A Christmas Story For Advent

 A Christmas Story, by Katharine Anne Porter

The story is at the link, in Google docs. I just read it in a Library of America collection of American Christmas stories. It’s more poignant as now I find out the story is true, the little girl was Porter’s niece. And she died aged 5 and a half.

Which almost changes my response to the story; but if I calculate correctly from Porter’s note, this memory dates from 1917. Whether the author embellished her own thoughts about Christmas in 1947, or reports them accurately from 1917, they are a window into what the “smart set” thought about the subjective. Our misconceptions and ignorance are rooted in the past, and in American history. There’s very little in this memoir that isn’t straight from the pen of Increase Mather, although I’m sure Ms. Porter and the “smart set” would loathe the connection.

Increase Mather is why we still think Christmas has its deepest roots in paganism (and one of the few topics left where we think we can use that term as a pejorative). The Puritans weren’t named because they tried to live pure lives, but because they wanted to “purify” Christianity. That meant, especially, purging it of anything connected to the Roman Catholic Church. Especially the Christ Mass, which they rightly pointed out was where the word “Christmas” comes from. Increase Mather is also the reason we think any connection between Christmas and “paganism” brings all of Christianity crashing down like a house of cards. 🃏 

Yeah. Nope. Mather wanted that to happen, so it would leave Puritanism standing. People have been falling for it ever since.

So everything about Christmas celebrations is pagan. Except it isn’t. Druids added nothing to the traditions of the season. Yule logs came to England probably through the Vikings, not the native Druids (you don’t burn what you worship). Santa Claus is St. Nicholas, not some Germanic figure haunting the Black Forest. The trees of Druidic worship have nothing to do with Xmas trees. 🎄 Those descend from the Paradeisbaum of German morality plays, and didn’t get to England until Victoria was on the throne, and her husband Albert brought the idea from Germany. Not too many influential Druids in Victorian England. (I’ll just point out Dickens never mentions a Xmas tree 🎄in any of his Xmas stories.The idea took time to take hold.)

I love the mention of the infancy stories of Jesus. The cherry tree story is probably medieval in origin (I don’t think cherry trees are native to the region where either the canonical or apocryphal gospels were written). But the rainbow bridge story is from an infancy gospel. The original is actually much grimmer than Porter’s version.

She also betrays the Renaissance bias toward the so-called “Middle Ages.” Since the Renaissance, Europeans and their descendants have prided themselves on not being so benighted and superstitious as in those “dark” centuries. Not only is that historically ignorant, but tell me how “enlightened” MAGA is today. Or corporate leaders and “tech bros,” for that matter. Or what was not dark about most of the 20th century; as well as the 19th, for anyone who wasn’t a white European/American; and for a lot of them, as well.

But I’m wandering. This story, most of it anyway, gives me reason to point out that the more things change, the more they remain the same. And what passes for knowledge is more often ignorance and bile, accepted as wisdom (which should sound very familiar). That is especially pointed in light of the story’s ending, and the knowledge that little girl never got to explain Santa Claus to her mother.

That makes the story worth reading, on its own. 🎅