Wednesday 8 December 2010

Excess, the true meaning of Christmas


Christmas fast approaches. Here we are, now in the second week of December. I’m slightly worried; I’m concerned that another tradition may be dying: I’ve yet to see a press article bemoaning the ‘commercialisation’ of the festival, or hear some finger-wagging moralist droning on about how we have all forgotten the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas, meaning the Christian meaning!

I’m sure that just about everyone who visits this page knows very well that there is no scriptural evidence for the date of Christ’s birth. December 25 was alighted on several centuries later because, by happy coincidence, it was a traditionally happy time in the Roman world, the height of Saturnalia and the birthday of Sol Invictus, the sun god. The festival was always about excess, so Christians have no cause for complaint!

The puritans, both in England and parts of the American colonies, recognised that Christmas, idolatrous anyway because of it’s popish overtones, was a holiday with pagan roots. So they banned it; they banned everything associated with it, all those things that add a little pleasure and warmth to the deep mid-winter.

This attitude did not die away with Cromwell and Cotton Mather. Edmund Gosse, the English poet and author, was brought up in the strict Plymouth Brethren sect; so absolutely no Christmas joy for him. There is a hilarious passage in Father and Son, his memoir published in 1907, where he details how the servants, feeling sorry for him, gave him some of their own hidden Christmas pudding. He ate it, only to be overtaken by a crisis of conscience. Father, on being informed of this dreadful sin, immediately threw the remainder of the “idolatrous confectionary” into the rubbish!

The Americans gave the world Santa Claus in his modern benign, jovial and anodyne guise. But England gave the world an older figure - Father Christmas, Old Christmas himself, who celebrates the coming of Christ in a boozy, self-indulgent fashion. He is not a gift-giver, simply the spirit of good cheer, yet another pagan intrusion. The most memorable depiction of the old boy is to be found in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. There he is, illustrated by John Leech, as the Ghost of Christmas Present, an Odin-like figure.

As for the supposed ‘commercialisation’ of Christmas that, too, is nothing new. It wasn’t the Bible that gave us Christmas; it was Charles Dickens. The central message of A Christmas Carol, once the moral homily is taken away, is that Christmas is about having a jolly good time among family and friends; and having a jolly good time meant buying things, lots of food and lots of drink. No, I’m wrong: it wasn’t Dickens at all – it was the Ghost of Christmas Present, who comes with clouds of plenty in his wake. Who comes, I suppose, with Christmas presents.

For the emerging middle class in general Christmas was really their festival: the more they celebrated the harder the workers had to work, the greater the incentive for spending, the greater the incentive for commercialisation in a new commercial world. The old tradition of simple good cheer, the tradition of Father Christmas himself, was drowned in a rising flood of consumerism. And as the festival expanded so, too, did consumer culture, which steadily worked its way through all classes as Christmas made its progress from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

So, let’s have no more nonsense about the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas. Christmas is about spending, eating and drinking to excess; in its modern form it always was. Charles Dickens would have understood as much. Waes Hail.

44 comments:

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  2. I'm being unfair to Cromwell, using his name as a convenient hook for English puritanism. There is no evidence at all that he personally had anything to do with banning Christmas.

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  4. Pagan holidays, Saturnalia Dec 17, Winter Solastice ( Yule ) The early christians chose to make their holidays close to the pagan holidays to simplify their conversion to the new religion. Christmas has been highly commercialized to the point where many people have lost sight of the intended meaning much to the delight of certain merchants, who I need not name. Christmas the Birth of the christ the Avatar Jesus which was fortold two decades in advance by the Roman Cumaean Sybil and acknowledeged by the Maji, a Persian sect of astrolegers. If only Christians would truly Follow the teachings of Jesus Their christ and not Mosaic law to justify their misdeeds, this would be a better world indeed.

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  5. Anthony, scratch any Christian festival you like and you will find a pagan one not far below the surface!

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  8. Winter Solastice Dec 21 (yule)

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  9. Astrology, the "Maji" wise men from the East were Astrologers from Persia. An attempt was later made to change this to "Three Kings from the East" when the bible was edited in an attempt to remove the Majical reference. Manipulation by Man influenced by Politics.

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  12. Hello,
    I've just returned to my island from a bit of island-hopping. Lots of balmy 25-degree evenings, peace and quiet, and one or two cocktails by a few marinas of choice.

    Has anything interesting happened in Central London during this Season of Goodwill whilst I've been away?

    :-)

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  13. Christmas, like every other day of the year, means whatever you want it to mean. A solemn occasion, or a pretext for fleshly delights.

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  15. Anthony, my own little circle, my most magical friends, always celebrate the solstice.

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  17. Adam,

    Look not above, there is no answer there;
    Pray not, for no one listens to your prayer;
    Near is as near to God as any Far,
    And Here is just the same deceit as There.

    And do you think that unto such as you;
    A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew:
    God gave the secret, and denied it me?--
    Well, well, what matters it! Believe that, too.

    "Did God set grapes a-growing, do you think,
    And at the same time make it sin to drink?
    Give thanks to Him who foreordained it thus--
    Surely He loves to hear the glasses clink!"


    I’m sorry you have such a wretched and bleak view of life. I do not. We are living loving beings passing briefly through space and time; we have to seize the day. I do not want to live in your realm or that of the White Witch, where it is always winter and never Christmas.

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  19. CI, it's at this time I think I envy you most. :-) I miss the light and the sun. If you want to know what's happening in London look at today's news. Not good.

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  21. @ Adam:Do not despair, for Valhalla awaits the stout of heart. You just have to believe it so.

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  22. Adam, that's not Fitzgerald's translation. It's that of Richard Le Gallienne.

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  24. Sorry, I have to say that your remarks on a 'Civil War' are a panicked exaggeration. These thugs, these so called 'students', are representative of nothing more than themselves. They are there for vandalism and destruction, no more than that. The best thing abut the new fee regime is that it will shake out these types from the university system altogether, assuming, that is, they even go to university.

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  26. Do you think the Prince soiled his Royal Trousers?

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  32. Adam, they are just a bunch of stupid thugs. I did not say you were being extreme; I said that your remarks about Civil War were a panicked exaggeration. These so-called 'students' are a tiny, oikish minority. It really is time we had a clearing out of the higher education sector. There are too many third class people pursuing too many third class degrees. As far as your questions are concerned all I feel is contempt, as you will see at the end of the weekend.

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  35. Most of these protesters were thugs, they weren't even real human beings let alone real students.

    Christmas has always been a Saturnalian feast for me and my favourite festival of the year. Dickens' Spirit of Christmas Present is (I feel) uncannily similar to the Green Man or Jolly Green Giant figure, who appears in The Holy Quran (in the chapter on western Christian civilization, Al Kahf [The Cave], the cave being the very Chalice Well in Glastonbury) and Islamic folklore as Khidhr, the evergreen spirit of joy, harmony, goodwill. (See Noorudeen, Hazrat Alhajj Hakim Maulana - Khalifatul Masih I. Haqaiqul Furqan iii: 3)

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  36. Adam, if you don’t know what a civil war is you should look at my past posts on the seventeenth century conflict in England or those on the War Between the States. But you know very well what a civil war is- a full scale national conflict involving great armies. These people are just a tiny minority. There is no ‘civil war.’

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  37. Rehan, on your opening observation I'm in absolute agreement.

    I'm so glad you share my love of Saturnalia and of tracing threads of meaning through all of the great religions. :-)

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  39. The Bolsheviks were anything but a small minority in 1918, the time when the Russian Civil War broke out. There is no civil war. I won't repeat the point endlessly.

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  41. i am all for "spirit of good cheer" peace

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  42. Peace to you too, dear Patience. It's so nice to see you. :-)

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