Xmas Time Is Here

Christmas was a lot different in the 1800s. In Boston, New York and Philadelphia, drunken gangs marauded through the streets. Not even the neighborhood watchmen could deter them. https://t.co/cnaqSTaV5q

— Anthony DeRosa 🗽 (@Anthony) December 26, 2020

Jason Zweig's argument rests on the work of Stephen Nissenbaum and Penne Restad, two authorities I've relied on more than once.  On the strength of that I consider his argument sound, at least to the extent he argues Christmas went from a time of flamboyant excess in celebration to: “As soon as Santa Claus entered the picture,” says Prof. Nissenbaum, “people had to go shopping.”

Good enough to begin with.  But it also utterly demolishes the supposed connection between Christmas and Saturnalia.  It's a Christmas myth that just won't die, even though Saturnalia has been dead as a holiday since at least the middle of the 4th century.  The myth lives on because it sounds clever, and clever is easier than thinking.  And because the cold, dead hand of Puritanism still rests on American popular culture.

For New Year, Posumus, ten years ago,

You sent me four pounds of good silver-plate.

The next year, hoping for a rise in weight

(For gifts should either stay the same or grow),

I got two pounds. The third and fourth produced

Inferior presents, and the fifth year's weighed

Only a pound--Septicus' work, ill-made

Into the bargain. Next I was reduced

To an eight-ounce oblong salad-platter, soon

It was a miniature cup that tipped the scales

At even less. A tiny two-ounce sppon

Was the eighth year's surprise. The ninth, at length,

And grudgingly, disgorged a pick for snails

Lighter than a needle. Now, I note, the tenth

Has come and gone with nothing in its train.

I miss the old four pounds! Let's start again!

That's Marcus Martialis, the 1st century Roman poet, tr. James Michie.  The tradition of gift-giving there is between friends; not parents to children.  The connection of Christmas Day to Saturnalia usually runs through the gift giving associated with the latter. This was gift giving between peers, though, not the gifting to children from adults through Santa Claus. (Nissenbaum points to that as a major shift in the 19th century.) Gift giving was associated with Christmas celebrations, mostly in the form of gifts to the poor from the rich. But these gifts were usually food and drink. That tradition has withered down to Boxing Day, not surprisingly a holiday unknown in America. Gift giving today is primarily an inter-family affair. The burden on adults at Christmas is gifts for children, not for friends. Saturnalia was about gifts to friends. And as I say, the Roman holiday died 1500 years before Clement Clarke Moore brought capitalism to Christmas’ rescue.

So, was Christmas connected to Saturnalia at all? Nope. (that link is for those of you who want to get into the historical weeds of the issue.)

The Christ Mass was first observed in Alexandria, Egypt. Saturnalia was a Roman holiday.  And by “Roman” I mean “City of,” much like Mardi Gras in this country means New Orleans, or Mummers means Philadelphia. Rome celebrated it, but not Alexandria. And by the time the Mass for the nativity was starting in Egypt, Saturnalia was already considered the “slave’s festival,” and on its way out in Rome. It overlapped the rise of the Christ Mass (not to be confused with the secular celebrations we call “Christmas”), but it no more affected our secular holiday celebrations than Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans affects our national non-observance of Epiphany or Ash Wednesday. If only because the roots of our secular Christmas lie in medieval Europe, not Roman Europe.

Most of the celebrations of Christmas we have today (in America, anyway) have roots in Tudor England and the court of Henry VIII.  There was gift giving, but to my earlier point, Henry expected the best gifts to come to him. He was rather how you imagine Donald Trump to be on Christmas morning: his gifts are small, what he expects to receive is large. Not exactly the spirit of Saturnalia. Peer to peer gifting was far in the future from Henry; adult to child giving further away still. Today Christmas is for children, first and foremost. What Roman or pre-Christian history is that rooted in (indeed, concern for children is arguably a Christian teaching. It certainly isn’t a pre-Christian one)?

Henry’s Christmas celebrations also lasted for 12 days and included many feasts (mostly because the food was available and food storage almost nonexistent. Use it or lose it was the rule for much of Europe for centuries). It included the “Lord of Misrule,” usually a courtier given license to lead the drinking and carousing and general carrying on. That doesn’t reach back to Rome, either. But Puritans in America, like Increase Mather, tried to argue that it did.

In the Apostolical times the Feast of the Nativity was not observed....It can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25....The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day...It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonorable to the name of Christ.

--Increase Mather, 1687.  

“If it had been the will of God that the several acts of Christ should have been celebrated with several solemnities, the Holy Ghost would have made known to us the day of his nativity, circumcision, presentation in the temple, baptism, transfiguration, and the like.” . . . . “This opinion of Christ’s nativity on the 25th day of December was bred at Rome.”

Also Increase Mather.

Here we meet the great irony of American myths about Christmas. Most of them are thinly-veiled attempts to tell Christians their beloved Christmas is actually pagan. The irony is that argument starts with the puritans in America who aimed their criticism at Catholics (and Anglicans). The Puritans didn’t believe Catholics were Christians (or almost anybody else), so the cudgel they laid down is now picked up by others. Whatever the Puritans deemed “unChristian” they labeled “pagan,” and most commonly used that label to decry Roman Catholic practices. So if you’re concerned about the roots of practices, the practice of saying customs were “originally pagan” is itself originally anti-Papist. You’re really appealing to anti-Catholic bigotry, not to sweet, objective Reason.

Know your memes.

I mentioned Penne Restad earlier.  Let me quote from her work Christmas in America, a bit:

It fell to Puritan reformers to put a stop to the unholy merriment [of the English Christmas celebration, which had little to do with giving gifts and much to do with getting drunk] and to bend arguments over the proper keeping of Christmas into an older and more basic one--whether there should even be an observance of the day. Defying the decisions of the Anglican Convocation of 1562 to maintain the church calendar, the Puritans struck Christmas, along with all saint's days [no Hallowe'en!], from their own list of holy days. The Bible, they held, expressly commanded keeping only the Sabbath. That would be their practice as well.

Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America,  Oxford 1995, p. 7.

On the same page, Restad quotes William Prynne's Histriomatrix (1633):

Into what stupendous height of more than pagan impiety...have we not now degenerated! [Christmas out to be] rather a day of mourning than rejoicing, [not a time spent in] amorous mixt, voluptuous, unchristian, that I say not pagan, dancing, to God's, to Christ's dishonour, religion's scandal, charities' shipwracke and sinne's advantage.

In fact, the idea that capitalism saved Christmas may be a sound one, but it doesn't mean Christmas sprang full-blown from the pen of Mr. Moore in 1823:

Christmas day is no religious day and hardly a holiday with them: New-year's day is perhaps a little, but only a little more so. For Twelfth-day, it is unknown; and the household private festivals of birthdays are almost universally passed by unsevered from the rest of the toilsome days devoted to the curse of labor.  

Restad, p. 17

That passage is quoting an English actress touring America in 1832 (what there was of it).  I especially like that "curse of labor" line, since the European celebrations of the season were meant to be a relief from that curse.  But good Puritans that we Americans are, we still take our holiday all on one day and one day only, and work like dogs to get to it, and work almost as much to get over it.  Gift giving and Christmas didn't get connected really until the late 19th century; there are some arguments the whole "shopping days until Christmas" didn't start until World War II, when shopping became a patriotic act (and a way to lift us out of the Depression).  I'm not sure most Americans had even heard of "Saturnalia" in the 1940's.

But the connection of Christmas to parties among adults (or office parties) and Santa for the kids on Christmas morning, is really of very recent vintage; and it's a very modern, very tame version of Christmas compared to celebrations of the past.  And the "past" does not mean "long passed:"

"Christmas that year, not one to look forward to, was one we should alway look back on."

That's the opening sentence of "Looking Back on Christmas" by William Owens.  I don't know if it's memoir or fiction, but it's become one of my favorite Christmas stories.   It's the story of a family gathering in rural Texas on Christmas Eve.  The family gathers, then sits down to dinner, and after dinner:

After the first table [old Texas tradition my family carried on with in my childhood:  the men ate first, then retired, and the women and children ate.  Yeah, my wife was appalled by that, too, and it was long before we were married that she encountered it.] the men and the bigger boys built up a big fire in the pasture between the house and the front gate.  Then, while the women stood on the front porch to watch, Uncle Charlie gave the little children firecrackers and showed them how to shoot them.  He put a paper fuse against a live coal.  When it had lighted he threw it away from the fire into the dark.

"Don't ever let one go off in your hand," he said, "And don't throw it close to nobody.  Somebody might get hurt."

While we went through the firecrackers he had given us, the men made a trip back to the kitchen.  This time they brought the jug with them and set it in the back end of a wagon.  They brought out more fireworks, and Monroe had the sack of powder in his coat pocket.

"Time for a roman candle," Uncle Charlie said.

He took a long red roman candle and went to the fire.

"You all watch now," he said, "I'm gonna hold it like I was aiming to shoot the gate."

Charlie runs into the dark and let's the candle shoot balls of fire, then he gets Othal to join him in a roman candle battle.  Full disclosure:  I once did something similar with my cousin, although in summer, not winter.  We used plastic tubes from his golf bag to launch bottle rockets at each other.  We didn't even have the excuse of alcohol, we were just young and dumb.

Anyway, you get the flavor of the celebration.  Firecrackers going off, then roman candles being fired at each other in close range.  Then when those are exhausted and everyone's tired of running around and through the house:

Uncle Charlie was not ready for the fun to be over.  He went up the steps and across the front porch.  Aunt Niece was standing in the door, with the lamplight behind her.  He lifted her chin with his fingers and went on past her, to the chimney corner where he kept his double-barreled shotgun.  Then he came out with the gun under his arm and a box of shells in his hand.

Near the fire, he loaded both barrels and set the stock against his shoulder.

"You aiming at the gate?" Othal asked.

"You got to aim at something."

He fired, and after the first blast we heard shot rattle against the gate.

"Got it first shot," Othal said, and ran for his own gun.

In no time at all, five guns were blazing away at the gate, and the little children were running for hiding places under the house.  I shivered at the sound, but felt safe, for their backs were to us and they were aiming at the gate.

Then Othal came running around the house, loading and firing as he ran, and some of the others took after him.  The women had run inside, but I could hear them telling the men to stop.  Too scared to stay under the house, I crawled out and started for the door.  In the darkness I can straight into Otha's knees, and he let a double-barreled blast go off right over my head, leaving a burning flash in my eyes and a ringing in my ears.

The gate was "a wide, heavy gate made of oak timbers fourteen feet long and an inch thick."  However, the next morning:  "We went to look at the gate, and found it half hanging from the posts, with the timbers drilled and splintered by shot."  The story ends this way:

Uncle Charlie came in with a backstick for the fireplace.  My grandmother was waiting for him.

"You ruint the gate," she said.

"I reckon we did."

He laughed and the light in his blue eyes showed he was not sorry.  She frowned and went out to the front porch.

Aunt Niece came in, with a peeled orange in her hand.

"Christmas gift," he said to her.

She went up to him and stuck a slice of orange between his teeth.  They were both laughing without making a sound, and once he leaned over and kissed her.

"I had me some Christmas," he said.

Not so long ago, that story.  It wasn't just in the 1800's that Christmas was a lot different.

Christmas Rituals

Although Trump is pushing me to say "Happy Holidays," just out of spite.

Here we go again, and again, Valerie Tarico gives me the grounds to repeat myself (even as I assume her article is a rerun, not something original to this year).

Christmas has almost nothing whatsoever to do with "pagan" celebrations, Sumerian mythic tropes, or the "cult of virginity."  It probably involves from Hebraic tropes, but why is that an issue, unless you have a agenda against Judaism (a common problem in Christianity, but why give it credence?).  Anyway, she notes there is no mention of a Christmas celebration in the 3rd century, which is the first sound thing in her article( there is actually, as we will see; but not in Rome).  While she provides links to her own articles about Sumerian myths (she links to her own interview with a world religions scholar who makes no mention of Sumeria at all, so I don't know what she's even talking about there) and a "cult of virginity,"* she plunges into pure speculation and uninformed conjecture about "winter solstice celebrations" with no supporting links at all.  If this were one of my students' research papers, I'd pull out the red ink right there and start slashing.

First, let's stop this nonsense about Saturnalia and "Latin peoples" (there were no "Latin peoples" in Europe; there were Romans who spoke Latin, until the language died out.  The Church and the British kept it alive, but for radically different reasons.).  To do that, though, we have to unearth a great deal of history in a very short space.

Yes, Christians did start adopting pagan temples as places of worship, pagan heroes as saints (I can think of a couple of Irish saints off the top of my head), and pagan practices as Christian:

This would change only after Constantine converted to Christianity. From the mid-fourth century on, we do find Christians deliberately adapting and Christianizing pagan festivals. A famous proponent of this practice was Pope Gregory the Great, who, in a letter written in 601 C.E. to a Christian missionary in Britain, recommended that local pagan temples not be destroyed but be converted into churches, and that pagan festivals be celebrated as feasts of Christian martyrs. At this late point, Christmas may well have acquired some pagan trappings. But we don’t have evidence of Christians adopting pagan festivals in the third century, at which point dates for Christmas were established. Thus, it seems unlikely that the date was simply selected to correspond with pagan solar festivals.

They started that in the 4th century; but doing so is not the same thing as adopting pagan ideals, and the practice only came under critique about 500 years ago, by the Reformed movement of the Reformation.  That Christianity did not have its own practices, apart from the eucharist instituted by Paul, is not an indication that the practices and customs it did acquire are therefore tainted or even an indication of superstition (a word associated with falsity only by those who overlook their own rituals and superstitions.  Even the scholar Tarico interviewed uses the word without making it a perjorative, something Tarico can't quite bring herself to do, for all her claims of "rationality.").

Did Christmas have anything to do with Saturnalia?  No.  That was on December 17 to December 23, but by 354 C.E. it was only on December 17.  It was more like the Feast of Fools than anything we think of as a Christmas observance (and remember we're talking about a religious ceremony here, not a civic one.  Christmas as we know it is an amalgam of medieval practices (feasting, mostly, anymore) and Charles Dickens' childhood memories (Pickwick and Scrooge are the roots of our modern Christmas, as well as Clement Clarke Moore).  Saturnalia was a holiday on the Roman calendar (city of, not empire of) that held on as a holiday on the Roman calendar until the mid-5th century (curiously, Constantine did not see fit to convert it to a Christmas celebration.  Indeed, he was probably unaware of any concept of a Christ Mass at the time of his death):

December 17 was recognized as the date of the Saturnalia as late as AD 448, when it was notated in the ecclesiastical calendar or laterculus ("list") of Polemius Silvius. But now, deprived of its pagan significance, it is identified only as feriae servorum ("festival of the slaves").

By then Christmas had been observed on December 25 in Rome for at least 60 years, so I don't think they were confused about the dates.  So maybe it was "Natali invictii"?  Well, maybe, as the date is the same as Christmas.  However:

But even should a deliberate and legitimate "baptism" of a pagan feast be seen here no more than the transference of the date need be supposed. The "mountain-birth" of Mithra and Christ's in the "grotto" have nothing in common: Mithra's adoring shepherds....are rather borrowed from Christian sources than vice versa.

Mithra's shepherds is one of those "chicken or egg" problems, and Luke came before Mithra.  Maybe Tarico is connecting Mithra with Sumeria through Zoroastrianism, but that definitely came after Christianity.  Whatever link there is doesn't really mean anything.

If you noticed the date 354 C.E. and wondered why that year was singled out, be patient.  History is complicated and not really at all linear; we have to circle back and jump forward in order to put some things in context, and to begin to explain how things came to be.  So, to reiterate:  Saturnalia was celebrated from December 17 to December 23, but by the mid 4th century it was only celebrated on one day, not several.  We used to have 12 days of Christmas, too (Shakespeare knew it; the familiar song knew it.  It was observed in rural Ireland into the 20th century.  Anybody today aware of it, outside that song?  Anybody today realize the song refers to actual calendar days, or what they are?  How quickly did that disappear?  In America, it never appeared at all.  Hmmmm.....).  And no, Saturnalia was never celebrated on December 25, and it never celebrated the "birth of the unconquerable sun."

So when did December 25 become the day observed for Christ's birth?

The December 25 feast seems to have existed before 312—before Constantine and his conversion, at least. As we have seen, the Donatist Christians in North Africa seem to have known it from before that time. Furthermore, in the mid- to late fourth century, church leaders in the eastern Empire concerned themselves not with introducing a celebration of Jesus’ birthday, but with the addition of the December date to their traditional celebration on January 6.

Tarico jumps to the 7th century, but let's stay with the earliest centuries of the Church a bit longer.  history doesn't become simpler and less complicated the further back in time you go, and it isn't "made" just by the people you've heard of:

In Cyprus, at the end of the fourth century, Epiphanius asserts against the Alogi ... that Christ was born on 6 January and baptized on 8 November. Ephraem Syrus ....proves that Mesopotamia still put the birth feast thirteen days after the winter solstice; i.e. 6 January; Armenia likewise ignored, and still ignores, the December festival.... In Cappadocia, Gregory of Nyssa's sermons on St. Basil (who died before 1 January, 379) and the two following, preached on St. Stephen's feast (P.G., XLVI, 788; cf, 701, 721), prove that in 380 the 25th December was already celebrated there....

This is all in the late 4th century, a good 300 years before Pope Gregory wrote about converting the use of pagan temples.  As we will see, some authorities note the first mention of the date (25 December) in Rome was in 354; but the observation of a "Christ Mass" for the birth of the Savior came earlier, and did not originate in Rome.

Jerusalem

In 385, Silvia of Bordeaux (or Etheria, as it seems clear she should be called) was profoundly impressed by the splendid Childhood feasts at Jerusalem. They had a definitely "Nativity" colouring; the bishop proceeded nightly to Bethlehem, returning to Jerusalem for the day celebrations. The Presentation was celebrated forty days after. But this calculation starts from 6 January, and the feast lasted during the octave of that date.... Cyril declares that his clergy cannot, on the single feast of Birth and Baptism, make a double procession to Bethlehem and Jordan.... He asks Julius to assign the true date of the nativity "from census documents brought by Titus to Rome"; Julius assigns 25 December.... But Julius died in 352, and by 385 Cyril had made no change; indeed, Jerome, writing about 411 (in Ezech., P.L., XXV, 18), reproves Palestine for keeping Christ's birthday (when He hid Himself) on the Manifestation feast. 

Lots of controversy over dates, in other words, well into the late 4th century.  I thought the date was chosen to take over Saturnalia.  No?

Antioch

In Antioch, on the feast of St. Philogonius, Chrysostom preached an important sermon. The year was almost certainly 386, though Clinton gives 387, and Usener, by a long rearrangement of the saint's sermons, 388 (Religionsgeschichtl. Untersuch., pp. 227-240). But between February, 386, when Flavian ordained Chrysostom priest, and December is ample time for the preaching of all the sermons under discussion. (See Kellner, Heortologie, Freiburg, 1906, p. 97, n. 3). In view of a reaction to certain Jewish rites and feasts, Chrysostom tries to unite Antioch in celebrating Christ's birth on 25 December, part of the community having already kept it on that day for at least ten years....

Finally, though never at Rome, on authority he knows that the census papers of the Holy Family are still there. [This appeal to Roman archives is as old as Justin Martyr (First Apology 34-35) and Tertullian (Adv. Marc., IV, 7, 19). Julius, in the Cyriline forgeries, is said to have calculated the date from Josephus, on the same unwarranted assumptions about Zachary as did Chrysostom.] Rome, therefore, has observed 25 December long enough to allow of Chrysostom speaking at least in 388 as above (P.G., XLVIII, 752, XLIX, 351).

Constantinople

In 379 or 380 Gregory Nazianzen made himself exarchos of the new feast, i.e. its initiator, in Constantinople, where, since the death of Valens, orthodoxy was reviving. His three Homilies (see Hom. xxxviii in P.G., XXXVI) were preached on successive days (Usener, op. cit., p. 253) in the private chapel called Anastasia. On his exile in 381, the feast disappeared.

The Romans were quite pantheistic.  They never forced a Saturnalia observation on Jerusalem, or cared much about the worship of the God of Abraham going on there, so long as it didn't disturb the Pax Romana.  There is no record of a strong influence of the Saturnalia in Antioch or Constantinople.

Rome

[This is where it gets very complicated, so let's just cut to the chase:]

In the West the Council of Saragossa (380) still ignores 25 December .... Pope Siricius, writing in 385 to Himerius in Spain, distinguishes the feasts of the Nativity and Apparition; but whether he refers to Roman or to Spanish use is not clear.... By the time of Jerome and Augustine, the December feast is established, though the latter ... omits it from a list of first-class festivals. From the fourth century every Western calendar assigns it to 25 December. At Rome, then, the Nativity was celebrated on 25 December before 354; in the East, at Constantinople, not before 379, unless with Erbes, and against Gregory, we recognize it there in 330. Hence, almost universally has it been concluded that the new date reached the East from Rome by way of the Bosphorus during the great anti-Arian revival, and by means of the orthodox champions. 

But certainly not before the end of the 4th century, and not at all because of "Saturnalia."  First:  yes, Christians did start adopting pagan temples as places of worship, pagan heroes as saints (I can think of a couple of Irish saints off the top of my head), and pagan practices as Christian:

This would change only after Constantine converted to Christianity. From the mid-fourth century on, we do find Christians deliberately adapting and Christianizing pagan festivals. A famous proponent of this practice was Pope Gregory the Great, who, in a letter written in 601 C.E. to a Christian missionary in Britain, recommended that local pagan temples not be destroyed but be converted into churches, and that pagan festivals be celebrated as feasts of Christian martyrs. At this late point, Christmas may well have acquired some pagan trappings. But we don’t have evidence of Christians adopting pagan festivals in the third century, at which point dates for Christmas were established. Thus, it seems unlikely that the date was simply selected to correspond with pagan solar festivals.

To complicate matters further, let's go back to the very beginning of any reference to a mass celebrating the birth of Christ.  That occurs in Alexandria, which is not coincidentally in Egypt, where the culture proposed the significance of people at birth:  Pharaohs.  ("Origen, glancing perhaps at the discreditable imperial Natalitia, asserts (in Lev. Hom. viii in Migne, P.G., XII, 495) that in the Scriptures sinners alone, not saints, celebrate their birthday.") It's a short step from that to deciding the birth of Christ (which, after all, Paul had absolutely no interest in; nor does Mark or John) is a significant event, too:

The first evidence of the feast is from Egypt. About A.D. 200, Clement of Alexandria (Stromata I.21) says that certain Egyptian theologians "over curiously" assign, not the year alone, but the day of Christ's birth, placing it on 25 Pachon (20 May) in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus. [Ideler (Chron., II, 397, n.) thought they did this believing that the ninth month, in which Christ was born, was the ninth of their own calendar.] Others reached the date of 24 or 25 Pharmuthi (19 or 20 April). With Clement's evidence may be mentioned the "De paschæ computus", written in 243 and falsely ascribed to Cyprian (P.L., IV, 963 sqq.), which places Christ's birth on 28 March, because on that day the material sun was created. But Lupi has shown (Zaccaria, Dissertazioni ecc. del p. A.M. Lupi, Faenza, 1785, p. 219) that there is no month in the year to which respectable authorities have not assigned Christ's birth. Clement, however, also tells us that the Basilidians celebrated the Epiphany, and with it, probably, the Nativity, on 15 or 11 Tybi (10 or 6 January). At any rate this double commemoration became popular, partly because the apparition to the shepherds was considered as one manifestation of Christ's glory, and was added to the greater manifestations celebrated on 6 January; partly because at the baptism-manifestation many codices (e.g. Codex Bezæ) wrongly give the Divine words as sou ei ho houios mou ho agapetos, ego semeron gegenneka se (Thou art my beloved Son, this day have I begotten thee) in lieu of en soi eudokesa (in thee I am well pleased), read in Luke 3:22. Abraham Ecchelensis (Labbe, II, 402) quotes the Constitutions of the Alexandrian Church for a dies Nativitatis et Epiphaniæ in Nicæan times; Epiphanius (Hær., li, ed. Dindorf, 1860, II, 483) quotes an extraordinary semi-Gnostic ceremony at Alexandria in which, on the night of 5-6 January, a cross-stamped Korê was carried in procession round a crypt, to the chant, "Today at this hour Korê gave birth to the Eternal"; John Cassian records in his "Collations" (X, 2 in P.L., XLIX, 820), written 418-427, that the Egyptian monasteries still observe the "ancient custom"; but on 29 Choiak (25 December) and 1 January, 433, Paul of Emesa preached before Cyril of Alexandria, and his sermons (see Mansi, IV, 293; appendix to Act. Conc. Eph.) show that the December celebration was then firmly established there, and calendars prove its permanence. The December feast therefore reached Egypt between 427 and 433.

So, again, the picture is complicated.  The celebration began in Egypt, even though Origen still thought such observations the province of sinners, not saints.  And the celebration moved all over the calendar finally, by the 5th century, settling on December 25 throughout the Church.  Need I remind you that Saturnalia, a Roman (as in city of) holiday, was still on the ecclesiastical calendar as late as 448, but had no significance at all by then except as a "Feast for slaves"?  And it was observed on December 17, and had been by then for several centuries.  And the earliest evidence for the December 25th date in Rome is a calendar from 354.  Saturnalia had been observed on December 17 for a long time by that year.  And it wasn't replaced by Christmas; indeed, they continued side by side for almost 100 years, on the church's own calendar!  Can we stop this "Saturnalia" nonsense now?

Ironically, later in her article Tarico quotes Increase Mather on this subject:

“The early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”

Ironic because Mather and his fellow Puritans are responsible for this spurious connection between December 25 and Saturnalia.  Mather offers no evidence for that claim, either, except as an appeal to the prejudices of his audience, a context Tarico also unwittingly provides:

“If it had been the will of God that the several acts of Christ should have been celebrated with several solemnities, the Holy Ghost would have made known to us the day of his nativity, circumcision, presentation in the temple, baptism, transfiguration, and the like.” . . . . “This opinion of Christ’s nativity on the 25th day of December was bred at Rome.”

You don't need a secret decoder ring to catch the contempt dripping from that phrase:  "bred at Rome." The Reformed movement (of which Tarico's evangelical church is a descendant) practiced a particularly scathing contempt for Rome which has not much ebbed in 500+ years.  Almost everything she says in this article is a product of that heritage though she thinks herself well beyond it and a "reasonable" person.  Reason, however, is always grounded somewhere, and is a demanding taskmaster if you would use it to discover truth.

Tarico doesn't go much beyond the Puritans and their contempt for Christmas.  Christmas in America started this way:

It fell to Puritan reformers to put a stop to the unholy merriment [of the English Christmas celebration, which had little to do with giving gifts and much to do with getting drunk] and to bend arguments over the proper keeping of Christmas into an older and more basic one--whether there should even be an observance of the day. Defying the decisions of the Anglican Convocation of 1562 to maintain the church calendar, the Puritans struck Christmas, along with all saint's days [no Hallowe'en!], from their own list of holy days. The Bible, they held, expressly commanded keeping only the Sabbath. That would be their practice as well.

Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America,  Oxford 1995, p. 7.

With words like this, the kind Tarico might well have heard thundered from the pulpit of the church of her childhood:

"Into what stupendous height of more than pagan impiety...have we not now degenerated! [Christmas out to be] rather a day of mourning than rejoicing, [not a time spent in] amorous mixt, voluptuous, unchristian, that I say not pagan, dancing, to God's, to Christ's dishonour, religion's scandal, charities' shipwracke and sinne's advantage."

That's from William Prynne's Histriomastrix (1633), quoted in Restad,  p. 7.

The contempt for it sprang from two sources:  the unruly behavior connected with the celebration of the season; and the deep connection to Rome, because "Christmas" itself derived from the "Christ Mass," a term far too Roman for Puritans to find acceptable.  We can take up the words of Increase Mather again, to drive the point home:

In the Apostolical times the Feast of the Nativity was not observed....It can never be proved t that Christ was born on December 25....The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day...It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonorable to the name of Christ." (Restad, p. 14)

The Puritans wanted to return to a worship in keeping with what they thought "Apostolic times" were, even though that would have included far more Jewish practices than they would have been comfortable with, and a regular celebration of the eucharist (it's to the Reformed movement that we owe a celebration of "communion" only four times a year).  In fact, Christmas wasn't widely observed in 19th century America:

Christmas day is no religious day and hardly a holiday with them: New-year's day is perhaps a little, but only a little more so. For Twelfth-day, it is unknown; and the household private festivals of birthdays are almost universally passed by unsevered from the rest of the toilsome days devoted to the curse of labor."  Restad, p. 17.

 That's an English actress touring America in 1832 (what there was of it).  I especially like that "curse of labor" line, since the European celebrations of the season were meant to be a relief from that curse.  But good Puritans that we Americans are, we still take our holiday all on one day and one day only, and work like dogs to get to it, and work almost as much to get over it.

Christmas didn't officially become a holiday in America until 1870, but almost 150 years later we still like to think ourselves superior to those who passed the holiday on to us, and sneer at the "pagan" roots we imagine it has, as if we are not pagan ourselves.  The line between "pagans" and "us" is one the Puritans drew, and we re-draw it every time we imagine we know a secret truth hidden from the benighted who enjoy Christmas on whatever terms they like.

My preference is still to say:  "May it be unto you according to your faith."  But please, don't speak nonsense.  Better to be silent, and all that.

*This is what Tarico is told by by Tony Nugent, which she blithely ignores in order to force modern sensibilities on a millennia old story:

Or consider the idea that Mary is a virgin. The Greek writer of Matthew quotes Isaiah as saying: “a parthenos shall conceive and bear a child.” The Hebrew word in Isaiah is “almah,” which means simply “young woman.” But the Greek word parthenos can mean either a virgin or a young woman, and it got translated as “virgin.” Modern Bible translations have corrected this, but it is a central part of the Christmas story.

Yes, there is an idea of Mary ever virginal in the Roman Catholic teachings; but Tarico betrays her Puritanical roots on this subject.  The virginity of Mary is certainly overstated in the Christmas story.  Modern scholarship doesn't exactly ruin the tale by emphasizing Mary's youth rather than her physical state.  The emphasis on "cult" doesn't make Tarico entirely unreasonable; but it doesn't make her coldly rational, either.

And so this is Christmas....again, again.....

Although Trump is pushing me to say "Happy Holidays," just out of spite.

No, Daily Beast, just:  no.

Christmas has almost nothing whatsoever to do with "pagan" celebrations.

First:  Constantine set the date for Christmas?  I don't think so:

The December 25 feast seems to have existed before 312—before Constantine and his conversion, at least. As we have seen, the Donatist Christians in North Africa seem to have known it from before that time. Furthermore, in the mid- to late fourth century, church leaders in the eastern Empire concerned themselves not with introducing a celebration of Jesus’ birthday, but with the addition of the December date to their traditional celebration on January 6.

Besides, Constantine was dead by 337 C.E., which is another problem for the theory.  The biggest problem with it is:  history doesn't become simpler and less complicated the further back in time you go, and it isn't "made" just by the people you've heard of:

In Cyprus, at the end of the fourth century, Epiphanius asserts against the Alogi ... that Christ was born on 6 January and baptized on 8 November. Ephraem Syrus ....proves that Mesopotamia still put the birth feast thirteen days after the winter solstice; i.e. 6 January; Armenia likewise ignored, and still ignores, the December festival.... In Cappadocia, Gregory of Nyssa's sermons on St. Basil (who died before 1 January, 379) and the two following, preached on St. Stephen's feast (P.G., XLVI, 788; cf, 701, 721), prove that in 380 the 25th December was already celebrated there....

Please pause to note 380 C.E. is 43 years after the death of Constantine.  And as we will see later, some authorities note the first mention of the date (25 December) in Rome was in 354, or 17 years after Constantine's demise.

Jerusalem

In 385, Silvia of Bordeaux (or Etheria, as it seems clear she should be called) was profoundly impressed by the splendid Childhood feasts at Jerusalem. They had a definitely "Nativity" colouring; the bishop proceeded nightly to Bethlehem, returning to Jerusalem for the day celebrations. The Presentation was celebrated forty days after. But this calculation starts from 6 January, and the feast lasted during the octave of that date.... Cyril declares that his clergy cannot, on the single feast of Birth and Baptism, make a double procession to Bethlehem and Jordan.... He asks Julius to assign the true date of the nativity "from census documents brought by Titus to Rome"; Julius assigns 25 December.... But Julius died in 352, and by 385 Cyril had made no change; indeed, Jerome, writing about 411 (in Ezech., P.L., XXV, 18), reproves Palestine for keeping Christ's birthday (when He hid Himself) on the Manifestation feast. 

Lots of controversy over dates, in other words, well into the late 4th century.  I thought Constantine settled his much earlier, no?

Antioch

In Antioch, on the feast of St. Philogonius, Chrysostom preached an important sermon. The year was almost certainly 386, though Clinton gives 387, and Usener, by a long rearrangement of the saint's sermons, 388 (Religionsgeschichtl. Untersuch., pp. 227-240). But between February, 386, when Flavian ordained Chrysostom priest, and December is ample time for the preaching of all the sermons under discussion. (See Kellner, Heortologie, Freiburg, 1906, p. 97, n. 3). In view of a reaction to certain Jewish rites and feasts, Chrysostom tries to unite Antioch in celebrating Christ's birth on 25 December, part of the community having already kept it on that day for at least ten years....

Finally, though never at Rome, on authority he knows that the census papers of the Holy Family are still there. [This appeal to Roman archives is as old as Justin Martyr (First Apology 34-35) and Tertullian (Adv. Marc., IV, 7, 19). Julius, in the Cyriline forgeries, is said to have calculated the date from Josephus, on the same unwarranted assumptions about Zachary as did Chrysostom.] Rome, therefore, has observed 25 December long enough to allow of Chrysostom speaking at least in 388 as above (P.G., XLVIII, 752, XLIX, 351).

Constantinople

In 379 or 380 Gregory Nazianzen made himself exarchos of the new feast, i.e. its initiator, in Constantinople, where, since the death of Valens, orthodoxy was reviving. His three Homilies (see Hom. xxxviii in P.G., XXXVI) were preached on successive days (Usener, op. cit., p. 253) in the private chapel called Anastasia. On his exile in 381, the feast disappeared.

What?  No Santa Claus in Constantinople? Surely Constantine was turning over in his grave!

Rome

[This is where it gets very complicated, so let's just cut to the chase:]

In the West the Council of Saragossa (380) still ignores 25 December .... Pope Siricius, writing in 385 to Himerius in Spain, distinguishes the feasts of the Nativity and Apparition; but whether he refers to Roman or to Spanish use is not clear.... By the time of Jerome and Augustine, the December feast is established, though the latter ... omits it from a list of first-class festivals. From the fourth century every Western calendar assigns it to 25 December. At Rome, then, the Nativity was celebrated on 25 December before 354; in the East, at Constantinople, not before 379, unless with Erbes, and against Gregory, we recognize it there in 330. Hence, almost universally has it been concluded that the new date reached the East from Rome by way of the Bosphorus during the great anti-Arian revival, and by means of the orthodox champions. 

But certainly not before the end of the 4th century, and not at all because of "Saturnalia."  First:  yes, Christians did start adopting pagan temples as places of worship, pagan heroes as saints (I can think of a couple of Irish saints off the top of my head), and pagan practices as Christian:

This would change only after Constantine converted to Christianity. From the mid-fourth century on, we do find Christians deliberately adapting and Christianizing pagan festivals. A famous proponent of this practice was Pope Gregory the Great, who, in a letter written in 601 C.E. to a Christian missionary in Britain, recommended that local pagan temples not be destroyed but be converted into churches, and that pagan festivals be celebrated as feasts of Christian martyrs. At this late point, Christmas may well have acquired some pagan trappings. But we don’t have evidence of Christians adopting pagan festivals in the third century, at which point dates for Christmas were established. Thus, it seems unlikely that the date was simply selected to correspond with pagan solar festivals.

They did all that in the 7th century; well, to be fair, probably starting in the late 6th century.  2 centuries after the date for Christmas was finally established, however.

Saturnalia?  No.  That was on December 17 to December 23, but by 354 C.E. it was only on December 17.  It was more like the Feast of Fools than anything we think of as a Christmas observance (and remember we're talking about a religious ceremony here, not a civic one.  Christmas as we know it is an amalgam of medieval practices (feasting, mostly, anymore) and Charles Dickens' childhood memories (Pickwick and Scrooge are the roots of our modern Christmas, as well as Clement Clarke Moore).  Saturnalia held on as a holiday on the Roman calendar until the mid-5th century:

December 17 was recognized as the date of the Saturnalia as late as AD 448, when it was notated in the ecclesiastical calendar or laterculus ("list") of Polemius Silvius. But now, deprived of its pagan significance, it is identified only as feriae servorum ("festival of the slaves").

By then Christmas had been observed on December 25 in Rome for at least 60 years, so I don't think they were confused about the dates.  So maybe it was "Natali invictii"?  Well, maybe, as the date is the same as Christmas.  However:

But even should a deliberate and legitimate "baptism" of a pagan feast be seen here no more than the transference of the date need be supposed. The "mountain-birth" of Mithra and Christ's in the "grotto" have nothing in common: Mithra's adoring shepherds....are rather borrowed from Christian sources than vice versa.

Whatever link there is doesn't really mean anything.  Oh, and about the yule log, I'm not going beyond this:

The yule log

The calend fires were a scandal even to Rome, and St. Boniface obtained from Pope Zachary their abolition. But probably the Yule-log in its many forms was originally lit only in view of the cold season. Only in 1577 did it become a public ceremony in England; its popularity, however, grew immense, especially in Provence; in Tuscany, Christmas is simply called ceppo (block, log...). Besides, it became connected with other usages; in England, a tenant had the right to feed at his lord's expense as long as a wheel, i.e. a round, of wood, given by him, would burn, the landlord gave to a tenant a load of wood on the birth of a child; Kindsfuss was a present given to children on the birth of a brother or sister, and even to the farm animals on that of Christ, the universal little brother....

Not too many pagans running around Europe by the 16th century, really.  And what's left?  The Christmas tree?  Oh, please; I'm not going to repeat myself on that.  The twelve days of Christmas, where did that come from?  (It is the span of time between Christmas Day and Epiphany, or January 6.)  Nobody knows, but I'm comfortable saying;  not from pagans.  Certainly not from a yule log that burned for 12 days (unless you were a lucky 16th century English tenant!).  No, that's too simple; so let's start here and work backwards a bit:

The reason for the fixing of this date it is impossible to discover. The only tolerable solution is that of Mgr. Duchesne ..., who explains simultaneously the celebration of 6 January and of 25 December by a backward reckoning from 6 April and 25 March respectively. The Pepyzitae, or Phrygian Montanists, says Sozomen..., kept Easter on 6 April; hence (reckoning an exact number of years to the Divine life) Christ's birthday would have fallen on 6 January. But, it may be urged, the first notice we have of the observance of this date, refers to Christ's Baptism. But this (if we may assume the Basilidians, too, to have argued from 6 April) will have fallen on the exact anniversary of the Birth. But why preeminently celebrate the Baptism? Can it be that the celebration started with those, of whatever sect, who held that at the Baptism the Godhead descended upon Christ? On this uncertain territory we had better risk no footstep till fresh evidence, if such there be, be furnished us.

Indeed.  But working backwards, as I said, the New Advent articles tells us that Epiphany as a celebration of the church began in the Eastern church, where the idea of what actually was the "epiphany" wasn't settled for some time.  The baptism, the miracle at Cana (the first miracle in John's gospel), the magi, were all considered events of the epiphany of the divinity of Christ, and each was celebrated.  The shorter version is that the Eastern church attached importance to the Epiphany and celebrated it on January 6, while the Roman church celebrated the nativity on December 25.  Both could technically be epiphanies (revelation of the godhood and incarnation).  And sooner or later, the two were adopted on either side:

It is simpler to say that, about the time of the diffusion of the December celebration in the East, the West took up the Oriental January feast, retaining all its chief characteristics, though attaching overwhelming importance, as time went on, to the apparition of the Magi. 

Epiphany and Christmas were being celebrated long before the church reached deep into the lands where people were burning logs to keep warm in winter or worshipping trees or counting sparks from fires (which is kind of a stupid assertion, anyway, made by someone who's spent little time by a wood fire).  I'm comfortable in saying the dates were set long before the "yule" was named a log.

The term Yule is of disputed origin. It is unconnected with any word meaning "wheel". The name in Anglo-Saxon was geol, feast: geola, the name of a month (cf. Icelandic iol a feast in December).

As so many things are.  And Anglo-Saxon was not a language of Christians until quite a bit later than the 4th century, when most of these dates were being set.

little tree

"little silent christmas tree"

The Christmas Tree isn't of "pagan origin." In fact, of all things related to Christmas, it's probably the only one that is almost entirely a product of a Christian culture.

Not that it really matters; the insistence that "Christian" practices be pure and untainted by non-Christian (i.e., "pagan") practices is a silly one that dates back (again!) to the Puritans (see below).   Why we insist on keeping it up is another cultural practice very peculiar to Americans (equally peculiar is the idea that we are the world and our Christianity is world Christianity.  But that's another hobby horse....).


The tree is a seasonal decorative item.  Rather like the concept of communion, it springs not from some cultural icon co-opted by the new dominance of Christianity in the dark places of ancient history, but from Christian sources:  specifically, the Genesis story and the Paradeisbaum inspired by German morality plays and the veneration of Adam and Even in the Eastern church which spread, unofficially, westward.

CHRISTMAS Eve is the feast day of our first parents, Adam and Eve. They are commemorated as saints in the calendars of the Eastern churches (Greeks, Syrians, Copts). Under the influence of this Oriental practice, their veneration spread also to the West and became very popular toward the end of the first millennium of the Christian era. The Latin church has never officially introduced their feast, though it did not prohibit their popular veneration. In many old churches of Europe their statues may still be seen among the images of the saints. Boys and girls who bore the names of Adam and Eve (quite popular in past centuries) celebrated their "Name Day" with great rejoicing. In Germany the custom began in the sixteenth century of putting up a "paradise tree" in the homes to honor the first parents. This was a fir tree laden with apples, and from it developed the modern Christmas tree.

That first connection, to traditional stage decorations, is not to be overlooked.  The tree really is just a seasonal decorative item, just as Christmas in America is now just a time of year, with almost no connection to either Christ or the Roman Mass.

As Penne Restad documents it in Christmas in America, the small tree put up in German households on Christmas Eve (feast day of Adam and Eve) became the dominant feature of room-filling tableaus in 19th century America, tableaus complete with landscapes made of dirt hauled in for the purpose (think of Richard Dreyfus in "Close Encounters" hauling in dirt to build the Devil's Tower in his living room.  Now cover it with snow....).  It was never more than an excuse for decoration,  in other words.

There's also the fact that, at best, you are only likely to see "Chrismon" trees in Christian churches, and then only in the worship space of some Protestant churches.  You may find a decorated tree in a Christian place of worship, but odds are the decorations are specifically religious symbols, and even then the tree may (or may not) be up near the altar or pulpit.  It's a secular decorative item, not a religious "Xmas" item at all.

So the tree we get so manic about now is as American as Santa Claus and 24 shopping days 'til Christmas.

And while we're on the subject, no, Christmas is not Saturnalia sanctified.  It probably is taken from the Natali Invictii of Rome (at least when it started in Rome).  But it also started elsewhere on January 6, and where it was set on December 25th the reasoning had to do with the Day of Atonement and Zechariah's Temple duty.  You could look it up.  The idea that it was the Saturnalia is most likely from Increase Mather (or some other Puritan), who was no fan of Christmas to begin with, for reasons a lot of atheists and others sick of the holiday taking over the last 3 months of the American calendar might well sympathize with:

In the Apostolical times the Feast of the Nativity was not observed....It can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25....The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day...It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonorable to the name of Christ." (quoted in Penne Restad, Christmas in America, New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995,  p. 14)

You want a war on Christmas?  Take it up with the Puritans.  Although that last sentence could have been uttered today, rather than 300+ years ago; if you still want to protect Christmas from commerce.  If you do, let me recommend Bill McKibben as your guide.

As for the word itself, that didn't come into use until 1038; at least, New Advent says that's the earliest recorded appearance of the word.  The feast first appeared in 354 in Rome; as early as 200 C.E. in Alexandria.  And as for "Xmas," well....we've done that.

And so this is Christmas...

NTodd has made me think again about the connection between Christmas and Saturnalia.  Here's why most people think the two began as one:

For New Year, Posumus, ten years ago,
You sent me four pounds of good silver-plate.
The next year, hoping for a rise in weight
(For gifts should either stay the same or grow),
I got two pounds. The third and fourth produced
Inferior presents, and the fifth year's weighed
Only a pound--Septicus' work, ill-made
Into the bargain. Next I was reduced
To an eight-ounce oblong salad-platter, soon
It was a miniature cup that tipped the scales
At even less. A tiny two-ounce sppon
Was the eighth year's surprise. The ninth, at length,
And grudgingly, disgorged a pick for snails
Lighter than a needle. Now, I note, the tenth
Has come and gone with nothing in its train.
I miss the old four pounds! Let's start again!

Martial, tr. James Michie

The only problem is, that tradition had died out in Rome before the Feast of the Nativity got there in the mid 4th century.  And gifts weren't associated with Christmas, or even the Magi's visit, not gifts among peers as Saturnalia was practiced, until the 19th century.

As NTodd points out in two posts, gift giving went from wealthy to poor, not from equals to equals.  Even Clement Clark Moore saw the gift giving as from him to his children, his children replacing the demanding serfs and peasants of an earlier England.  The echo of those demands in children today demanding the "hottest" toy for Christmas is ironic.

Anyway, gift giving was not between peers, and it wasn't reciprocal.  Oddly, no one thinks of the Magi laying their gifts before Mary and Jesus and waiting in anticipation for what Jesus and Mary got them.  That cliche has become the anxiety of our age (it's made it's way into commercials to convince you to buy MORE Xmas presents this year, lest you be caught empty-handed and unable to reciprocate.  Which, of course, doesn't make it a gift at all, but simply another part of the economy.  Which the nightly news reminds us every day this time of year, is all that it really is.  Buy something for yourself, too; after all, you're peerless.)  There are connections made to the Magi, with gifts exchanged on January 6 (Epiphany) or with St.Nicholas (Dec. 6), but these are largely retrojections looking for support for modern practices.  Reciprocity came as a matter of industrialization.  Once merchants and manufacturers figured out how lucrative this could be, it couldn't be confined to children; it had to extend to spouses and family and even friends.

Which connects it to Saturnalia in the end, but only because the Romans got there first, not because we followed their path.  Given the structure of society, which is more Roman than we realize, especially in America, maybe that is inevitable.

Which gives a whole new meaning to the depressive side of the holidays, doesn't it?

"Running from the law King Herod has impos-ed"

"Why does this story never wear out?"

As part of the long process of formalizing a celebration of the birth of Christ–which includes shifting the purported date of Jesus’ arrival in the world to midwinter to co-opt pagan observances and then suppressing said observances–Saint Nicholas gets mashed up with other figures. 

Is this a religious claim?  Or a claim for power?

The usual "historical" analysis of the timing of Christmas (wrong, for the most part) is that it stomped all over a pagan holiday.  Some say Saturnalia (completely wrong), some say, more soundly, that it took root in the Natali Invictii observed in Rome on what is now Dec. 25.  The importance and singularity of Rome there cannot be overstated, as the observance of a feast for the nativity began as early as 200 C.E. in Alexandria, although it was in the spring, not winter.  Several locations took up various times of year for observing the Nativity, and only over 2 centuries did it settle on first January 6, and then December 25.  The shift in dates in some regions had to do with a calculation based on the Day of Atonement and Zechariah's Temple duty.  You could look it up.  The idea that it was the Saturnalia is most likely from Increase Mather (or some other Puritan), who was no fan of Christmas to begin with, for reasons a lot of people sick of the holiday taking over the last 3 months of the American calendar might well sympathize with:

In the Apostolical times the Feast of the Nativity was not observed....It can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25....The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day...It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonorable to the name of Christ." (quoted in Penne Restad, Christmas in America, New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995,  p. 14)

But the date of December 25 probably corresponded with a holiday in Rome, and so as Rome Christianized such holidays were made over into Christian holidays.  Then as the church centralized in Rome, important feast days regularized to prevent confusion.  By the same token the Thunderbird stopped being something from Native American lore and became an automobile (and alcohol, ironically).  Yes, Native American culture was crushed in America, but not so we could name a car.

You want a war on Christmas?  Take it up with the Puritans.  Although that last sentence could have been uttered today, rather than 300+ years ago; if you still want to protect Christmas from commerce.  If you do, let me recommend Bill McKibben as your guide.

As for the word itself, that didn't come into use until 1038; at least, New Advent says that's the earliest recorded appearance of the word.  The feast first appeared in 354 in Rome; as early as 200 C.E. in Alexandria.

I mention this because the history we "remember" is not the history humankind necessarily lived through.  It is perfectly valid to say Europeans crushed the native cultures of America almost as soon as they could; and perfectly ridiculous to even infer we did so in order to name an automobile.  But the idea that Christians oppressed Rome into giving up a holiday for Jesus is equally as absurd.  That is the convention, though; that "pagans" were "suppressed" by Christians in ways apparently analogous to how Native American culture was suppressed by Europeans.  We see it through an ahistorical lens, in other words; and then decide "religion" is, and was, predominantly about power.

We are humans.  One way to look at us is to identify everything we do as being about power.  What makes that an interesting analysis at this time of year is that the Christmas story is all about powerlessness.

Joseph is a carpenter.  He is not a man of means, a union member, a journeyman who sits atop the rest of the construction workers because he has skills that make him valuable from ground breaking to completion.  He is an almost employed beggar.  There is no market economy in 1st century Palestine.  Joseph lives like everyone else does:  by connections to a patron.  But as a carpenter, he has few such connections.  He may be slightly better off than the fisherman who come into the story later, but they might exceed him because at least they have something to sell that everyone needs.  Only people with extra money need a carpenter, and then only briefly.  Joseph is a poor man.

Mary is a child.  She's lucky Joseph doesn't accuse her of adultery, when she turns up pregnant without him.  And Jesus is born in a feeding trough because that's where peasant babies are laid in 1st century Palestine.  And he's visited by shepherds, the bikers and outlaws of the day; men who stink of sheep and sweat and are more like the "mountain men" of American history than not.  And his life is threatened within two years of his birth; his family has to flee to Egypt while Herod exerts his power as king, his absolute power over life, by slaughtering every male child two years old and under in Bethlehem.

This is a story of power, but the power doesn't reside with the mensch, the virgin, or the god.

These concerns over power are themselves "religious," if by "religious" you mean endemic to any community of believers.  Pope Francis, for example, is moving to reform the Vatican, shifting the emphasis from rules to mission.

"The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle."

He is not interested in church reform that amounts to a mere rearranging of the ecclesiastical furniture. Authentic ecclesial reform will be in service of the church's mission. In an address to the coordinating committee of the Episcopal Conference of Latin America, or CELAM, during his visit to Brazil in July, he said:

The "change of structures" [from obsolete ones to new ones] will not be the result of reviewing an organizational flow chart, which would lead to a static reorganization; rather it will result from the very dynamics of mission. What makes obsolete structures pass away, what leads to a change of heart in Christians, is precisely missionary spirit.

 That, of course, prompts a response:

"The service of the Roman Curia is part of the very nature of the church, and so that has to be respected," Cardinal Raymond  Burke told EWTN, a U.S.-based Catholic cable network that spotlights conservative views.

"I can't imagine that somehow the Roman Curia is going to take on a completely different figure. It just doesn't make sense," Burke said. The interview was broadcast Thursday as the centerpiece of a program that highlighted concerns about the direction of the church since Francis was elected in March.
...
 But Burke told EWTN that it was "not altogether clear what the results of the reform will be" and lamented what he described as "a kind of unpredictability about life in Rome in these days."

 Indeed, you can draw a very bright line between Cardinal Burke and Pope Francis from their own words:

"One gets the impression, or it's interpreted this way in the media, that he thinks we're talking too much about abortion, too much about the integrity of marriage as between one man and one woman," Burke said. "But we can never talk enough about that!"
 ....
 "When the dialogue among the people and the bishops and the pope goes down this road and is genuine," the pope contends, "then it is assisted by the Holy Spirit."

The Holy Spirit, need I say, is never about power; not even the power of persuasion.  Access to the Holy Spirit comes only through vulnerability; through what St. Therese of Lisieux called "The Little Way."  One might say the Pope wants his church to be more "catholic" by being more small, more concerned with little things.

Whether that is seen as co-opting what was in place when he rose to the Papacy, or not, depends on your perspective.

Last one out, please turn off the lights...

Athenae sent me to the Adam Gopnik story on NPR from earlier this week, and while it was a good comment, the summary of it on the website flipped my switch:

Commentator Adam Gopnik loves everything about Christmas, gaudiness included, because to him it represents an idea — that oppression can produce new beginnings, and that a light can go on in the middle of darkness.

Can I just say I'm full bore sick of the "light in the middle of darkness" stuff?

You look up the "history of Christmas," you get this kind of stuff:

The middle of winter has long been a time of celebration around the world. Centuries before the arrival of the man called Jesus, early Europeans celebrated light and birth in the darkest days of winter. Many peoples rejoiced during the winter solstice, when the worst of the winter was behind them and they could look forward to longer days and extended hours of sunlight.

Well, yeah, maybe. But why then, do we, in a world so industrialized that seasons mean little more to most of us than whether or not we need a coat when we go outside, still put up lights at the end of the year? Because we're afraid of the dark? Or because it's aesthetically pleasing?

I have a book about one young Irish girl's memories of a rural Irish Christmas in the mid-20th century. For an agricultural society, the coming of winter meant rest and living off what was provided from the summer. Meat was prepared and animals slaughtered to provide food for the winter, and where there was little food storage capacity or preservation possible, most of that food had to be eaten soon. By the time spring came around larders were usually empty. Not quite so grim a story is told in that book, of course, but she makes it clear the season was an agricultural necessity, not a social or anthropological one. The solstice mattered less than the weather, and the fact livestock had to be wintered over, and crops couldn't be tended. It was also a time to celebrate after a long period of hard work; a time to rest and recover and get ready for all the demands of spring. So, when I put up Christmas lights, am I afraid of the dark and wishing the sun would come back? Or do I just think they're pretty?

And what makes me any different from people in Scandinavian country 3000 years ago? They were superstitious fools, and I'm not? Feh.

Then, of course, there's the simplistic stuff like this:

Although some evidence suggests that his birth may have occurred in the spring (why would shepherds be herding in the middle of winter?), Pope Julius I chose December 25. It is commonly believed that the church chose this date in an effort to adopt and absorb the traditions of the pagan Saturnalia festival.

And this, mind you, is on The History Channel's website, and is the "REAL" story of Christmas. Bah, humbug. You want a real history, you look at something like this:

Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church. Irenaeus and Tertullian omit it from their lists of feasts; Origen, glancing perhaps at the discreditable imperial Natalitia, asserts (in Lev. Hom. viii in Migne, P.G., XII, 495) that in the Scriptures sinners alone, not saints, celebrate their birthday; Arnobius (VII, 32 in P.L., V, 1264) can still ridicule the "birthdays" of the gods.

Alexandria
The first evidence of the feast is from Egypt. About A.D. 200, Clement of Alexandria (Strom., I, xxi in P.G., VIII, 888) says that certain Egyptian theologians "over curiously" assign, not the year alone, but the day of Christ's birth, placing it on 25 Pachon (20 May) in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus. [Ideler (Chron., II, 397, n.) thought they did this believing that the ninth month, in which Christ was born, was the ninth of their own calendar.]

If you wade through that (as you should, if you want to know something verifiable about history), you reach this conclusion:

The present writer in inclined to think that, be the origin of the feast in East or West, and though the abundance of analogous midwinter festivals may indefinitely have helped the choice of the December date, the same instinct which set Natalis Invicti at the winter solstice will have sufficed, apart from deliberate adaptation or curious calculation, to set the Christian feast there too.

In other words, as that Irish family knew in the 20th century: on the farm, the time of year that falls in December is a good time for a feast!

Now, as to this information, first note that this is a Catholic encyclopedia, and yet there is no mention here of Pope Julius I setting the date. In fact, the whole question of the date is clearly far more complex than that. Looking back from 1700 years later, we tend to flatten out "the church" and forget that, for centuries, there were "churches" in, as this entry recognizes: Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Constantinople, Antioch, as well as Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Asia Minor. Church historians, of course,know this; but who wants to listen to church historians when we can tell simple stories pagan holidays that became Christian holidays (oh, those silly Christians and their "holy days!").

This is not to neglect the great irony that most of these arguments against holidays (pagans started it!) were advanced by the Puritans in America. History abounds in such ironies.

So how did the date of 25 December get selected? Nobody seems to know, exactly, but the process was not a simple one:

At Rome, then, the Nativity was celebrated on 25 December before 354; in the East, at Constantinople, not before 379, unless with Erbes, and against Gregory, we recognize it there in 330. Hence, almost universally has it been concluded that the new date reached the East from Rome by way of the Bosphorus during the great anti-Arian revival, and by means of the orthodox champions. De Santi (L'Orig. delle Fest. Nat., in Civiltæ Cattolica, 1907), following Erbes, argues that Rome took over the Eastern Epiphany, now with a definite Nativity colouring, and, with as increasing number of Eastern Churches, placed it on 25 December; later, both East and West divided their feast, leaving Ephiphany on 6 January, and Nativity on 25 December, respectively, and placing Christmas on 25 December and Epiphany on 6 January. The earlier hypothesis still seems preferable.

I would note that the Roman celebration is the earliest mentioned here, and it comes a good 70 yearsa after the Natalis Invicti had reached its peak of popularity. So the idea that Christians took over a popular Roman holiday is a weak one, indeed. The time of year may have been remembered, but the pagan holiday had long passed its prime by the mid 4th century.

As for the Saturnalia connection; fuggedaboutit!

The origin of Christmas should not be sought in the Saturnalia (1-23 December) nor even in the midnight holy birth at Eleusis (see J.E. Harrison, Prolegom., p. 549) with its probable connection through Phrygia with the Naasene heretics, or even with the Alexandrian ceremony quoted above; nor yet in rites analogous to the midwinter cult at Delphi of the cradled Dionysus, with his revocation from the sea to a new birth (Harrison, op. cit., 402 sqq.).

So, is this the "real" story of Christmas? I'm sure it's closer than some Pope in some century appropriating a pagan holiday in order to convert everyone to Christianity. Those explanations always smack of apocryphal material for a "Lives of the Saints" story: they may sound good, but they have little to do with reality. Do people today put up lights to bring the sun back? Then its not likely they did so in "ancient days," either. The New Advent entry covers several seasonal topics, and notes, for instance, that the "yule log" didn't become a public ceremony in England until 1577, hardly pagan times in Merrye Olde England at all. How did the ceremony even get started?

...probably the Yule-log in its many forms was originally lit only in view of the cold season.

Huh! And probably we put up lights in December because it's festive, and because the longer nights mean they'll stay lit longer and cheer us up until spring comes back. And maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with Mithra...or Saturn...d'ya think?

ADDENDUM: Just a footnote, because this kind of stuff drives me crazy. Again, from The History Channel:

In Germany, people honored the pagan god Oden during the mid-winter holiday. Germans were terrified of Oden, as they believed he made nocturnal flights through the sky to observe his people, and then decide who would prosper or perish. Because of his presence, many people chose to stay inside.

Silly, superstitious people! We don't fear mythical gods who fly by night! We fear a lone Muslim living in a cave in Pakistan, who robs us of our sleep and keeps us from shopping and triggers terror alerts. We fear brown people who will cross the Rio Grande and wreak untold havoc on us and will probably give us all leprosy! At least, that's what our pundits and politicians tell us, and why would they want us to be afraid needlessly? Much more reasonable to fear these things than to fear Odin!

Hmmmm...wanting to stay inside in Germany during the mid-winter. Can't imagine why anyone would want to do that, except for fear of a god flying by....

Xmas In America

First, Christmas as we know it in America didn't really get started until the 1820's. It wasn't widely celebrated until the 1860's, and didn't become an official national holiday until 1870. So the "observance" of it (whatever that means) is not all that old. (For a bit of perspective, A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, and many scholars today attribute the "revival" of Christmas celebrations in England to Dickens). And from almost the moment the holiday was observed as a holiday, it was connected to commerce. So the connection between Christmas and shopping, in America, is as old as Christmas in America itself.

The other matter is:  there was no single "church" in America (still isn't).  Christmas in Europe came directly from Rome and really wasn't widespread there until the 11th century (another story entirely), so most of what we think of as "traditional Christmas" is from medieval Europe (not that there's anything wrong with that!), and a lot of it in this country traces back to Tudor England.

We'll get to that.

The first important point is that Christmas didn't enter this country via the Roman Catholics (who gave us the word, after all).  Christmas was banned by the Puritans, who pretty much hated it.  But what they hated was not what Scrooge hated:  they didn't hate Christmas trees (that didn't show up until the 19th century here, anyway) or greens and garland, or even Santa Claus.  The Puritans hated the raucous nature of Christmas; oh, and that the word itself referred to the "Christ Mass," which was much too "Romish" (their word) to tolerate in the New World.

But I need to put that in context, so bear with me a moment.  As I said, most of the celebrations of Christmas we have today (in America, anyway) have roots in Tudor England and the court of Henry VIII.  There was gift giving even then, but gift giving was engaged in only among the peerage, and  Henry expected the best gifts to come to him. He was rather how you imagine Donald Trump to be on Christmas morning: his gifts are to others are small, what he expects to receive is large.  Gifting to family and friends was far in the future from Henry; adult to child giving further away still. Today Christmas is for children, first and foremost. The root of that is one I'm interested in tracing.

Henry’s Christmas celebrations also lasted for 12 days and included many feasts (mostly because the food was available and food storage almost nonexistent. Use it or lose it was the rule for much of Europe for centuries). It included the “Lord of Misrule,” usually a courtier given license to lead the drinking and carousing and general carrying on. That doesn’t reach back to Rome, either. But Puritans in America, like Increase Mather, tried to argue that it did.

In the Apostolical times the Feast of the Nativity was not observed....It can never be proved that Christ was born on December 25....The New Testament allows of no stated Holy-Day but the Lords-day...It was in compliance with the Pagan saturnalia that Christmas Holy-dayes were first invented. The manner of Christmas-keeping, as generally observed, is highly dishonorable to the name of Christ.

--Increase Mather, 1687.  

“If it had been the will of God that the several acts of Christ should have been celebrated with several solemnities, the Holy Ghost would have made known to us the day of his nativity, circumcision, presentation in the temple, baptism, transfiguration, and the like.” . . . . “This opinion of Christ’s nativity on the 25th day of December was bred at Rome.”

Also Increase Mather.

He's not wrong about that date for Christmas Day.  And his connection of Christmas to Saturnalia is where many an armchair historian and scholar has determined that's exactly what history says (it isn't.)  The salient point for us is that Christmas in America had little or nothing to do with the Church (or any church), and a great deal more to do with commerce.  I can explain that rather simply (this isn't a lecture, after all), by pointing to the figure of Santa Claus.

Take it as accurate the Santa Claus from from the Danish figure Sinterklaas, who in turn comes from St. Nicholas (whose feast day is Dec. 6; we'll get there, too).  I have a picture of Sinterklaas, and it hardly resembles the figure of Clement Moore, Thomas Nast, or Haddon Sondblom (the artist of the '50's and '60's Coca-Cola Santas of my childhood.)  Sinterklass is depicted astride a regal white horse, bedecked with golden bridle and all the trimmings, as it flys through the sky (sans wings, not unlike the reindeer).  Sinterklaas sits regal and proud in the saddle, a tall, lean man wearing a Bishop's mitre and carrying a golden crozier.  Hardly the "jolly old elf" Moore says he saw in his living room. But Sinterklaas is a Catholic figure, a saint and the very picture of a Prince of the Church.  Santa Claus is a creature of mythology ("elf") who comes as a kind and trustworthy peddler, taking care of  Christmas for Mom and Dad and (especially) the kids.  Who are presumed to be "good" without having to prove it (post-Romanticism has been good for children, by and large). In the latest very American iteration, toy stores in "Red One" (the newest Xmas movie about Santa) all have "portals" to the North Pole, the better to deliver the toys which are provided to the children.  Or...something.  It's all about commerce, anyway, which is hardly what Sinterklaas was about.

Our American Christmas, in brief, was never about Advent and scriptures and taking care of the poor, which is one of the lessons of the Christchild being born in a feeding trough ("manger" is the nicer euphemism).  Although now we make the former saint kneel beside the Babe,  in tacit recognition that Santa Claus has eclipsed the "reason for the season."  Which it was in Europe; but never really was in America.

The fact is, Christmas as we know it and celebrate it in America, is pretty much an invention of the market place, and has only and ever tangentially been related to Christmas as a religious observance, as the "Christ Mass" held to honor the birth of the Savior. It's more like the two celebrations occur coincidentally at the same time of year, than that one is a vulgar and degrading corruption of the Platonic ideal of the other. Once you understand that, the picture becomes much clearer; or perhaps darker.

If you want to understand how Christmas got started in America, consider the example of the European Feast of Fools. As New Advent says, it was "a celebration marked by much license and buffoonery." Scholars again differ on the reach and importance of this festival; some crown it as a n important "release valve" of the tensions and pressures of feudal society. Others, like Michel Foucault, downplay it. It was limited to northern France and a few other regions of Europe, and always opposed by the Church. The lesson for us is that this 'feast' was a folk celebration, not a church one, and its irreverence was tolerated by the Church because they couldn't stop it, more than it was encouraged as a way of reminding the peasants of their place in the hierarchy (a comparison to Christmas in the slave holding South will prove instructive here, if I remember to mention it again). Christmas, too, was a folk celebration, one more honored in the British South (thanks to the presence of the Episcopal church) than in Puritan New England (where it was officially banned for a time, in at least some of the New England states). Restad's history presents Christmas as largely a folk celebration, in contrast to Thanksgiving, which was vigorously promoted in the 19th century by Sara Josepha Hale, who did more than any individual to promote Thanksgiving as a national holiday (ironically, the objections to it were on church/state grounds. It was argued that a national day of giving thanks would violate the First Amendment, an objection that was finally obviated by the times, when Lincoln established what later became the holiday) Aside from the religious entanglement objection, Thanksgiving was regarded as more of a "New England" celebration than a national one, for much of that century. Christmas, on the other hand, crept into public celebrations from many lands and many hands, and was early on largely disconnected from any religious observance, and while promoted as connected to the Christchild, was really no more dependent upon Church sanction than it is now. The idea, in other words, that there was a "pure" Christmas observance in America once upon a time, which the marketplace or the public square corrupted, is as false as the idea that the Christmas celebration we know now descended in an almost unbroken line from the Roman Saturnalia. It just happens that people like an excuse to exchange gifts and eat a lot of food, and especially for people from a northern European culture, winter is a jolly good time to do that.

Christmas that year, not one to look forward to, was one we should alway look back on.

That's the opening sentence of "Looking Back on Christmas" by William Owens.  I don't know if it's memoir or fiction, but it's become one of my favorite Christmas stories.   It's the story of a family gathering in rural Texas on Christmas Eve.  The family gathers, then sits down to dinner, and after dinner:

After the first table [old Texas tradition my family carried on with in my childhood:  the men ate first, then retired, and the women and children ate.  Yeah, my wife was appalled by that, too, and it was long before we were married that she encountered it.] the men and the bigger boys built up a big fire in the pasture between the house and the front gate.  Then, while the women stood on the front porch to watch, Uncle Charlie gave the little children firecrackers and showed them how to shoot them.  He put a paper fuse against a live coal.  When it had lighted he threw it away from the fire into the dark.

"Don't ever let one go off in your hand," he said, "And don't throw it close to nobody.  Somebody might get hurt."

While we went through the firecrackers he had given us, the men made a trip back to the kitchen.  This time they brought the jug with them and set it in the back end of a wagon.  They brought out more fireworks, and Monroe had the sack of powder in his coat pocket.

"Time for a roman candle," Uncle Charlie said.

He took a long red roman candle and went to the fire.

"You all watch now," he said, "I'm gonna hold it like I was aiming to shoot the gate."

Charlie runs into the dark and let's the candle shoot balls of fire, then he gets Othal to join him in a roman candle battle.  Full disclosure:  I once did something similar with my cousin, although in summer, not winter.  We used plastic tubes from his golf bag to launch bottle rockets at each other.  We didn't even have the excuse of alcohol, we were just young and dumb.

Anyway, you get the flavor of the celebration.  Firecrackers going off, then roman candles being fired at each other in close range.  Then when those are exhausted and everyone's tired of running around and through the house:

Uncle Charlie was not ready for the fun to be over.  He went up the steps and across the front porch.  Aunt Niece was standing in the door, with the lamplight behind her.  He lifted her chin with his fingers and went on past her, to the chimney corner where he kept his double-barreled shotgun.  Then he came out with the gun under his arm and a box of shells in his hand.

Near the fire, he loaded both barrels and set the stock against his shoulder.

"You aiming at the gate?" Othal asked.

"You got to aim at something."

He fired, and after the first blast we heard shot rattle against the gate.

"Got it first shot," Othal said, and ran for his own gun.

In no time at all, five guns were blazing away at the gate, and the little children were running for hiding places under the house.  I shivered at the sound, but felt safe, for their backs were to us and they were aiming at the gate.

Then Othal came running around the house, loading and firing as he ran, and some of the others took after him.  The women had run inside, but I could hear them telling the men to stop.  Too scared to stay under the house, I crawled out and started for the door.  In the darkness I can straight into Otha's knees, and he let a double-barreled blast go off right over my head, leaving a burning flash in my eyes and a ringing in my ears.

The gate was "a wide, heavy gate made of oak timbers fourteen feet long and an inch thick."  However, the next morning:  "We went to look at the gate, and found it half hanging from the posts, with the timbers drilled and splintered by shot."  The story ends this way:

Uncle Charlie came in with a backstick for the fireplace.  My grandmother was waiting for him.

"You ruint the gate," she said.

"I reckon we did."

He laughed and the light in his blue eyes showed he was not sorry.  She frowned and went out to the front porch.

Aunt Niece came in, with a peeled orange in her hand.

"Christmas gift," he said to her.

She went up to him and stuck a slice of orange between his teeth.  They were both laughing without making a sound, and once he leaned over and kissed her.

"I had me some Christmas," he said.

Not so long ago, that story.  It wasn't just in the 1800's that Christmas was a lot different.  But I cite it because this is precisely the celebration of Christmas the Puritans despised.  And frankly, when Christmas Day is spent either in the glow of unbridled lust (wanting goods is as lustful as wanting sexual congress), or the afterglow of "Now what?", I think we could do with a bit more of a raucous Christmas celebration.  Sometimes I think we vanquished the Puritans, and still the Puritans won.

The interesting thing about Christmas in America is that it's always been a glorious bastard, a jackdaw of a project grabbing "Christmas trees" from Germany (related to the "Paradeisbaum" of the medieval German morality plays) and decking the halls and boar's heads and feasting from England (which may or may not be related to, or even influenced by, Druidic practices. It's always seemed like a bit of a stretch to me to go from kissing under the mistletoe directly back to Frazer's "golden bough"). Carols were a medieval creation coming, per Restad, from pagan folk dances that people liked and simply "Christianized" (like most things, the Church couldn't beat 'em, so it joined 'em), although many of the carols we know today are products of the 18th and 19th centuries (so it goes). The idea of caroling, IOW, is much older than most of our carols. As Restad points out, Christmas in America was cobbled together from European bits and pieces, and the parts that fit in America stuck, and the parts that didn't fell away.

We forget, too, that America initially had no holidays. Europe had them because of the church, which was universal throughout the different countries of Europe, and because of local customs. But without a universal church, or established local customs, America went, for almost a century, without any national holiday which all citizens could claim as their own. Ironically, again, that holiday became Christmas; but not because all Americans were, or were even presumed to be, Christians.

Stephen Nissenbaum argues that the American Christmas was formed more by Clement Clark Moore's poem than any other single source. Accepting his position arguendo, what is most notable about "The Night Before Christmas" is that it creates a holiday and the celebration of it, without ever getting closer to religion than the word "Christmas" (which the Puritan New Englanders despised as a "Romish" word, but which, by Moore's day, had lost almost all religious connotation). This was more a feature than a bug in the 19th century. Dicken's Christmas Carol comes closer to invoking the religious reasons for the season, but he does it mostly in terms of Victorian sentimentality, than in terms of any church doctrine. Penne Restad points out that Christmas was grabbed onto by merchants in America almost as soon as it emerged as a public celebration. The emergence of the holiday coincided with a renewed interest in the power and importance of domesticity, an interest probably prompted by the Industrial Revolution and the quick acceptance by Americans of the ideals of the Romantic movement (especially the importance of children as children). Personally, I think it was a combination of Romanticism and the Pietistic movement of the 17th century, which effects lingered long in a Protestant dominated culture, but Restad makes clear the connections between the desires for domestic values and the importance of a uniting holiday, one everyone could gather into despite cultural ("Germany" as we know it, for example, didn't exist in the 19th century. We often overlook how many cultural differences there were between Europeans, differences that carried over into America) and doctrinal differences. In this sense, Christmas was the first truly "American" holiday. Grafted onto European roots, without doubt; but made a holiday both observant Christians and non-Christians (and yes, there were some, even in the 19th century!) could engage in. It's not at all insignificant that Christmas in America began almost as a religious observance almost anyone could join, and quickly became a public holiday everyone could revel in. And aside from the Puritan's objections to the holiday's Catholic roots, it was the revelry they objected to almost as much.





Where were we then? Oh, yes: Christmas has always been two things at once, especially in America. It's never been a particularly religious holiday, so much as it's been a holiday named for and celebrated around a religious observance (which is still more honored in the breach than in the keeping). Christmas became, almost as soon as it was universally celebrated, a celebration of hearth and home, of domesticity (to this day, does a Christmas tree remind you first of Rockefeller Center, or of your childhood home?) Restad shows us that the Christmas tree itself became an American custom because it came with stories of German families gathered around a small tree on a table top, revealed in all its decorations and offerings of presents by the parents to the excited children. It was the American twist that the tree got bigger and bigger until it had to scrape whatever ceiling it was placed under from the floor on which it had to sit. Some things truly never change.

And I have to add here:  that's a problem in its own right, though probably not the one you are thinking of right now:

In their comprehension of poverty and its solutions, most Americans moved little beyond Dickens. They believed their Christmas generosity praiseworthy. Charles Dudley Warner thought the present American Christmas to be "fuller of real charity and brotherly love, and nearer the Divine intention" than earlier Christmases. The New York Tribune found the holiday "hearty and generous-minded, [full of] good-cheer and open-handed hospitality." "Nowhere in Christendom," it contended, "are the poor remembered at Christmas-tide so generously as they are in American cities, especially in our own."

In this show of self-congratulation, Americans persisted in seeing poor relief as a matter of individual action to be undertaken on much the same terms as gift-giving within the circle of family. That is, Christmas was the time to give. The best and largest gifts went to those closest to the circle's center. The lesser gifts, in descending order of value, went out to relatives and acquaintances of decreasing importance. The worthy poor, as the outermost members of the larger community family, received gifts too, though the least valuable of all the gifts given.

Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America, p. 139, 140

Perhaps I should explain who the "worthy poor" were:

A sense that there were those who were worthy of relief and those who were not qualified the attention devoted to poverty relief [after the Civil War], though. Children almost always deserved aid, as did honest women. Seldom did the same plea go out for men. A seasonal article on the New York Tribune implored the public to provide for poor children. In 1877, it reminded readers that most Americans were "Christian people," and advised them to try their best to keep children from being deprived at this time "when they think that all good gifts and gladness come straight from Him whose birthday it is." At the same time, the paper advised the sympathetic to ignore plain street beggars.

As Restad notes:

The sentimentalization of "worthy paupers" at Christmas time, whether in fact or in fiction, did not bring into question the essential structure of the market economy that had, if only indirectly, produced their poverty. Instead, it imbued destitute women and vagabond children with admirable qualities that existed apart from materialism, perhaps even as substitues for tangible wealth. It also aroused the sympathies of readers by giving a face to poverty, and placed the means of solving the problems of hunger and homelessness in the hands of individuals.(p. 135)

I've learned to look to history for lessons in how we got here, and to understand culture as a genetic inheritance (metaphorically speaking) almost as pre-determined as eye color or gender. we think what we think and act the way we act in part because of who our ancestors were, and what they passed on as important and valuable. The "worthy poor" is an interesting category, especially at this season of the year, when even the most unbelieving among us is encouraged to reflect on the lessons of the man who grew up from the Christchild. Well, perhaps lessons is not the right word. As Bob Cratchit puts it to his wife, speaking of his youngest son:

"Somehow he gets thoughtful sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see."

We don't, after all, want to be reminded that Jesus never put a faith test before someone before Jesus would speak to them, and the one time it is recorded that he did, the Syro-Phoenician woman rebukes him quite accurately. We still prefer our Jesus be more like us, and to start him up from childhood that way, every new year.

I'm well aware of the John Cheever story  about Christmas being a sad season for the poor. First it crossed my mind as just a good post title; then I reflected on how much it represents that American ideal that individual actions can alleviate poverty for the "worthy poor." I can't think of a story that illustrates that better than Cheever's. It's not really a question of generosity, even, because that question gets down to the issue of ownership in the first place. Restad notes in her history of Christmas in America that it was the affluence and abundance produced after the Civil War that led people to think of widening the circle of their gift-giving, to begin to include at all the "worthy poor." Hard to condemn such compassion, and any critique of it looks just like that: condemnation. But there were other voices, even in the 19th century, even in America:

People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization
-- Edward Bellamy

The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.
-- John Dewey

I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings
-- John Stuart Mill

The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them ... It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of thier education, or the joy of their play.
-- Robert F. Kennedy

We must recognize that we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power....[What is required is] a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr

There was a story about a Christmas yard display in Detroit that was too political for some of the neighbors. And generally that's our line on Christmas: we want to reserve it "for the children," and of course, that's still how we think of the "worthy poor," as children. Hard to think of men as children, so they get excluded from the "worthy poor" very easily. We also don't like quotes like those above associated with our Christmas revels. Fair enough. But perhaps even at Christmas we could look again at the ideas of scarcity and abundance, and consider again whether charity really means merely scraping the crumbs off our tables, or if it means something more.

Christmas is a sad season for the poor; but that doesn't mean it has to be; or that our charity has to be based on sorrow, either.

So is our Christmas ruined by all this commercialism? Depends on whether or not you agree with Linus about "what Christmas is all about." I like his answer, personally. But that's the answer for some of us; it isn't, and doesn't have to be, the answer for all of us. Let it be unto you according to your...well, faith, is how the German E&R Church concluded that blessing. But this isn't necessarily a matter of faith. So let it be unto you according to your best interest. Keep Christmas as it best suits you. And may it be a blessing unto you. Now, and into the ages.