It was associated with Christmas in Mexico. It became popular in the US by the Ecke family who were sole distributors. They sent the plants to TV stations for free and people wanted to buy them afterwards.
So, marketing
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And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger…
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ETA: better pictures
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Exactly. In Puritan Massachusetts Christmas was explicitly forbidden.
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17th century Puritans in England got it banned too, as “a popish festival with no biblical justification”. In the English traditional generally it was a relatively minor holiday at the best of times. I find it ironic on multiple levels that modern fundamentalists make a big deal out of Christmas and attack its commercialization as destroying the “real meaning of Christmas,” when the commercialization was the main part of what made it such a major holiday (and the “real,” i.e. original, meaning is pagan). These same fundamentalists see the Puritans as having created the “Christian traditions” and general basis for the existence of the country as a whole, which is an entire other set of ironies…
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Always, ALWAYS blame the Victorians[1]!
The people from the time of the reign of Victoria, not the the people that live in the state
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Speaking as a modern medievalist[2], I wholeheartedly support this maxim.
[2] who happens to also live in Victoria.
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Except shepherds do not watch their flocks by night in the winter in Israel. They do in spring.
Also, human gestation periods vary, averaging 38 weeks.
You mean in the entire Southern Hemisphere?
Here in Australia, there used to be a song about Santa’s sleigh being pulled by kangaroo’s. But the singer is Rolf Harris and we don’t talk about him any more!
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I had to Google his name. What a creepy weirdo.
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Passover/Easter moves because the lunar calendar (Passover) does not line up with the Solar Calendar (Solstice). I am sure there is a year around 1 AD where the time period would be close to a reasonable gestation time. Christmas was a chosen date and there were probably multiple reasons it settled on December 25 none of which is historically accurate. I just think the conception/death date lining up is a new (to me) and interesting possible reason for the choice.
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I will take your word for the habits of ancient Israeli Shepherds. Matthew, as an author, presented the Shepherds as attending because Shepherds are near the bottom rung of society. Royalty, King Herod, was actively trying to wipe out the Messiah, the religious elite ( Sadducees, Pharisees) were ignorant of his coming, foreigners (the Magi) were more informed than they were. Shepherds, were landless, not even farmers. The likely did not even own their flocks, they were probably hired help, homeless, sleeping in the fields. But they were among the first to be let in on the great event. The symbol makes for a good story and facts are irrelevant 
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Or if you prefer your lessons about Saturnalia with more Marvel characters:
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Every time I wonder about some aspect of current dress, city structure, social convention, architecture (separate bathrooms!), etc, I go look it up. The answer is always “the Victorians started that”. It’s a running joke in my head now, to the point where I wonder if there was a world before that period and how different it must have been.
I suppose this also reflects bias in the literature to some degree though. Certain people who write books are pretty enamoured with that time period and perhaps it gets overemphasized.
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I think that’s the key to the whole Christmas story. Almost none of the details stand up to historical scrutiny, but I don’t think it matters. It’s a story, and it’s a nice one. It doesn’t need to be more than that.
I think Christians and non-Christians alike get really hung up on the story being factual, as though the validity of the entire religion depends on it. I suppose if a person is a biblical literalist than that’s true, but that person is doomed anyway. Very little of the Bible that is actually verifiable holds up to scrutiny in that way. Neither do any parables or moral fairy tales, however. That doesn’t mean they have no value as teaching tools or advice on how to live. I suppose it’s Evangelicalism that has infected modern Christianity with this intense desire for historical factual accuracy (a standard no religion will ever meet) and it has coloured all debate on the topic.
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