The Ghost Of Increase Mather Still Stalks The Land

Meet the New Puritans, same as the old Puritans.

Today is Christmas Day, a connection to some of the most ancient of all known northern European shamanic traditions. Like people living in the north for millennia, we continue to embrace them with regional, national, and religious tweaks. 

It occurs during the week of the shortest day and longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, when ancient holy men and women lit “yule logs” to push back the darkness and implore the gods or nature to bring back the light of summer.

When I was a teenager, I had a pair of leather sandals with a leather peace sign prominently displayed on them.

Yeah. That one. No one knew in the ‘70’s that it was a symbol designed for a British anti-nukes group in the ‘50’s, so rumors abounded that it was Satanic. I still remember the mother of a girl I knew warning me I was trafficking with Satan just by wearing comfortable footwear. I realized then and there that she thought the symbol had magical, or demonic, powers. I knew even then a symbol is what you want it to be, even as that symbol no longer conjures up opposition to nuclear weapons, but more generally to conflict itself (or maybe it just conjures up hippies).  In any case, the origin of the symbol means nothing anymore. It’s what we associate it with that matters.

Thom Hartman associates Christmas with “ancient holy men and women” lighting ‘yule logs,’ which is a new one on me.I’d always understood the custom came from the Nordic countries and simply involved keeping the fire going through the long, dark winter. Or barons in England filling baronial fireplaces with massive logs. Never heard of it being part of any religious practice.

But that’s the legacy of Increase Mather. Anything he didn’t like was European and, if it needed to be worse, it was Roman Catholic and/or pagan, two conditions which, to Mather, were completely alike. His Puritans came to America to “purify” themselves from all three strands of tradition. So, to this day, in America, the annual observance of Christmas is accompanied by the annual ritual of “Everything about Christmas is PAGAN!” Which would please Increase Mather no end.

It’s utter bullshit.

Let’s start with the Yule Log, since this article is behind a paywall and these two paragraphs are all I’ve got. The closest any Christmas celebration today comes to a Yule log is a Buche de Noel. Most of us don’t even have chimneys for Santa to slide down, much less fireplaces below them large enough to hold Yule Logs. I don’t even care if Yule logs were burned by Druids or shamans to chase away the darkness gods and sympathetically return the Sun to the sky (that’s parody anthropology, by the way, about one step removed from James George Frazer, whose work is parodic in modern terms). Today they refer to a delicious chocolate cake with marzipan or meringue mushrooms. The term refers to a seasonal dessert, nothing more.

As for that “week of the shortest day and longest night of the year”, that’s not because the Church started celebrating the Christ Mass in order to stamp out the pagan winter solstice. That coincidence is the result of Pope Gregory XIII replacing the Julian calendar… in the late 16th century. That would be a full millennia, plus about 200 years, after the first celebration of the Christ Mass. Attentive readers may remember that St. Lucy’s Day fell on the day of the solstice on the Julian calendar, which is part of the reason she was associated with light, and young girls in the Nordic countries wore a wreath of candles to celebrate the saint, and the return (slowly) of sunlight. Now St. Lucy’s Day is December 12. And Christmas used to be on January 6th, which is why in the “Cherry Tree Carol” the unborn Jesus tells Joseph “on the 6th day of January my birthday will be.” As it was, until 1582.

If anything was supposed to supplant pagan solstice observations, that would have been St. Lucy’s Day. But Mather preferred to focus on the holiday he didn’t want imported to America. Saints days were extraneous, just another problem with the Roman church. Christmas Day was the big fish Increase wanted to fry.

Now, of course, the date of the solstice remained close to the date of Christmas no matter whether the calendar was Julian or Gregorian. But the proximity to the solstice is as coincidental as the proximity of All Saints’ Day to Samhain. That date was chosen by the Pope in Rome . There’s little indication Ireland was foremost in his mind. Pope Gregory III fixed the date in the early 8th century. Patrick converted Ireland in the 5th century, but it’s hard to tell how the importance of the westernmost reach of the Church so influenced Rome. There’s more coincidence than connection.

And if there was a connection, what would it matter? What’s the connection between Hallowe’en and Samhain? I spent my childhood blissfully unaware of the latter while annually enjoying the former. And what I know about the latter now still doesn’t explain begging for candy or wearing a costume or getting to walk the streets with your friends after dark and ring strangers’ doorbells.

So, are our Christmas traditions pagan? Most of our December customs have nothing to do with the church. How much of Advent is celebrated outside the liturgical church? Do you associate the penitential roots of Advent with anything observed in December? Have you ever heard of Gaudete Sunday? Who are you more familiar with? Zacharias or Simeon? Or Scrooge and Marley? Apart from a reference to a church service on Christmas Day, what part of Dickens’ “Carol” involves the “reason for the season,” except in the words of Tiny Tim, told to us by his father?

Santa Claus is supposedly based on St. Nicholas, but did he drive a sleigh pulled by reindeer? In Turkey? Was he familiar with chimneys? Cookies? Milk?  The Christmas meal is a remnant of medieval England, when food freshly harvested had to be eaten before it rotted.  Christmas celebrations also have their roots in medieval Europe, when the knights and barons and dukes hosted parties over days, largely because the harvest was in and hunting passed the winter days (all you have to do is read “Gawain and the Green Knight”). We just have our parties in December, so we can go back to work on December 26th, another remnant of our Puritan heritage.  In medieval times the rich spent 12 days, from December 25th to January 6th, celebrating. We have a few parties, and the day off on Christmas. Gift giving? Again, more to do with Henry VIII than anything else.

Every way you look at it: Advantage: medieval Europe.

There is precious little that we do know that doesn’t have roots in history, though most of that history for our December traditions dates back only to the 19th century. Xmas trees go back to the 16th century in Germany, where the Paradeisbaum of Adam and Eve (their feast day was/is on December 24th) became a German Xmas decoration, a decoration that didn’t reach England until the 19th century. And it was more widespread in America before it was in England. So the pagan roots of those traditions are much more conjectural than actual.

And who cares, anyway? Most of our American Christmas customs started with Clement Moore, far more than started with pagans in pre-Christian Europe. And most of our Christmas traditions and celebrations have little or nothing to do with the traditions and celebrations of the church. You can celebrate one; you can celebrate the other; you can do both and a little bit of neither. It can be for you according to your faith, whether you have faith in God or just your own reason. 

But there’s no reason to celebrate the lack of reason that pseudo-anthropology rests on. Especially just to make yourself feel clever.