Every Christmas, millions of families serve ham as their centerpiece dinner. But this tradition didn't come from Christianity—it came from pagan winter solstice celebrations that Christians tried desperately to eliminate.
In ancient Germanic and Norse cultures, the winter solstice marked the darkest day of the year, when communities would sacrifice a wild boar to the god Freyr, the deity of fertility, prosperity, and agriculture. The boar sacrifice was meant to ensure the sun would return and crops would grow in spring.
Families would roast the entire animal and feast on it for days during Yule celebrations. The boar's head was considered especially sacred and would be paraded around on a platter before being eaten. This wasn't just dinner—it was a religious ritual.
When Christianity spread through Northern Europe, church leaders tried to ban these pagan feasts and replace them with Christian celebrations. They moved Christmas to late December specifically to compete with Yule, hoping people would abandon their old traditions.
But people refused to give up their boar feasts. The tradition was too deeply ingrained—families had been sacrificing and eating boar at winter solstice for thousands of years. No amount of church pressure could make them stop.
So the church gave up trying to ban it and instead tried to Christianize it. They claimed the boar represented the devil being conquered, or that it symbolized Jesus's triumph over sin. They basically just slapped Christian meaning onto a pagan practice and called it good.
Over centuries, wild boar became domesticated pigs and eventually specifically cured and preserved as ham. Ham became practical because families could slaughter pigs in fall, cure the meat, and have it ready for the winter feast. The preservation process also made it special—you couldn't have fresh ham year-round like you can now.
The tradition of parading the boar's head survived too, particularly in England. Oxford colleges still perform the "Boar's Head Carol" ceremony every Christmas, carrying an decorated boar's head into the dining hall. They're reenacting a pagan sacrifice ritual and calling it Christmas tradition.
In America, ham became the second most popular Christmas dinner after turkey, but most families have no idea they're continuing a 2,000+ year old pagan ritual that the Christian church failed to eliminate. We've just forgotten the wild boar, the blood sacrifice, and the sun god it was meant to honor.
So when you're carving that glazed ham on Christmas Day, you're participating in one of the oldest continuous food traditions in human history—one that predates Christianity by a millennia and survived every attempt to kill it off.