Christmas Presents

 At the same time as TV shows and magazines are telling us to simplify, to get away from commercialization and overspending and discover "the true meaning of Christmas," we are also being constantly urged by the same TV and magazines to buy lavish presents, especially for the children, though expensive electronics and jewelry seem aimed more at the adults.

(I discussed this in my short book, "Contested Christmas," available on Amazon and other on-line book sellers.)

But how about the Middle Ages?  Did they have presents and commercialization?

They certainly had presents.  But they were not on Christmas!  Christmas was a time of religious observance.  The "twelve days of Christmas" however were observed, close to two weeks of feasting and merriment.  On the Feast of the Innocents, December 28, there would be special festivities dedicated to children.  This day was sometimes called Feast of Fools, a day when children would get to play the role of adults.

Presents showed up on January 1, New Year's Day.  The Romans had celebrated the first of January with presents, and there were periodic attempts in the Middle Ages to ban presents on New Year's as a pagan practice, but that didn't stop anyone.  These presents were usually exchanged between close friends or between spouses or lovers.  They were not "commercial" in that they were not made in a factory or advertised on TV, but you could certainly go to an artisan in a medieval city and buy jewelry or shoes or a new knife.  The gift-giving season might also be extended to January 6, Feast of the Wise Men, when the Three Kings were supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem and made gifts to the baby Jesus.

The Christmas-New Year's season was also when the powerful gave gifts to their underlings.  This was different from the normal practice the rest of the year, in which the powerful expected the weak to attempt to curry favor with them in part by offering presents.

 

Christmas presents with a focus on children really began in the nineteenth century, as did the modern version of Santa Claus.  Christmas had become a hard-drinking holiday, and there was a concerted effort to make it more friendly, home-centered (rather than tavern-centered), celebration.  Focusing on the children meant much less focus on the liquor.  Wrapping presents in colorful paper not only led to a surprise but took them out of the ordinary:  a present is something special when you have to unwrap it, not like just being handed a new shirt or a book or a toy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval holidays and social history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback!

Birthdays in the Middle Ages

Birthdays are a big deal in the modern West.  A lot of milestones turn on birthdays, such as being old enough to drive, old enough to vote, old enough to drink, even old enough to compete in the Olympics.  People in the US will sometimes celebrate their 21st birthday by going to a bar on the first day they are legally able to do so.

Birthdays were much less important in the Middle Ages.  One did not celebrate with presents and birthday cake.  (What?  No cake?  I hate to break it to you, but they didn't have chocolate either.)

There was a vague sense of the "stages of life" where one reached the "age of consent" at 7 and the "age of reason" at 14 (details varied a lot depending on who you asked), but no one tried to cling to age 39 or felt that once they were in their 50s things were different, or hummed the Simon and Garfunkel song about "how terribly strange to be seventy."  (Much less the Beatles song about "when I'm 64."  Paul McCartney has said he's changed it to 84 when he sings it now.)

When someone important died, it was often noted how old they had been, but since keeping track of the day or even the year of their birthday was not a big deal when they were little, one cannot expect this always to be accurate.  Saint Anthony, father of monasticism, was said to reach 105.  Maybe.

The only real birthday that medieval people celebrated with gusto was of course Christmas, the supposed birthday of Jesus.  But even that celebration, as I have discussed elsewhere, was far outshone by Easter, which is far more significant theologically.  (And medieval accounts of Jesus's incarnation and birth always looked forward toward his death—the myrrh given to him by magi was used in embalming.)

The real date that was remembered most vividly for an individual was not the day of their birth but the day of their death.  Christians of course believe that Jesus died and rose again, and although ordinary people were not expected to rise again on this earth, the day of their death was a crucial one.  One's death date became one's anniversary.  People would establish what were called anniversaries in the Middle Ages, special prayers to be said on the same day of the year each year for the soul of their dear departed.

This is not unique to medieval Christianity, of course.  Modern people will remember a loved one on the day that they died, and modern Judaism has certain rituals used to honor them on that day.

Every day of the year was celebrated as some saint's day, and which saint went with which day was determined almost always by the date on which the saint had died.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval life stages and Christianity, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Feast of the Wise Men

It's January 6, Feast of the Wise Men, also known as Epiphany (from the Greek, meaning a vision or revelation).  All self-respecting manger scenes today have both shepherds and kings (wise men) bearing gifts.  The Bible version is a little more complicated.

The book of Matthew is the only one of the gospels to mention the wise men.  They come not to a manger but to Mary and Joseph's house in Bethlehem, where they have lived since their marriage.  They are not called kings, just wise men (magi), and their number is unspecified.  The assumption that there were three of them is doubtless due to their bringing three gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

These three gifts were intended to illustrate Christ's three roles, as king (the gold), as priest (the incense), and as sacrifice (myrrh was used in embalming).  He both orders and performs the sacrifice and is the sacrifice Himself.

In Matthew, King Herod is not happy to hear about a baby born to be King of the Jews and orders all baby boys under the age of two to be killed.  The Feast of the Innocents, commemorating the slaughter of the baby boys, is usually celebrated on December 28, suggesting that in medieval theology (when all these dates were chosen) it took Herod close to a year to figure out that the wise men who had promised to come tell him where the baby lay (they'd arrived on January 6) weren't coming to tell him about it after all.  In the Bible, they are warned in a dream not to say anything to Herod.

Matthew has Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt to escape Herod, then settle in Nazareth once they return, rather than going back to Bethlehem.  This is different from Luke (the only gospel to mention shepherds), which has Mary and Joseph living in Nazareth the whole time, but going to Bethlehem to be enrolled/taxed and finding no place to stay but a stable.  Here there is no mention of Herod and no flight into Egypt.  Both of these gospels have Jesus born in Bethlehem and grow up in Nazareth, which fulfills Old Testament prophecies, but they give different explanations for how it happened.

The Feast of the Wise Men is sometimes called Twelfth Night, which doesn't quite work.  If you count Christmas Day as the first day of Christmas, then the twelfth would be January 5.  It is however twelfth night, which would mean it could begin at sundown on the 5th (using the Jewish version that days begin at the previous sundown) and include the 6th.  The "eve" is important to a number of religious holidays, including Hallowe'en and Christmas Eve (but if you start counting Christmas from sundown on Christmas Eve, you still don't get to January 6).  Maybe one should count the "twelve days of Christmas" as starting the day after Christmas--more time for food and fun (note:  there are no partridges or pear trees in the New Testament).

In Italy, children receive gifts on Epiphany.  They are not brought by Santa but by Befana, a wicked fairy (try to guess what word her name is corrupted from--hint, put the letter E at the beginning of Befana, before the B, and say it out loud).  The story is that the Wise Men asked her where to find baby Jesus and she refused to answer.  After they left, however, she got to thinking that maybe she should have gone with them, and she's spent the last 2000 years wandering around giving children gifts, in the hope that one of them might be the Christ child.

December 6, Feast of Saint Nicholas, and January 6, Feast of the Wise Men.  A whole month of opportunities for presents, especially if you include Hanukkah, New Year's (when Romans and medieval people exchanged gifts), and, why not? Kwanzaa.  Parents don't seem to understand their children's logic on this point.

For more on the history of Christmas, check out my book "Contested Christmas," available from Amazon and other online bookstores.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016 

Saint Nicholas

It's Saint Nicholas Day, December 6, earliest sunset of the year, so I think I'll talk about Santa, Jolly Old Saint Nick, and the question of how the saint whose feast day is almost three weeks before Christmas has gotten associated with Christmas.  (Hate to break it to you, but medieval Christmas was completely lacking in both Santa and Christmas trees.)

(And for that matter, isn't "Old Nick" another name for Satan?  And if you rearrange the letters in Santa, what do you get?)

There really was a Saint Nicholas, by the way, who lived in what is now Turkey in the later days of the Roman Empire.  He had various stories told about him, including that he saved some girls whose destitute father was going to sell them to the local brothel; the saint saved them by secretly throwing bags of money through their window.  He also supposedly brought back to life some boys whom a nefarious innkeeper had cooked up and was getting ready to serve.  These stories made him the patron saint of children.  (See more here on how he became the patron saint of poor working girls during the Renaissance.)

By the seventeenth or eighteenth century, well-to-do Dutch were celebrating Saint Nicholas day (Sint Niklaus or Sinter Klaas as they called him) with small presents for the children.  In the Netherlands, the saint still comes up the canal in his canal boat on the 6th, bringing toys for the good children, but his assistant, Black Peter, puts coal in the wooden shoes of the bad ones.

Santa as we know him (say Sinter Klaas fast and you'll see where the name Santa Claus comes from) is a specifically American invention, that started in the early nineteenth century with Washington Irving, the same person who wrote about the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow.  He was trying to create a vision of an "old fashioned" sort of family celebration, based on Dutch heritage--with the war of 1812 and all that, the British weren't as welcome in New York State as the Dutch still were.

But it was Clement Moore's poem "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (aka "The Night Before Christmas") that single-handedly moved Santa from December 6 to the 24th.  By the middle of the nineteenth century, Santa was well established, driving out alternate gift-givers.  Thomas Nash, a newspaper illustrator (whose Santa is above), was the first to come up with the North Pole toyshop--I guess someone dressed in furs and driving reindeer just had to live in northerly climes.

But the jolly, red-dressed figure, with a bushy beard, big black boots, and a sack of gifts only really took the appearance he has now in the twentieth century, with Coca Cola commercials, where he chugged a frosty bottle of Coke, rather than puffing on a Dutch clay pipe as he had earlier (and is doing in Nash's illustration).

The Byzantine saint certainly has had many transformations in the last 1600 years, to being considered a secular symbol of Christmas, acceptable where a manger scene would not be (wait! aren't saints religious by definition?), most visible sitting in the mall in December where terrified children are forced to sit on his lap.  Ho ho ho!

For more on Santa and Christmas in the Middle Ages, see my essay, "Contested Christmas," available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Christmas in the Middle Ages

Although medieval people celebrated Christmas with gusto, their celebration was very different from what we now take for granted.  There were no Christmas trees, no Santa equivalents, and no presents!  They did however celebrate with singing.  The time for presents was New Year's, when gifts might be exchanged between lovers, or a lord might distribute small gifts to his faithful followers.

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