This week Southern California has experienced that rarity—rain several days running.
My dogs hate it, so I (along with most of the neighbors in this condo complex) have been out walking between bands of rain.
There’s a place where two streets fork, forming a triangle of grass and shrubbery that functions as the bulletin board for the local canine community, so while my dogs sniff each leaf and blade of grass to catch up on the news, I can look at the houses, in particular one that seems to have every inch of its front, roof, and tiny patio decorated with cotton “snow,” colorful wire figures all lit up, and festoons of icicle lights. Hanging from the front of the chimney a great glowing Santa face is framed by more lights, and the windows blink and glow with twinkling colored lights.
Over the past few days, I’ve overheard quite a variety of commentary.
Among all the whoas! Beautiful! Wow! Awesomes! (mostly from kids) was this exchange:
(Kid in envious voice) “Bet those kids get a lot of presents.”
“No,” (the parental figure shot back), “because their dad spent all his money on Christmas lights.”
From adult passers-by there was the usual spectrum of reactions, pleased and not-so-pleased, the latter ranging from the secular to the fundamentalist, which can be summed up as:
“I hate this time of year, the frickin’ lights and Christmas crap, and you can’t escape the damn music. There oughta be a law against religion.”
And:
“Look at that house. Singing snowmen, wire reindeer, elves, Santa face, icicle and colored lights, and not one single sign of what Christmas is actually all about—the birth of Christ. What a blatant exercise in consumerism!”
The amusing thing is that both sorts of commentators spoke in exactly the same tone of self-righteousness.
So I got to thinking about how many definitions of the ‘Yule spirit’ there are, and how we symbolize it. Last year a bunch of us at a party were talking about this. The 15-year-old said something like, “You know what’s weird? My grandma is all about church and putting Christ back into Christmas, but I was looking at her tree, and all of a sudden it seemed weird to me. She’s got a tree inside her house, and sitting on top of it is this really expensive porcelain Father Christmas, with velvet robes. And I thought, if I was a Martian, and I walked into her house, I would think, why does this lady have a two-foot tall old man in robes perched on top of a tree, with these lights and metal balls hanging all over it? Nobody back on Mars would believe it, they’d think I was making it up.”
Their mom’s response went something like, “It’s symbolism—Father Christmas represents the saint, and he’s on top of the tree where the star usually goes, to symbolize heaven. The saints are all about good behavior, and family, and morals and the things you’re supposed to be thinking about when you think about the birth of Jesus.”
We got into a long discussion about Yule traditions, whose culture had borrowed symbols from whose, and appropriation of Christmas trappings to legitimize gobbling, guzzling, and grabbing the goodies.
But we’re also giving gifts, someone pointed out. It’s not just about getting but also giving. About getting together with loved ones, taking stock at the end of a year. Looking outside yourself, and maybe sharing with your fellow human. Listening to music, because yeah, a lot of Christmas jingles are incredibly irritating, but there are also some really beautiful pieces—as there has been a few centuries of refinement going on here. Which is why people of various religious backgrounds (including UU and the more laid-back skeptics) will join choirs to happily sing the Halleluiah chorus from Handel’s Messiah.
Nobody convinced anyone else, going away with pretty much the same ideas they’d arrived with, but the discussion was amicable for all its disparity.
I love this disparity, I have to admit. I love how one person seeing that house sees blatant commercialism while another person, looking at the same house, sees a celebration of the sacred, and all the twinkling lights are an evocation of the numinous, of anticipation, of hope and joy and nothing more serious than the promise of fun. I love our stories and myths and our patterns and our endless quest for the significance just out of reach.
There’s a quote that I think fits the season, and the humans who live through this season:
“We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.”
This is awesome, Sherwood.
Real Christmas Spirit is lovely–generous and loving.
But I can completely do without the vulgar materialism fest that usually starts before Halloween in my area and the glops of phony sentiment surrounding the season.
Amazing riff, Sherwood. Quite an interesting and hot issue. I enjoy having such debates, because they’re far rarer here in Israel. After all, there isn’t that much ‘blatant consumerism’ (or so I think), and most people celebrate the holidays, even if not fully, out of the sense of thousands of years of tradition and preserving our identity and culture. There’s no argument about the nature of Hannukah, for example, or of Pesach (Passover).
This actually makes me wonder, how do these things happen? Why is Christmas so far off from its’ original nature, and holidays of different cultures are not? Does it have to do with the claims that Christmas is an adopted holiday – not really the birth of Christ, but originally some pagan sun festival? Is it because Christianity became a widespread culture, compared to other cultures? Is it because of the ease of being both christian and secular, thus abandoning the original meaning of the holiday, as compared to other cultures where the holiday is either non-religious or cannot be separated from the religious tradition?
I truly wonder. I have never understood the nature of Christmas, other than the vague concept of giving and gifting. Is it because I’ve never been exposed to Christmas? Or is it because it’s hard to find people who agree on the nature of Christmas?
Koby, there’s a huge split between the religious conception of Christmas and the cultural one. So many people identify themselves as Christians–culturally–they are not religious that the holiday has really veered off its original course. It does not have anything to do with the original syncretism of which most people are unaware.
Koby: these are good questions, and I do not think there is any easy answer, that is, any answer that is going to satisfy everyone. Very generally? Western society is moving into a transitional period, with secular overtones (though notice that books and movies about fantasy elements are more popular than ever). With that, the holidays (once holy days) that developed traditions that could be exploited for consumerism became popular. Apparently St. Patrick’s Day wasn’t that big a deal before the Hallmark Company tied it to love and sold cards; now you find people celebrating the day who have never heard of St. Patrick and have no idea when or where he lived or what he did. Easter has been coopted by rabbits laying eggs, candy and goodies. But other Christian days such as Pentecost pass by without anyone outside of church-attending Christians being aware. There’s no commercial value there, though symbolically it carries terrific gravitas for practicing Christians.
Ditto with All Souls Day–the day after Halloween.
I think you confused St. Patrick with St. Valentine, Sherwood. St. Patrick’s Day is not particularly noted for its card. And St. Valentine’s being the patron saint of lover is older than Hallmark.
On the pagan sun holiday — the evidence is against this, since the oldest reference to Christmas being December 25 is older than the oldest reference to that particular sun holiday, which would appear to make it the Kwanzaa of its day. (The pagan sun holiday was, definitely, instituted by an emperor in Christian times.)
It appears to based on the date of Easter. In search of tidiness, many early Christians thought that the first Good Friday had to be on the same day as the Annunciation. This gave two dates for Christmas, depending on whether you went for the April 6 or the March 25 date for the Good Friday/Annunciation. The March 25 one won, so of course Christmas is nine months later.
Mary, December 25 was the “birthday” of both Mithras and Sol Invictus, so not a Christian construction but definitely a borrowing. Christmas being nine months later than Easter would be a consideration though.
Sherwood: I’m pretty sure that was St. Valentine’s. St. Patrick’s Day is the Irish thing.
More seriously, Koby, I think it’s a lot to do with being the dominant religion in Europe, and by extension in North America, for so long, with the British Empire’s huge colonial takeover and demand that its traditions, sacred and secular, be followed in the countries it conquered, and with North America being so big on the “cultural” radar. Christmas was exported to all kinds of odd places because of those, though not as badly as it looks form Hollywood or North American Malls. (My husband lived for 2 years in Kenya, where the Christmas fuss starts December 23rd).
The Christians in an area could generally give or take any tradition because, there was no fear that Christianity and Christians as a whole could be annihilated, and had to hold onto itself.
The secularisation of things, as more countries refuse to persecute for religious beliefs skews the holiday towards different meanings – and different commercial enterprises chose to depict and celebrate those that furthered their own ends.
Also, there’s a strong gap between Christmas as practiced by a childless adult, a parent, and a child, a lot of which can have to do with those aspects parents feel children are drawn to, or understand, or should be taught, plus what schools accept as appropriate (Which tends towards the more secular for obvious reasons. I’d agree wholly if the secular included a bit less Frosty and Rudolph.)
However, Dickens certainly had more effect than expected. He’s the one who raised it strongly into the limelight in England, before which it was celebrated considerably less. And, well, back to the number of countries in the British Empire.
Thanks, Mary and Lenora: trust me to be dyslexic with holidays, as well as with everything else.
St. Valentine’s Day indeed . . . but still, does anyone who celebrates it actually know a thing about the saint? I don’t think but a very few.
pilgrimsoul, since there is every reason to believe that Sol Invictus is the more recent of the two — yeah, there’s definitely borrowing but quite probably not a pagan construction
Mithras? What evidence is there that there was such a feast on December 25?
This is lovely, Sherwood. If “an enlargement of our being” isn’t at the heart of every celebration, it should be.
On a side note, it may have been Valentine’s Day you meant, but exactly the same thing applies to St Patrick’s Day – what proportion of people drinking green beer in pubs in the US are really thinking about Patrick’s Christian ministry in Ireland? It’s a holy day of obligation for Catholics here, but even so, it’s far more significant as a bank holiday for most.
When something’s as present in the culture as the Christmas festival is, then you do get so many different ways of participating in it–and in reacting against it. Although Christmas celebrations have obviously been with us a lot longer than Potter-mania, the various reactions remind me a little of people’s reactions to that. When people feel (for whatever reason) on the outside, then they can feel resentful and pick at various things from the outside. Even from the inside (i.e., people who enjoy the Harry Potter books) there are arguments about the “proper” way to enjoy them. And yet, despite all the arguing, the fact is that everyone’s participating in the cultural phenomenon in one way or another (well, maybe not every single person, but many many). And Christmas is like that times 100: you have arguments among people who are within the tradition about how best to be observing it, and reactions both for and against the tradition from those reacting form the outside–but *all* these reactions constitute participation in the phenomenon… .and I love things that we all (or many of us) participate in, together.
…. I feel like I’ve used a lot of words to say something obvious. Anyway, thanks for the post; I enjoyed it a whole lot.
Thank you all for the answers. They are much appreciated. I try to understand as much as I can of what lies behind other cultures.
Sherwood, Patrick was the evil guy who drove all the druids out of Ireland!
As for the pagan sun holiday, i have no idea. It’s something I read somewhere, and I never checked it out. However, in the Gemara (Babylonian Tractate) somewhere it says that Adam was the one who originally founded Hannukah, as a sun celebration – he was afraid that the days getting shorter meant the end of the world, and when Winter Solstice came and the days started getting longer again, he knew it wasn’t so, and made it a holiday. It then says that pagans co-opted the holiday and used it to worship the sun, and the Maccabees’ restored it to its’ former meaning when they founded Hannukah.
But to the main part of the debate, i understand what you’ve written, but one thing is very hard for me to accept – that the secular parts of Christmas are so far away from the religious. Like I said, most Jewish holidays have no such separation, even today in Israel, where most people aren’t religious. Passover is about freedom to do as we will, having been redeemed from Egypt, celebrated with the family – just as it was when the Temple existed. Most (Jewish) Israelis (in a poll they did, I think it reached 95%) celebrate it, and that’s how they do it. They may not read the Hagaddah or the Bible, but they talk about freedom and eat with the family. Same far Hannukah – most families light candles, and talk of our victory over cultural oppression and spreading the light in the darkness, both religious and non-religious. Why does this separation exist for Christianity but not for Judaism?
Hallie: I used to get my students to research wearing green versus wearing orange, and Patrick’s life, and the history of Ireland.
Asakiyume: very true!
Koby: Possibly Christianity has been the majority religion so long that many of its precepts are taken for granted or have lost their meaning? So few know what Christianity is actually about, outside of these outlier cultural trappings, and a lot of jokes about mean nuns and repressive fundamentalists.
Now that last I do not understand. How can you not get an idea of what Christianity is about, when it pervades literature? It underlies all of Western literature, just about. Even if you are reacting against it (Phillip Pullman, forex), you are speaking to its power and ubiquity.
Brenda: after 20 years of teaching, I can assure you, that there were many students who hadn’t the least notion what those references were about, except in extremely general terms, often with false info gained through popular culture added on.
There are quite a few readable histories of Christmas and how it transformed its celebrations from the earlier centuries of the Church (cap means the Holy Roman Catholic Church which once was the one and only Christian arbiter, at least in Europe), to how it became a national holiday in the United States as part of the American Victorian family-centered observances (it became an official national holiday in the U.S. , so signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, in 1870.
Just as President Lincoln signed Thanksgiving into a national holiday in 1863.
Neither of them were official national holidays here until then.
One of the huge impulses to make this a national, family-centered Christmas holiday was to circumvent the roving bands of madly drunken fools who ruled the streets from early morning until two days later.
But as you can see even from Alcott’s Little Women, Christmas was already a huge celebration-observance in 19th century U.S.
Love, C.
Also, Washington Irving had a lot to do with the mythology of the traditional English Christmas, as you can see from reading his works — see Old Christmas, for instance, much if not all of is available full text online.
Dickens was deeply influenced by Irving, as Dickens was by every successful writer.
Love, C.
Brenda: I had to answer fast as I was going out the door, but there was a study at the local university that corroborates my experience. When asked about Christianity, a huge proportion of university students knew that Christianity is centered around Jesus, but could not name the books of the Bible in which that story is written, could not name any of the apostles (there was a percentage who did not know what the word ‘apostle’ meant), could not identify Lazarus, did not know what the Sermon on the Mount was, and other similar questions.
Sigh. I should not be surprised.
Once, when I was commuting, I was on a long subway ride. A student, obviously in high school, was painfully plowing through MORTE D’ARTHUR. She asked me, “What is this Grail thing?” I should have kept it simple: It’s a magic cup. Instead I backed up and began, “You know who Jesus was, right? Well when they crucified him…” Lost her immediately.
Brenda: exactly. When I taught (selections from) the Morte d’Arthur to my sixth graders, each year, it seemed, I had to give more and more of the religious background–the medieval background having already been laid by working through Pyle’s Robin Hood first.
At least, these days, you can give them “magic cup. Google on it for more” and count on the internet to kick up the basics.
brenda
As someone once said, “We see things not as they are but as we are.”