Well, Americans especially have an extremely skewed historical belief system about the nationalist origins of this holiday. An interesting history of "the holidays" as we know them can be found in a book by a guy named Jock Elliot, called "Inventing Christmas: How Our Holiday Came To Be."

Elliott (who is former chairman of the advertising firm Ogilvy and Mather) takes us on a tour of the commercialism, entertainments, consumption, and sacred-secular dualism that led to the holiday as we know it. Focusing on the "invented traditions" that define modern Christmas, Elliott explains that "Most of our Christmas customs were invented in an amazingly short twenty-five-year period, from 1823-1848-a sort of `Big Bang' of our Christmas."