[Rhodes22-list] History - A Christmas Story

[Brad Haslett]

Hope everyone enjoyed the day off!  I usually spend Christmas on the road
but actually got to stay home this year.  Nothing beats being the only non
Mandarin speaker at a Christmas party.  Here's a little gem I stumbled
across this morning.  Brad

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 *SEASONS GREETINGS*
*A Brief History of Christmas*
The Elizabethans partied hard. The Puritans banned it. Now comes the ACLU.

*BY JOHN STEELE GORDON*
*Tuesday, December 25, 2007 12:01 a.m.*

Christmas famously "comes but once a year." In fact, however, it comes
twice. The Christmas of the Nativity, the manger and Christ child, the wise
men and the star of Bethlehem, "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald Angels
Sing" is one holiday. The Christmas of parties, Santa Claus, evergreens,
presents, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Jingle Bells" is quite
another.

But because both celebrations fall on Dec. 25, the two are constantly
confused. Religious Christians condemn taking "the Christ out of Christmas,"
while First Amendment absolutists see a threat to the separation of church
and state in every poinsettia on public property and school dramatization of
"A Christmas Carol."

A little history can clear things up.

 The Christmas of parties and presents is far older than the Nativity. Most
ancient cultures celebrated the winter solstice, when the sun reaches its
lowest point and begins to climb once more in the sky. In ancient Rome, this
festival was called the Saturnalia and ran from Dec. 17 to Dec. 24. During
that week, no work was done, and the time was spent in parties, games, gift
giving and decorating the houses with evergreens. (Sound familiar?) It was,
needless to say, a very popular holiday.

In its earliest days, Christianity did not celebrate the Nativity at all.
Only two of the four Gospels even mention it. Instead, the Church calendar
was centered on Easter, still by far the most important day in the Christian
year. The Last Supper was a Seder, celebrating Passover, which falls on the
day of the full moon in the first month of spring in the Hebrew calendar. So
in A.D. 325, the Council of Nicea decided that Easter should fall on the
Sunday following the first full moon of spring. That's why Easter and its
associated days, such as Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, are "moveable
feasts," moving about the calendar at the whim of the moon.

It is a mark of how late Christmas came to the Christian calendar that it is
not a moveable feast, but a fixed one, determined by the solar calendar
established by Julius Caesar and still in use today (although slightly
tweaked in the 16th century).

By the time of the Council of Nicea, the Christian Church was making
converts by the thousands and, in hopes of still more converts, in 354 Pope
Liberius decided to add the Nativity to the church calendar. He also decided
to celebrate it on Dec. 25. It was, frankly, a marketing ploy with a little
political savvy thrown in.

 History does not tell us exactly when in the year Christ was born, but
according to the Gospel of St. Luke, "shepherds were abiding in the field
and keeping watch over their flocks by night." This would imply a date in
the spring or summer when the flocks were up in the hills and needed to be
guarded. In winter they were kept safely in corrals.

So Dec. 25 must have been chosen for other reasons. It is hard to escape the
idea that by making Christmas fall immediately after the Saturnalia, the
Pope invited converts to still enjoy the fun and games of the ancient
holiday and just call it Christmas. Also, Dec. 25 was the day of the sun
god, Sol Invictus, associated with the emperor. By using that date, the
church tied itself to the imperial system.

By the high Middle Ages, Christmas was a rowdy, bawdy time, often inside the
church as well as outside it. In France, many parishes celebrated the Feast
of the Ass, supposedly honoring the donkey that had brought Mary to
Bethlehem. Donkeys were brought into the church and the mass ended with
priests and parishioners alike making donkey noises. In the so-called Feast
of Fools, the lower clergy would elect a "bishop of fools" to temporarily
run the diocese and make fun of church ceremonial and discipline. With this
sort of thing going on inside the church to celebrate the Nativity, one can
easily imagine the drunken and sexual revelries going on outside it to
celebrate what was in all but name the Saturnalia.

With the Reformation, Protestants tried to rid the church of practices
unknown in its earliest days and get back to Christian roots. Most
Protestant sects abolished priestly celibacy (and often the priesthood
itself), the cult of the Virgin Mary, relics, confession and . . .
Christmas.

In the English-speaking world, Christmas was abolished in Scotland in 1563
and in England after the Puritans took power in the 1640s. It returned with
the Restoration in 1660, but the celebrations never regained their medieval
and Elizabethan abandon.

 There was still no Christmas in Puritan New England, where Dec. 25 was just
another working day. In the South, where the Church of England predominated,
Christmas was celebrated as in England. In the middle colonies, matters were
mixed. In polyglot New York, the Dutch Reformed Church did not celebrate
Christmas. The Anglicans and Catholics did.

It was New York and its early 19th century literary establishment that
created the modern American form of the old Saturnalia. It was a much more
family--and especially child--centered holiday than the community-wide
celebrations of earlier times.

St. Nicolas is the patron saint of New York (the first church built in the
city was named for him), and Washington Irving wrote in his "Diedrich
Knickerbocker's History of New York" how Sinterklaes, soon anglicized to
Santa Claus, rode through the sky in a horse and wagon and went down
chimneys to deliver presents to children.

The writer George Pintard added the idea that only good children got
presents, and a book dating to 1821 changed the horse and wagon to reindeer
and sleigh. Clement Clarke Moore in 1823 made the number of reindeer eight
and gave them their names. Moore's famous poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas,"
is entirely secular. It is about "visions of sugar plums" with nary a wise
man or a Christ child in sight. In 1828, the American Ambassador Joel
Roberts Poinsett, brought the poinsettia back from Mexico. It became
associated with Christmas because that's the time of year when it blooms.

In the 1840s, Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol," which does not even mention
the religious holiday (the word church appears in the story just twice, in
passing, the word Nativity never). Prince Albert introduced the German
custom of the Christmas tree to the English-speaking world.

In the 1860s, the great American cartoonist Thomas Nast set the modern image
of Santa Claus as a jolly, bearded fat man in a fur-trimmed cap. (The color
red became standard only in the 20th century, thanks to Coca-Cola ads
showing Santa Claus that way.)

Merchants began to emphasize Christmas, decorating stores and pushing the
idea of Christmas presents for reasons having nothing whatever to do with
religion, except, perhaps, the worship of mammon.

With the increased mobility provided by railroads and increasing immigration
from Europe, people who celebrated Christmas began settling near those who
did not. It was not long before the children of the latter began putting
pressure on their parents to celebrate Christmas as well. "The O'Reilly kids
down the street are getting presents, why aren't we?!" is not an argument
parents have much defense against.

By the middle of the 19th century, most Protestant churches were, once
again, celebrating Christmas as a religious holiday. The reason, again, had
more to do with marketing than theology: They were afraid of losing
congregants to other Christmas-celebrating denominations.

In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law a bill making the
secular Christmas a civil holiday because its celebration had become
universal in this country. It is now celebrated in countries all over the
world, including many where Christians are few, such as Japan.

 So for those worried about the First Amendment, there's a very easy way to
distinguish between the two Christmases. If it isn't mentioned in the
Gospels of Luke and Mark, then it is not part of the Christian holiday. Or
we could just change the name of the secular holiday back to what it was
2000 years ago.

Merry Saturnalia, everyone!