Although children did not get presents, they did have their own holiday, the Feast of Fools, halfway between Christmas and New Year's. This was often celebrated as an upside-down day, when children got a chance to boss the grownups. On a more serious note, the Feast recalled the slaughter of the Innocents, the babies Herod killed when trying (unsuccessfully) to kill the baby foretold to be a greater king than he.
I've just written a short book on Christmas, entitled Contested Christmas, combining the history of the celebration (and of Santa) with commentary on the modern holiday. It has just been released as an ebook on Amazon on Friday: http://amzn.com/B00N099HX4.
Keep reading for a sneak preview of the opening:
Ah, the “true
meaning of Christmas.” Between
Thanksgiving and New Year’s one hears the term constantly, on everything from
made-for-TV movies playing essentially non-stop, to exhortations that we all
wish each other Merry Christmas rather than Happy Holidays, to websites devoted
to tips on crafting handmade ornaments.
But the “true
meaning of Christmas” is highly contested.
Most would agree that over-commercialization is ruining Christmas, even
as great piles of expensive and beautifully wrapped presents, to make
children’s eyes glow with excited anticipation, are considered part of the
season’s true meaning.
Magazine articles in
November and December routinely urge readers to simplify their holiday
celebrations to avoid stress and over-spending, even while other magazines—and
often the same ones!—show elaborately decorated interiors, provide recipes for
lavish feasts, and contain ads promoting luxury purchases.
Christmas is
supposed to require snow, even though in the US, where the song “White
Christmas” is recorded by dozens of artists, the majority celebrate the holiday
with no snow on the ground. And in the
southern hemisphere, including Australia, Christmas comes in the middle of the
summer. (December snow, interestingly,
puts one in the Christmas spirit, while January snow makes one yearn for
Florida.) Family, faith, and friendship
are identified with 4H and with Kwanzaa, yet are also considered true aspects
of Christmas.
Part of the true
meaning of the Christmas season revolves around its (relative) shortness,
extending only from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.
During a period of not much over a month, it is expected that we will
pack in a good six months’ worth of shopping, decorating, eating, socializing,
worshipping, and attending concerts—not to mention relaxing and taking it all
in. Everybody knows about the Twelve
Days of Christmas, which traditionally began on Christmas Day and ended on
January 6, the Feast of the Wise Men.
But in practice the US has forty days or so of Christmas, and the season
is definitely over well before Twelfth Night.
(New Year’s both
recapitulates the gaiety and celebration that are supposed to define Christmas
and marks the end of the season. It’s
easy to tell what Christmas is over.
It’s when the TV news anchors and sports commentators remove the
poinsettias from their desks. This
happens January 2.)
The holiday comes
laden with powerful and conflicting expectations, expectations that require a
great deal of work, organizing, and spending in order to achieve the simple
joys that are supposed to convey its true meaning. The season is intended to be one of mirth
and joy, and so we set to work with grim seriousness to make sure that the
mirth’s meaning is properly joyous. As
everyone strives to make this the best (and doubtless truest) Christmas ever,
it is worth pondering: why is Christmas
the only holiday that gets to have a true meaning?
It certainly isn’t
the religious aspect that makes Christmas special. You never see a heart-warming TV movie about
a family discovering the true meaning of Easter. Yet Easter is a much more important Christian
holiday than is Christmas. Easter has
been celebrated since the earliest church, but Christmas began only as a
fourth-century reaction to pagan efforts to make December 25 a birthday for the
sun-god Apollo. After all, anyone can
have a birthday, but rising from the dead has got to be special.
Incidentally, the
winter solstice on December 21, Christmas (and Apollo’s birthday) on the 25th,
and New Year’s are now spread out over a ten day period, but originally they
were all celebrations of the darkest day of the year, the solstice, and the
beginning of the sun’s return as the days start to grow longer. Keeping track of that pesky leap year,
celebrated every four years except when it’s not, messes calendars right up.
The darkest days of
the year were an important time for celebration long before the spread of
Christianity. The Romans, the Greeks,
the Babylonians, everyone had one or more holidays or feasts around that time,
times for food and drink, for merry-making with friends, for gifts, and often
for a fairly raucous breakdown of normal social conventions. It is perhaps ironic that many of these
ancient pagan aspects are continued in what is supposed to be a thoroughly
Christian holiday.
Comparing the
celebrations of Christmas and Easter indicates how differently the holidays are
viewed. When was the last time you saw a
billboard, “Keep Christ in Easter”?
Probably never. How many singers
bring out an Easter album? Remarkably
few. How many radio stations blast the
airways with Easter songs non-stop all during Lent? None at all.
Compared to big discussions of whether Santa Claus is a jolly old elf, a
saint, or a satanic being (in Dijon in 1951, the cathedral priests burned Père
Noël in effigy on Christmas Eve as a pagan impostor), the Easter Bunny gets off
remarkably easy. For a great many
people, Easter means chocolate eggs and new spring outfits, and maybe that
annual attendance at church.
Perhaps it is not
worth thinking too deeply about rabbits, a symbol of promiscuity in most
cultures, laying little brown pellets that children are encouraged to eat. Sex and coprophagia, not a good combination. At least the rabbits do not represent any
“true meaning.”
© C. Dale Brittain 2014
© C. Dale Brittain 2014
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