All Hallow’s Even

Some of my best childhood memories revolve around Hallowe'en.  My mother's youngest sister, the "crazy" aunt who came to our church Halloween party (this was when I was just barely too old to wander the streets at night with the "children"), put on makeup to look like a corpse in a coffin, and then joined us to bob for apples (probably the first time I'd done that, and I found out what hard, wet work it is.  And what absolutely foolish fun.).  Or just the freedom of wandering the streets at night without my parents in tow, joining all the neighborhood kids of the Baby Boom as we walked from house to house in clumps that gathered and broke again, passing stories of where to get the best candy, or the homemade stuff like popcorn balls and caramel apples, stuff always gone by the time you got there, or always from a house several streets over of undetermined location or ill-defined description.  And the story always included that house being "out" by the time you heard of it.  It prepared us for Christmases when we'd have to find the "IT" toy for our kids in an unforeseeable future.  A future that included my wife dressing up in black tights and leotard she wore in high school, to costume herself as a "cat" for our daughter's first Hallowe'en....oh, wait.  You don't need to hear about that one.

That aunt is gone this year, leaving me with the Peanuts Hallowe’en card I can’t send. For some reason I started sending her one in high school, and I kept it up as best I could year after year.  Now last year was the last year. Oddly, this year, I remember that Hallowe’en falls exactly three weeks after my brother’s birthday: October 10.  He’s been gone…5 years now? I should remember, you’d think…and for the over 6 decades I knew him, I never seem to have made the connection between the holiday and his birthday. I remember going out on Hallowe’en evening when we were both young enough, but old enough to escape parental supervision. But his birthday, in my mind, was connected to Columbus Day. I remember childhood Hallowe’ens with him, now more than ever. But I never made that 3-week connection before. Maybe this year it will be the return of my loved ones, as the days shorten and the nights deepen.

All the internet bluster about Hallowe'en and Samhain from years back seems to have faded now, as well as the business of Hallowe'en being "stolen" from "ancient practices."  Most of that is echoing remnants of the early 19th century, Romanticism turning into Victorianism.  It was the Romantic movement that began to preserve "folklore," as it came to be called.  "Came to be" not because it was illegitimate, but because it was ignored and despised before the Romantics, who saved it but didn't revive it.  The Victorians then supercharged it, along with fuzzy memories of medieval Europe.  Most of the ghost stories and "monsters" we know now (vampires, werewolves, ghosts, goblins, even witches) are products of the Victorian imagination, not remnants of stories told around campfires 3 millenia ago.  The Victorians tried to link them to an imagined past in order to make them "authentic" in a risingly scientific age, but the connections are horseshit.  Most of those stories are distinctly "modern." Frankenstein was a product of the Romantic beginning of the 19th century; Dracula came out of the late Victorian era, and is a novel at great pains to place itself in its contemporary setting by including what was then cutting edge technology to tell the story. But it’s told in the epistolary style of the novels of the…late 18th century. The 19th and early 20th centuries are the great era of our most prized ghost stories including, of course, the stories by Edgar Allan Poe (a man under-appreciated for his narrative gifts, and over-appreciated for his few poetic ones).

Poe's stories were “modern,” most of them conveniently set in a Europe of an indeterminate age when people dressed in what is now costume and ran around in castles and buildings that look more like something from a Disney theme park than reality.  (We hadn’t yet come to Twain’s Realism.) And Poe was writing those in the mid-19th century, in America. Again, the connection to an imagined past gave the stories the verisimilitude they required.

So most of our Hallowe'en is a matter of memory and conjecture, and the stories we tell ourselves.  But it isn't rooted in some "truth" we destroyed with our "enlightenment" or our "progress."  That Romantic nostalgia prompted by the Industrial Revolution which drove us to protect “folklore” became the “truth” we imbued those stories with, the “wisdom” our “modern” era lost. As with most things, our "truth" about these matters is what we say it is.

Hallowe’en began as the vigil for All Saints Day, making it the most well-known vigil for a feast day outside of Christmas Eve. Holy Saturday is the vigil for Easter, still the proper day of the Great Vigil, which can be the most powerful liturgy in Christianity. Literally speaking, Holy Saturday is Easter Eve. But popularly, we know only two vigils, and the only service widely known now is the Candlelight Christmas Eve Service, itself moved back from midnight to evening, the better to get us home early and away from church on Christmas Day, even on Sunday. 

Don’t get me started.

So Hallowe’en is actually the vigil for All Saint’s. But we’ve forgotten that.

All Saint's Day, per New Advent, started in...well, here, let me just give you the whole magilla:

In the early days the Christians were accustomed to solemnize the anniversary of a martyr's death for Christ at the place of martyrdom. In the fourth century, neighbouring dioceses began to interchange feasts, to transfer relics, to divide them, and to join in a common feast; as is shown by the invitation of St. Basil of Caesarea (379) to the bishops of the province of Pontus. Frequently groups of martyrs suffered on the same day, which naturally led to a joint commemoration. In the persecution of Diocletian the number of martyrs became so great that a separate day could not be assigned to each. But the Church, feeling that every martyr should be venerated, appointed a common day for all. The first trace of this we find in Antioch on the Sunday after Pentecost. We also find mention of a common day in a sermon of St. Ephrem the Syrian (373), and in the 74th homily of St. John Chrysostom (407). At first only martyrs and St. John the Baptist were honoured by a special day. Other saints were added gradually, and increased in number when a regular process of canonization was established; still, as early as 411 there is in the Chaldean Calendar a "Commemoratio Confessorum" for the Friday after Easter. In the West Boniface IV, 13 May, 609, or 610, consecrated the Pantheon in Rome to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs, ordering an anniversary. Gregory III (731-741) consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary for 1 November. A basilica of the Apostles already existed in Rome, and its dedication was annually remembered on 1 May. Gregory IV (827-844) extended the celebration on 1 November to the entire Church. The vigil seems to have been held as early as the feast itself. The octave was added by Sixtus IV (1471-84).

So, mid-9th century, it got set as a date on the Church's calendar.  That led, later, to All Soul's on November 2.  The connections to Ireland, especially jack o' lanterns (turnips in Ireland, only after a long period exclusively pumpkins, which are as American as corn and tobacco) didn't really come until the 19th century.  Attempted connections between the Irish Samhain and All Saint's are all pretty much retrojection, especially as an attempt to connect Hallowe'en to Irish practices it supposedly overtook. Gregory was a long way from Ireland in the 9th century and Christianity only reached the island in that century.  It's a pretty small tail wagging a pretty large dog to imagine Gregory picked the date for the entire church just to appeal to an Irish pagan festival. I think Patrick was the better evangelist to the island.

The vigil that became Hallowe’en appears in the literature as early as Shakespeare, where the practices of the Roman church were slowly being turned Anglican; but that's another story.  Curiously, most of the literature on Hallowe'en begins in the late 18th century with Robert Burns in Scotland (call it Pre-Romanticism. Burns was just writing about what he knew, but accepting it and recognizing it, was down to the Romantics). Hallowe’en literature continues in the early 19th century with Walter Scott.  It jumps the pond to Washington Irving's story of Ichabod Crane, where Disney (?; or someone before them) transforms the pumpkin into a jack o' lantern, which made the tale into a Hallowe'en story.  It’s a grand irony that the persecution of single women and elderly widows in 16th century Puritan Salem became inextricably connected to Hallowe’en by Disney, too (“Hocus Pocus”). Thus do we domesticate our worst history and invent our monsters. 👹 

And then we get Poe.  The iconic black cat 🐈‍⬛ of Hallowe'en decorations arguably stems from Poe's story of the same name.  By Poe's time, of course, especially in Puritan tinctured America, the holiday has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic vigil. Poe never set any story at Hallowe’en, and as late as 1937 Edith Wharton sets her last ghost story (she wrote several) on the eve of All Saint’s without ever mentioning the word “Hallowe’en.” But we’ve found great value ($) in doing it in the past half-century, so that now it rivals Xmas Eve and whets our consumer appetite for the year’s end.

Interestingly, the Aztecs and Mayans (and even less remembered groups in Mexico) had festivals honoring the return of the dead.  I can't say for sure the dates of the observances didn't shift after Christians changed the culture, but George Frazer found the Irish expecting the return of the dead around the end of October, which makes sense as people left the fields (farmers first, herdsman as it got too cold finally for the herds) and went indoors to survive the winter.  Thinking of those lost is a likelier custom as winter sets in, especially in Europe.  It seems to be have been as true in tropical Mexico, where the current Dias de los Muertos has very distinct roots in the culture of Mexico.  Many of the practices of the days extend into pre-colombian times, including the idea that the children who have departed return on November 1, the adults on November 2.  Did they adopt the Catholic dates?  Maybe.  It is certainly a festival that is far more "pagan" than it is "Christian."  Not that there's anything wrong with that!

I noted one year long ago now, that there's still no concerted "War on Hallowe'en," even as Hallowe’en has become more and more an adult celebration. (I’ve also had reason to notice that Hobby Lobby starts selling Xmas and (less so) Thxgiving merchandise in September; but ignores Hallowe’en altogether. It’s an interesting lacunae for a store that sells Marvel superhero merchandise, and jigsaw puzzles with scenes from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” Their tolerance for Xmas merchandise makes up for the dearth of Hallowe’en merchandise. I suspect the owners refuse to truck with demons and devilry. Even if it only means selling Spider-Man costumes for little kids.) The idea that the vigil marks the “thin place” where the dead and the living can meet and walk together is, in this post-Victorian world, sadly turned into a time of terror, not comfort. Dias de Los Muertos is a time of celebration because the dead, the loved ones we have lost, are again close to us. Hallowe’en is a time of terror, because the dead are again close to us. We used to visit graveyards and put them near the churches we’d visit at least once a week. Now we avoid cemeteries because they remind us our death is inevitable. 

I doubt the vigil of All Saint’s started as a night of deepest darkness to be dispelled by the light of day, as in Fantasia’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” (The roots of modern Hallowe’en show in that depiction of Walpurgisnacht. The “thin time” from Irish culture that brought back the beloved ancestors, now brings back the demons. And corresponds to the Ancient Greek idea of the balance of opposing forces: chaos and logos. It’s truly superstition, and ironic because the Puritans denounced such ideas, and now their religious descendants are terrified by them all over again. Such, as Carroll observed, is human perversity.) I’m sure like Christmas Eve, the vigil was looking forward to the feast day, anticipating one of the joyous feast days of the year. There’s a reason it’s one of two popular vigils, even as both are now almost wholly divorced from their religious roots. The popular explanation today is that we like to be scared at least once a year. But scared of what? The dead? The reminder of our mortality? Of the evil people (and only people) do?  Of the memories of our loved ones? Or the example of the saints?

I have lamented the changing face of Hallowe'en. (Pro tip:  when you can link to posts that are over 15 years old, you've been at this too long.)  I have layered Hallowe'en into the more important rituals/holy days of our modern American calendar.   I still think some reasonable connections can be made there.  But I’m more inclined to see Hallowe’en as the gateway to Advent, making it the first of the many “eves” that line up as gateways to the days after, from October to February. Our dreary months, that we learned long ago to find reasons to lighten. I've commented on the "razor blades in apples" stories, though I think the reference there (to a Salon article, of all things) is less reliable than other information I have which provides a more specific date to the origin of all those stories.

As I said, one of the earliest full mentions of Hallowe'en and its attendant celebrations is the poem by Robert Burns that I've posted before on October 31.  I'll continue that tradition this year.  Consider this just prelude, as Hallowe'en itself is prelude to All Saint's which, I would argue, is prelude to the end of Pentecost (the season of, I mean), and in that way preparation, itself, for Advent.  And then Christmas and Epiphany, the preparation for Lent; which is the preparation for…

But there I go, getting ahead of myself again.

Mostly, Hallowe'en is for fun.

American Xmas

Let's get this out of the way.  Not my first rodeo (or post of this), but can't hurt to make it a "tradition."

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) in America 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 to others are small, but he expects to receive 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.  It was established by Rome. But 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 name “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 regally 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. Dickens has Scrooge attend church on Christmas morning, a changed man.  It's not that Christmas fell on a Sunday that month, but that Christmas was a holy day throughout Europe.  Look back up at what Increase Mather said; there was never such an observance in America.  Even today, most non-Catholic (and Episcopalian?) churches in America close on Sunday when that's Xmas Day.  Once you understand all 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. (He also thinks Moore's poem shows the transformation of gift giving from peer to peer (or husband to wife, or employer to employee, as seen in A Christmas Carol), to parent to child.  For Nissenbaum, Moore's "jolly old elf" is a harmless peddler with a sack of goods, which he gives rather than sells, and leaves for the children.  It's not that Moore invented the custom, but that he popularized it.) Accepting Nissenbaum's 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 the tradition arose from 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 their 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.

🐈‍⬛ 🎃

Some of my best childhood memories revolve around Hallowe'en.  My mother's youngest sister, the "crazy" aunt who came to our church Halloween party (this was when I was just barely too old to wander the streets at night with the "children"), put on makeup to look like a corpse in a coffin, and then joined us to bob for apples (probably the first time I'd done that, and I found out what hard, wet work it is.  And what absolutely foolish fun.).  Or just the freedom of wandering the streets at night without my parents in tow, joining all the neighborhood kids of the Baby Boom as we walked from house to house in clumps that gathered and broke again, passing stories of where to get the best candy, or the homemade stuff like popcorn balls and caramel apples, stuff always gone by the time you got there, or always from a house several streets over of undetermined location or ill-defined description.  And the story always included that house being "out" by the time you heard of it.  It prepared us for Christmases when we'd have to find the "IT" toy for our kids in an unforeseeable future.  A future that included my wife dressing up in black tights and leotard she wore in high school, to costume herself as a "cat" for our daughter's first Hallowe'en....oh, wait.  You don't need to hear about that one.

Oddly, this year, I remember that Hallowe’en falls exactly three weeks after my brother’s birthday: October 10.  He’s been gone…3 years now? I should remember, you’d think…and for the over 6 decades I knew him, I never seem to have made that connection. I remember childhood Hallowe’ens with him, now more than ever. But I never made that 3-week connection before.

All the internet bluster about Hallowe'en and Samhain seems to have faded now, as well as the business of Hallowe'en being "stolen" from "ancient practices."  Most of that is echoing remnants of the early 19th century, Romanticism turning into Victorianism.  It was the Romantic movement that began to preserve "folklore," as it came to be called.  "Came to be" not because it was illegitimate, but because it was ignored and despised before the Romantics, who saved it but didn't revive it.  The Victorians then supercharged it, along with fuzzy memories of medieval Europe.  Most of the ghost stories and "monsters" we know now (vampires, werewolves, ghosts, goblins, even witches) are products of the Victorian imagination, not remnants of stories told around campfires 3 millenia ago.  The Victorians tried to link them to an imagined past in order to make them "authentic" in a risingly scientific age, but the connections are horseshit.  Most of those stories are distinctly "modern." Frankenstein was a product of the Romantic beginning of the 19th century; Dracula came out of the late Victorian era, and is a novel at great pains to place itself in its contemporary setting by including what was then cutting edge technology to tell the story. The 19th and early 20th centuries are the great era of our most prized ghost stories including, of course, the stories by Edgar Allan Poe (a man under-appreciated for his narrative gifts, and over-appreciated for his few poetic ones).

Poe's stories were “modern,” most of them conveniently set in a Europe of an indeterminate age when people dressed in what is now costume and ran around in castles and buildings that look more like something from a Disney theme park than reality.  And Poe was writing those in the mid-19th century, in America. Again, the connection to an imagined past gave the stories the verisimilitude they required.

So most of our Hallowe'en is a matter of memory and conjecture, and the stories we tell ourselves.  But it isn't rooted in some "truth" we destroyed with our "enlightenment" or our "progress."  That Romantic nostalgia prompted by the Industrial Revolution which drove us to protect “folklore” became the “truth” we imbued those stories with, the “wisdom” our “modern” era lost. As with most things, our "truth" about these matters is what we say it is.

Hallowe’en began as the vigil for All Saints Day, making it the most well-known vigil for a feast day outside of Christmas Eve. Holy Saturday is the vigil for Easter, still the proper day of the Great Vigil, which can be the most powerful liturgy in Christianity. But popularly, we know only two vigils, and the only service widely known now is the Candlelight Christmas Eve Service, itself moved back from midnight to evening, the better to get us home early and away from church on Christmas Day, even on Sunday. 

Don’t get me started.

So Hallowe’en is actually the vigil for All Saint’s. But we’ve forgotten that.

All Saint's Day, per New Advent, started in...well, here, let me just give you the whole magilla:

In the early days the Christians were accustomed to solemnize the anniversary of a martyr's death for Christ at the place of martyrdom. In the fourth century, neighbouring dioceses began to interchange feasts, to transfer relics, to divide them, and to join in a common feast; as is shown by the invitation of St. Basil of Caesarea (379) to the bishops of the province of Pontus. Frequently groups of martyrs suffered on the same day, which naturally led to a joint commemoration. In the persecution of Diocletian the number of martyrs became so great that a separate day could not be assigned to each. But the Church, feeling that every martyr should be venerated, appointed a common day for all. The first trace of this we find in Antioch on the Sunday after Pentecost. We also find mention of a common day in a sermon of St. Ephrem the Syrian (373), and in the 74th homily of St. John Chrysostom (407). At first only martyrs and St. John the Baptist were honoured by a special day. Other saints were added gradually, and increased in number when a regular process of canonization was established; still, as early as 411 there is in the Chaldean Calendar a "Commemoratio Confessorum" for the Friday after Easter. In the West Boniface IV, 13 May, 609, or 610, consecrated the Pantheon in Rome to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs, ordering an anniversary. Gregory III (731-741) consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary for 1 November. A basilica of the Apostles already existed in Rome, and its dedication was annually remembered on 1 May. Gregory IV (827-844) extended the celebration on 1 November to the entire Church. The vigil seems to have been held as early as the feast itself. The octave was added by Sixtus IV (1471-84).

So, mid-9th century, it got set as a date on the Church's calendar.  That led, later, to All Soul's on November 2.  The connections to Ireland, especially jack o' lanterns (turnips in Ireland, only after a long period exclusively pumpkins, which are as American as corn and tobacco) didn't really come until the 19th century.  Attempted connections between the Irish Samhain and All Saint's are all pretty much retrojection, especially as an attempt to connect Hallowe'en to Irish practices it supposedly overtook. Gregory was a long way from Ireland in the 9th century and Christianity only reached the island in that century.  It's a pretty small tail wagging a pretty large dog to imagine Gregory picked the date for the entire church just to appeal to an Irish pagan festival. I think Patrick was the better evangelist to the island.

The vigil that became Hallowe’en appears in the literature as early as Shakespeare, where the practices of the Roman church were slowly being turned Anglican; but that's another story.  Curiously, most of the literature on Hallowe'en begins in the late 18th century with Robert Burns in Scotland.  It continues in the early 19th century with Walter Scott.  It jumps the pond to Washington Irving's story of Ichabod Crane, where Disney (?; or someone before them) transforms the pumpkin into a jack o' lantern, which made the tale into a Hallowe'en story.  It’s a grand irony that the persecution of single women and elderly widows in 16th century Puritan Salem became inextricably connected to Hallowe’en by Disney, too (“Hocus Pocus”). Thus do we domesticate our worst history and invent our monsters. 👹 

And then we get Poe.  The iconic black cat 🐈‍⬛ of Hallowe'en decorations arguably stems from Poe's story of the same name.  By Poe's time, of course, especially in Puritan tinctured America, the holiday has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic vigil. Poe never set any story at Hallowe’en, and as late as 1937 Edith Wharton sets her last ghost story (she wrote several) on the eve of All Saint’s without ever mentioning the word “Hallowe’en.” But we’ve found great value ($) in doing it in the past half-century, so that now it rivals Xmas Eve and whets our consumer appetite for the year’s end.

Interestingly, the Aztecs and Mayans (and even less remembered groups in Mexico) had festivals honoring the return of the dead.  I can't say for sure the dates of the observances didn't shift after Christians changed the culture, but George Frazer found the Irish expecting the return of the dead around the end of October, which makes sense as people left the fields (farmers first, herdsman as it got too cold finally for the herds) and went indoors to survive the winter.  Thinking of those lost is a likelier custom as winter sets in, especially in Europe.  It seems to be have been as true in tropical Mexico, where the current Dias de los Muertos has very distinct roots in the culture of Mexico.  Many of the practices of the days extend into pre-colombian times, including the idea that the children who have departed return on November 1, the adults on November 2.  Did they adopt the Catholic dates?  Maybe.  It is certainly a festival that is far more "pagan" than it is "Christian."  Not that there's anything wrong with that!

I noted one year there's still no concerted "War on Hallowe'en," even as Hallowe’en has become more and more an adult celebration. (I’ve also had reason to notice that Hobby Lobby starts selling Xmas and (less so) Thxgiving merchandise in September; but ignores Hallowe’en altogether. It’s an interesting lacunae for a store that sells Marvel superhero merchandise, and jigsaw puzzles with scenes from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” Their tolerance for Xmas merchandise makes up for the dearth of Hallowe’en merchandise.) The idea that the vigil marks the “thin place” where the dead and the living can meet and walk together is, in this post-Victorian world, sadly turned into a time of terror, not comfort. Dias de Los Muertos is a time of celebration because the dead, the loved ones we have lost, are again close to us. Hallowe’en is a time of terror, because the dead are again close to us. We used to visit graveyards and put them near the churches we’d visit at least once a week. Now we avoid cemeteries because they remind us our death is inevitable. 

I doubt the vigil of All Saint’s started as a night of deepest darkness to be dispelled by the light of day, as in Fantasia’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” I’m sure like Christmas Eve, the vigil was looking forward to the feast day, anticipating one of the joyous feast days of the year. There’s a reason it’s one of two popular vigils, even as both are almost wholly divorced from their religious roots. The popular explanation today is that we like to be scared at least once a year. But scared of what? The dead? The reminder of our mortality? Of the evil people (and only people) do?  Of the memories of our loved ones? Or the example of the saints?

I have lamented the changing face of Hallowe'en. (Pro tip:  when you can link to posts that are over 15 years old, you've been at this too long.)  I have layered Hallowe'en into the more important rituals/holy days of our modern American calendar.   I still think some reasonable connections can be made there.  I'm going to try (again!) to keep that in mind as we move toward Advent.  (Is Hallowe'en the gateway to Advent?  Or just to All Saint's, which prepares us for the liturgical year's end?)  I've commented on the "razor blades in apples" stories, though I think the reference there (to a Salon article, of all things) is less reliable than other information I have which provides a more specific date to the origin of all those stories.

As I said, one of the earliest full mentions of Hallowe'en and its attendant celebrations is the poem by Robert Burns that I've posted before on October 31.  I'll continue that tradition this year.  Consider this just prelude, as Hallowe'en itself is prelude to All Saint's which, I would argue, is prelude to the end of Pentecost (the season of, I mean), and in that way preparation, itself, for Advent.  Which is preparation, too.  But there I go, getting ahead of myself again.

Mostly, Hallowe'en is for fun.

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.

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.