said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us” (Luke 2:15). The nativity scene lets every household make that short journey. Its figures are Mary, Joseph and the child, the shepherds, an ox and a donkey, and later the wise men. Luke does not mention the animals. Together the figures put the night of the birth on a table where a child can reach it.

The Catholic bishops of the United States write that the custom in its present form “owes its origin to St. Francis of Assisi, who made the Christmas crèche or manger for Christmas Eve of 1223,” at Greccio, in Italy. Think how far that one Christmas Eve has travelled. Some eight hundred years later, the manger Francis set up stands on kitchen tables and in churches all over the world, and every family that sets one out is making Francis’s point again: God came to us poor enough to lie in a feeding trough. The bishops’ household blessing, which a parent may lead on Christmas Eve, asks God to “bless all who look upon this manger; may it remind us of the humble birth of Jesus, and raise our thoughts to him, who is God-with-us and Savior of all.” Many Protestant families keep a nativity set too, and many churches put children in the parts.

Why is the star a symbol of Christmas?

It stands for Christ the light, shown to the nations. Matthew tells how wise men from the east followed a star until it stood over the place where the child was, and how these strangers from far away knelt and worshipped him. Whether that star was something astronomers could chart or a light God sent, no one can say for certain, and its meaning does not wait on the answer. The star on top of a Christmas tree and the star that singers carried from house to house in many parts of Europe both keep that night in view.

What do star lanterns mean at Christmas?

The star lanterns of the Philippines, called parol, stand for the Star of Bethlehem. Their story belongs to the Simbang Gabi, the nine Masses that Filipino Catholics keep in the last days before Christmas, beginning on 16 December. The word comes from the Spanish farol, a lantern, and the Archdiocese of San Francisco, whose Filipino parishes keep the novena, tells how the lanterns “began as a way for Catholics to get to the early morning Masses in the dark” and were made, over time, into stars of bamboo and paper.

So a lamp that people carried to church before dawn slowly took the shape of the star the wise men followed, and every December the people carrying it make the wise men’s journey again on their way to Mass. Filipino Catholics keep the novena far from the islands too. In San Francisco each parish brings its parol to a Mass in early December, to be blessed before the novena begins, and the archdiocese sees in the lanterns and the dawn Masses together the faith of a people “journeying with the Holy Family to Bethlehem to welcome the Light of the World.”

Why are angels a Christmas symbol?

Luke gives the angels the news of that night. An angel tells the shepherds in the field that a Saviour is born, and then “suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:13–14). Churches still sing those words as the Gloria. The angel at the top of a tree, the angels in the nativity scene and the angels children play in a nativity play all stand where Luke put them, between heaven and the shepherds.

What do the gifts of the wise men mean?

When the wise men found the child, Matthew writes, “they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11). Matthew does not explain them, and before long Christians did. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing about AD 180, saw in each gift who the child was: gold for a king whose kingdom has no end, frankincense for God, and myrrh, the spice of burial, because he “should die and be buried for the mortal human race.” Think of what that means. Three gifts laid before a young child in a house in Bethlehem already named him king and God, and already pointed to his grave. The cradle and the cross were in the room together, and Christians have read the gifts that way ever since.

What do Christmas lights, bells and wreaths mean?

Of all the signs we put on our houses, the light says the most with the least. A candle in the window or a string of lights along the roof points to Christ, the light who came into our darkness, and in the long nights of December it says so to every neighbour who walks past. In Irish homes the window candle is a welcome as well. The bell, the wreath on the door and the holly with its thorns and red berries each carry a meaning of their own, and they are gathered in what Christmas bells, lights and wreaths mean to Christians.

The Christmas tree came later than most of these signs, in German towns of the 1500s and 1600s, and it gathered several meanings as it grew: a green branch in winter, the tree of life in Eden, the wood of the cross and the lights of Christ. Its story is told in the history and meaning of the Christmas tree.

Which Christmas symbols are Catholic?

Catholics keep nearly all of these signs alongside other Christians, and the Church gives some of them prayers of their own. The Book of Blessings has an order for blessing the Advent wreath, though the wreath itself began in a Protestant children’s home in Hamburg in 1839, as the story of the Advent wreath tells, and Catholic and Protestant families now light it alike. The most moving of these customs comes at the end of the Mass on Christmas night, when, the Church’s Directory on Popular Piety says, the faithful may be invited to kiss the image of the Child before it is laid in the nativity scene. Where that is done, a parish that has waited four weeks through Advent comes forward one by one to kiss the Child, and then the manger receives him. The customs that Catholic countries carried around the world are gathered in our page on Catholic Christmas traditions.

Is the candy cane a Christian symbol?

Its shape can remind us of a shepherd’s crook, but the famous story behind it is a modern legend. The story says a candymaker in Indiana invented the cane as a lesson in faith: hard like the rock of the Church, white for Christ’s purity, shaped as a J for Jesus and striped red for his blood. The cane’s beginnings were probably Christian, yet it “was almost certainly not designed to be the tasty theological treatise it’s now purported to be,” as Elesha Coffman wrote for Christian History, at Christianity Today. The oldest story behind it is a tradition, not a record. In about 1670, it says, a choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral had white sugar sticks bent into shepherds’ crooks to keep children quiet at a living nativity. The red stripes and the peppermint came much later, “around the turn of the century,” and for the idea that they were added to teach the faith, Coffman writes, there is “no evidence to confirm that theory.”

She quotes Barbara Mikkelson of the Urban Legends Reference Pages, who put the matter fairly: “though there’s nothing wrong with Christians now finding (and celebrating) symbolism where there wasn’t any before, there is something wrong with myths being presented as fact.” That is a good rule for the whole season. A candy cane on the tree can still turn a child’s thoughts to the shepherds. We only need to tell the child the truth about where it came from.

And the truth behind every sign of the season, the old and the merely charming, is one fact. Before that night no one could point to a child and say, there is God. After it the shepherds could, and so could Mary as she wrapped him in swaddling clothes. Some Christians keep very few of these customs, out of conscience or simply by custom, and the child in the manger belongs to them just as much. When we set out the nativity scene this year, or let a child hold the little shepherd, we are doing what John did. We are telling one another what we have seen. “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3).

Related reading

• Why was Jesus born in a manger?
• What was the Star of Bethlehem?
• How old was Jesus when the wise men came?
• Where is the Christmas story in the Bible?
• Catholic Christmas traditions
• Is holly in the Bible?