I’ve been helping my eldest with his homework: a project on
Christmas around the world.
Now, there are no doubt people out there – not ODHSNM readers, of course – who would
find this outrageous.
Not me helping my son with his homework. The “around the
world” bit. The true meaning of Christmas, they declare, can’t be reduced to
some multicultural, relativistic blah blah blah... - a line of argument which you know full well
will inevitably end in someone blurting out the word “Immigrants!”
The true meaning of Christmas, they will say, is...erm...
Well, dear readers, let me put this to you. Christmas is
just a celebration of good stuff at a crappy time of year. It has had all sorts
of stuff superimposed on it over the centuries, but at the end of the day
that’s what it started out as and that’s what it still is.
Don’t give me all that “it’s the birth of Jesus” malarkey.
Christ is a late addition to Christmas.
He’s been stuck on top of at least two sets of pre-Christian
traditions.
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| Pagan dessert |
Firstly, the Northern European pagan Yule celebrations
around the winter
solstice. That’s where you get your holly and ivy, your Druidic mistletoe,
your Christmas trees, your Yule log (chocolate or otherwise) and all those
other Germano-Celto-Scandinavian accessories.
Not one of those things – except perhaps a log – would have
been found in the Iron Age Middle East, so have clearly come from somewhere
other than the Jesus story.
The second source is Greco-Roman paganism, specifically the
festival of Saturnalia.
Saturnalia (Kronoia for the Greeks among us) was a month
long celebration of the good old days before that bastard Zeus cursed
mankind with the need to work for a living. It involved:
- Gift giving
- Eating and drinking to excess
- A general end-of-term, office party kind of vibe all round, when slaves were afforded freedoms usually denied them and the bosses made fools of themselves
Sounds Christmassy, doesn’t it?
There are loads of other hypotheses kicking about saying
that the Christian myth is based on other bits of
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| Not real |
The point is – and I’ll go out on a limb here – it is
completely impossible to extract a “true” Christian core or indeed a “true”
pagan core. It’s a big syncretic mess of bits and bobs appropriated from here,
there and everywhere.
Look at Santa Claus. Where does he fit in? Don’t try to tell
me that he’s “really” Saint Nicholas, the fourth century Turkish bishop and
early Christian martyr. What the hell would he be doing with reindeer and
elves? He’s as obviously mashed up as Baron Samedi.
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| Balls |
Why do you think the Puritans banned
Christmas in 1647 as “a popish festival with no biblical justification”?
Precisely because they could see how pagan it all was. At least Oliver Cromwell
had the balls to recognise it for what it was instead of whinging about the
corruption of the “real” meaning on Radio Four.
You can’t select certain bits and say that’s the “real”
Christmas and the rest of it isn’t – the Christian bits, the non-Christian
bits, whatever. Every step along the way contributed to getting us where we are
today. Who can say where taking any of them out would have taken us? There is
no distinction between the signal and the noise.
The materialistic aspects of Christmas are just as ancient
as the spiritual aspects.
And if we accept that consumerism is our current religion
(or substitute for it), then a 50 year tradition of buy-buy-buy from Black
Thursday to the January Sales is getting on for half the age of all “ye olde
traditions” the Victorians bequeathed us.
It’s as silly to worship a tree or indeed money as it is to
worship a big old beardy sky-fairy. If
you pick away rationally at every part of the Christmas myth, eventually you’re
left with nothing but a bloody long winter ahead of us.
Maybe we don’t need to have a justification for having a
party. The weather’s shit, it’s dark all the time – don’t we have a right to
cheer ourselves up?
Perhaps THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the true meaning of
Christmas.
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