November 29, 2005
’Tis the Season Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST With the safe completion of Thanksgiving—a holiday that as far as I know no one objects to except turkeys—we have officially entered the season of Christmas, a holiday that, these days, it sometimes seems everyone objects to except children. Some say that a Christian holiday should not be foisted upon non-Christians and that everything should be generic, so as not to give offense. Holiday tree, not Christmas tree; “Season’s Greetings,” not “Merry Christmas”; no traditional Christmas symbols unless carefully balanced with non-Christmas ones. I say fiddlesticks. Perhaps a very brief history of Christmas will help everyone relax and enjoy the season a bit more. For the truth of the matter is that Christmas is two completely separate holidays, one sacred and one profane, that have little if anything to do with each other except that, for historical reasons, they both fall on December 25 and are both called Christmas. In the earliest days of Christianity, Christmas wasn’t celebrated at all. It was the events at the end of Christ’s life, not its beginning, that dominated the church year. Theologically they still do, and Easter and Good Friday are far more important holy days than Christmas in the church calendar. The Last Supper was a Seder, the feast celebrating Passover, and Passover always falls on the day of the first full moon of spring in the Hebrew calendar. So the Council of Nicea, in A.D. 325, decided that Easter would fall on the first Sunday following the first full moon of spring, which is why Easter usually comes shortly after Passover. (Because the Hebrew calendar is a lunar one, every so often an extra month is added to bring the calendar back into astronomical reality, and that can make Passover come after Easter, as it did in 2005.) Most Christian holy days are determined by Easter. That is why Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, etc., are all “moveable feasts,” moving around the secular calendar at the whim of the moon. But Christmas does not move. It, and its associated holy days such as Advent and Epiphany, are set not by the moon but by the solar calendar created by pagan astronomers under the direction of Julius Caesar (and slightly tweaked by the astronomers of Pope Gregory VII in 1583, to make it more accurate). The reason why Christian holy days march to the drummers of two different calendars is simple. In the third and fourth centuries, as Christianity began to spread rapidly through the Roman Empire, the church fathers had a marketing problem. The Romans celebrated an annual holiday called the Saturnalia from December 17 to December 24. It honored Saturn, the god of the harvest, but it has its origins in far more ancient winter-solstice festivals. The Saturnalia was party time, with feasting, drinking, dressing up (often in the clothes of the opposite sex), decorating with evergreens, and gift-giving. Sound familiar? It was, of course, a very popular holiday and many did not want to give it up. So the church created a holiday to celebrate the birth of Christ as a substitute. The old Saturnalia customs were cheerfully adopted (although I imagine the early church fathers weren’t too keen on cross-dressing). The giveaway is that while we don’t know when Christ was born, the gospels tell us that it was when “the shepherds were watching their flocks by night.” In other words, when the flocks were up in the hills grazing on summer pastures. In December, they would all have been safely tucked away in barns. In the Middle Ages, such northern pagan customs as mistletoe and evergreen trees were incorporated into the celebration. Then along came the Protestant Reformation. Many of the new Protestant denominations wanted to purify (the origin of the word Puritan) the church of what they regarded as medieval corruptions of the ancient faith. Out went the priesthood, confession, bishops, the cult of the Virgin Mary, and . . . Christmas. Although Anglicans continued to celebrate Christmas, and thus the holiday was prominent in the Southern colonies, Puritans did not, and December 25 was just a regular work day in early New England. It was only in the early nineteenth century that Christmas began to creep back into many Protestant churches. Again, the reason was a marketing problem. New York, that most secular of American cities, whose patron saint is St. Nicholas, invented the modern American version of Santa Claus, by such means as Clement Clark Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (1823), usually known by its first line, “’Twas the night before Christmas . . .” This was a celebration of the wholly secular Christmas that derives from the Saturnalia. Although Moore was an Episcopal priest, his poem is all about sugar plums, not the nativity. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) is equally about the secular Christmas. It is a story about the redemption of a rich but lonely and unhappy man by the spirit of the season and the necessity of love, family, and friends to lead a happy and fulfilled life. The word church appears in A Christmas Carol exactly once, the word Christ never. Meanwhile, merchants such as New York’s A. T. Stewart began opening larger and larger stores. They began decorating these new department stores for Christmas. They pushed the old tradition of gift-giving for obvious reasons of self-interest. And people of differing religious traditions began living in closer proximity. It didn’t take the children long to catch on and exploit the situation. “The O’Reilly kids down the street are getting presents; why aren’t we!?” is not a question parents have good defenses against. (This also accounts for why Hanukkah, once a minor Jewish holy day, is now a much bigger one in this country than in Israel.) By the mid-nineteenth century Christmas was back in the calendar of most Protestant churches, and the secular celebration of the old Saturnalia under the name of Christmas was gathering force quickly. J. P. Morgan’s uncle, of all people, wrote “Jingle Bells” in 1849. Perhaps the most famous of all American Christmas songs, “White Christmas,” was written by Irving Berlin, who was Jewish. Both songs celebrate the winter solstice not the birth of Christ. Today the vast American merchandising and advertising industries spend billions to get people to carry on the ancient pagan tradition of gift-giving. But in recent decades some people have been trying to curtail all public acknowledgment of Christmas in the name of political correctness. A class trip from a public school in New Jersey to see a dramatic production of A Christmas Carol in New York was cancelled a few years ago when one parent objected on religious grounds. Obviously the parent had never read the book or seen any of the many films based on it (the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim is the best in my view). Objecting to A Christmas Carol on religious grounds is like objecting to The Diary of Anne Frank because one scene in the play shows the family celebrating Hanukkah as they hide in the attic from the Nazis. Even poinsettias have been denounced as a Christian symbol and ordered removed from a county courthouse. In fact the poinsettia was brought to this country—and soon to Europe—only in 1828, by the diplomat Joel Roberts Poinsett, after he returned from a stint as American consul in Mexico where the plants are native. They became associated with Christmas only because they bloom at that time, are easily grown in greenhouses, and make a splendidly cheery decoration in the dark days of December. I would hope that in the spirit of, uhmm, Christmas, people, before they lodge a complaint, would ask themselves if what they object to is really an aspect of the Christian holy day or is it actually part of the secular holiday that happens at the same time but has roots that antedate Christianity by millennia. Happy Saturnalia, everyone!
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