This vintage Victorian Advent calendar postcard depicting Santa Claus was designed to tear out and mail. An “Adventskalender,” the German word for Advent calendar, was first used by German Lutherans in the 19th century and has since spread to other Christian denominations.
Nov/Dec 2025 (Volume 17, Issue 6)
By Don Doxsie
For most Iowans, Christmas Day is when almost everything in our daily lives comes to a halt. It’s a day of worship and revelry, a day for family and generosity, a day unlike any other day. It’s something people have come to expect and anticipate.
It wasn’t always that way.
As Iowa-born poet Hadley Read wrote while reflecting on his Hamilton County childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, it really wasn’t much different than the other 364 days of the year: “Chores got done on Christmas day, same as any other day… Cows got milked and cattle fed. Barns got cleaned and all the rest.’’
Many of Iowa’s earliest settlers viewed Christmas with apathy if not disdain. George F. Parker wrote in “Iowa Pioneer Foundations” that most Iowa farmers in the middle of the 19th century didn’t acknowledge any holiday except possibly the Fourth of July. December 25 came and went with little notice.
That changed through the decades. As Iowa began to fill up with immigrants from European nations, the state’s residents came to embrace, enjoy and emphasize the holiday as much as anyone anywhere.
“The Christmas Tree,” an engraving by Winslow Homer, published by Harper’s Weekly, Dec. 25, 1858. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
“Over a period of years, Iowa Christmases became a meld of traditions and customs, both those based on the birth of the Babe in a manger, and those of a more secular sort,’’ Clarence Andrews wrote in his book, “Christmas in Iowa.”
Michael Zahs, a former teacher and avid historian who probably knows more about Iowa holiday traditions than anyone, said he thinks the earliest celebration of Christmas in Iowa probably took place at Fort Madison in 1808 or 1809. Fort Madison was the first U.S. military installation along the upper Mississippi River and the soldiers there were believed to have at least acknowledged the holiday, even if it was just with warm greetings and an extra ration of whiskey.
There were seven Moravian congregations in Iowa, starting in 1854, that helped shape the way we celebrate Christmas in Iowa. They decorated churches with pine boughs and made candles and cookies. Gracehill Moravian Church and Cemetery, completed in 1867 and located southwest of Washington, is the last church that remains from the Moravian congregations and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
There was more recognition of Christmas in the years that followed. Mary Miller recalled that her family celebrated Christmas as far back as 1842 in Clinton, which was then known as New York. The children hung stockings inside their log house and the next morning found each of them filled with “a nice, fat, brown doughnut and some pieces of gaily colored calico.’’ Christmas dinner usually included a wild turkey that Mary’s father shot, roast venison, roast pork, potatoes, nuts and mincemeat pie.
Christmas became a legal holiday in Iowa in 1862, eight years before it was declared a national holiday. By then, European immigrants had begun descending on Iowa, bringing their Yuletide customs with them.
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