Christmas - A History

The Lord of Misrule's Christmas Guide

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					Christmas 
		- A History

December 25th (January 6th for Orthodox Christians)

Welcome, welcome, welcome and a Merry Christmas to you all. My name is Christopher Christmas and I am the Lord of Misrule (see my page: Lord of Misrule) who ensures that there is merriment and happiness on Christmas Day throughout the UK. Pour yourself a mug of O’Holic’s Triple Thick But Never Sick Hot Chocolate and pull up a chair and I will tell you everything you need to know about Christmas and how it is celebrated here on these fertile islands of ours.

I shall begin at the beginning, at the very dawn of time, when the earth started to spin and our great, great, great, great . . . grandfathers first looked up at the sky and saw the sun burning brightly above them giving out its generous warmth and bringing the dark earth to life.

DRUIDS / ROMANO-GREEKS / NORDICS / HEBREWS
Our great-whatever-grandfathers, you see, realised soon enough that the earth had seasons and that the changing of these seasons was in some way linked to the movement of the sun. In the summer, the sun stayed high in the sky for many hours, but come the winter it rose on one horizon and fell on the other with a rapidity of speed which was at first both frightening and worrying. Would the sun ever come back again and would the days ever get longer? Our friends up in the Nordic countries even worshipped the sun and believed it to be a great wheel in the sky which gently changed the seasons as it spun.

This puzzle, about the variable length of days, was resolved quickly enough when the most ancient of star gazers lay upon their backs to look upon the planets and realised that the heavens moved in a fairly regular pattern and that on the same day each year, the 21st December in the modern calendar but the 25th December in the ancient Roman astronomical calendar, the days stopped getting shorter and started to grow longer again. This was the time of the winter solstice (the time when the sun stands still) and it quickly became a date that was observed with some reverence and no small amount of celebration.

My dear ancient Romano-Greek cousins, ever ones for a good party, started celebrating on the 17th December with the festival of Saturnalia and did not stop raving for a full seven days. In Roman mythology, Saturn was the ancient god of agriculture – closely identified with the Greek god Cronus. It was believed that Saturn presided over a Golden Age – a time of perfect peace and happiness – and that to commemorate this Golden Age, festivals should take place each year after the final harvest. Such happy times: men dressing up as women, masters dressing up as servants, houses decked with evergreens, candles - always a sign of hope and life - warmly lit, brightly coloured processions filling the towns, and presents being willingly exchanged.

Here in the UK, in the years before Christianity arrived on these shores, the Celtic Druid priests observed the winter solstice by cutting the parasitic plant mistletoe from the oak trees and blessing it as being a symbol of rebirth and a sign that the winter months were starting to turn their faces towards the dawning of a new year.

And in Israel, the Jewish people marked the mid-winter with the eight-day Hebrew festival of Hanukkah, lighting a new candle each day (again as a symbol of life and hope), exchanging gifts, and remembering the year that had just finished.

I guess you can begin to see already that December has always been a pretty important month, though historically up until now no one has yet called it Christmas. For Christmas, (the mass celebrating the birth of Christ) we need a birth, and that’s where the baby Jesus comes in.

NATIVITY
The sketchy account of the birth of Jesus (no one actually gives or knows a precise date!) is contained in two Gospels as part of the Bible’s New Testament: one written by Matthew and the other written by Luke. No two people see or report things in exactly the same way, and this is true of Matthew and Luke who give different accounts of Jesus’ birth, but from these accounts we’re able to piece together the story of the ‘nativity’: a word which simply means birth and which can apply to any birth, though which is most specifically associated with the birth of Jesus these days.

So, what do Matthew and Luke have to say? Well, they both agree that Jesus was born to a woman called Mary who was engaged at the time to a carpenter by the name of Joseph, and, that at the time of the birth, Mary was still a virgin. Big question, how does a woman who is a virgin (not had sexual intercourse) actually become pregnant? Luke knows: he says that Mary was visited by an angel of the Lord who told her that she was to carry God’s son in her womb. Matthew in part corroborates this with the assertion that Joseph too was visited by an angel and persuaded to marry Mary in the hope of protecting her during her pregnancy.

Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth, but travelled to Bethlehem near Jerusalem in Judea in order to register for the Census that had been ordered by the Roman Emperor, Augustus. That little sleepy town of Bethlehem was heaving with registrants when Joseph and Mary arrived and in spite of Mary’s heavily pregnant condition, they could not find a place to stay. Travelling from inn to inn searching for a bed, they eventually met an innkeeper who, because his inn was full, offered his stable as a place for Mary and Joseph to sleep for the night.

And whilst they were there, Mary went into labour and the baby Jesus was born.

Now this event, heralded by angels, was startling and wonderful. Out in the fields, an angel visited some shepherds and told them:

"Fear not, for behold, I bring you tidings of great joy. For there is born to you this day in the city of David, a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth, lying in a manger."

And so the shepherds hurried off to find the baby Jesus and to honour his historic birth.

There were also Three Wise Men (Caspar, Balthazar and Melchoir) who followed a bright star in the east that hung over Bethlehem and they too came to pay homage to Jesus and marked his birth with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

And so, Jesus Christ was born, but many years passed before the first Christmas was celebrated.

For more nativity info, click here

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS
It took some time for the notion of Christianity to spread across the world. In fact, it wasn't until the year 238 that the word "Christian" was even used for the first time - by the missionary Paul (later St Paul) when travelling in Antioch, in Syria.

As I mentioned before, the Gospels did not set out the date of Jesus’ birth (most likely to have been between 20 and 29 September) and it was not until the year 366 A.D. that the then Pope, Julius the First, hit upon the idea of decreeing that the 25th December (using the ancient Roman astronomical calendar to determine the winter solstice) was to be the date on which Jesus’ birth would be celebrated. This was quite a cunning plan: a ruse to Christianise the existing Pagan solstice celebrations by giving them a Christian focus. By the year 529, the 25th December had become a formal holiday, and by 567 the 12 days from Christmas Day to Epiphany (6th January) were all public holidays . . . a tradition sadly lost to us poor hard-working souls today! Epiphany comes from a Greek word meaning 'to show' and, depending on the church, marks the day when Jesus was baptised or alternatively the day on which the Three Wise Men arrived in Bethlehem to bestow gifts upon the infant child. Right up until the 1800s, Epiphany was as much a celebration in its own right as Christmas Day - hence the long holiday!

TRADITIONS
So, thanks to the clever mind of Pope Julius the First, Christmas became an established Christian holy day, but in placing it so close to the existing solstice festivals, Christmas quickly became a mash of different traditions: Christian, Pagan, Hebrew, Greek, and Nordic to name but a few. The established church wanted Jesus’ birth to be celebrated each year by a simple mass, but the old traditions of feasting and merry-making refused to die out. One of the Four founding Fathers of the Greek Church went so far as to warn, in 389, against 'feasting in excess, dancing and crowning the doors'.

MEDIEVAL TRADITIONS
During the Medieval period (approximately 400 to 1400), Christmas was a real out and out party time with only very limited religious observance. The old Pagan attitudes to the winter solstice long outlived Julius’ initial decree, as the Britons - having picked up many Pagan ideas form the Romans - set about having bawdy parties and decking their houses in greenery, much in the same way as the ancient Romano-Greeks had done in celebrating the festival of Saturnalia.

Again, the Church made moves to bring these Pagan attitudes within their area of influence: mistletoe was banned and holly, as a representation of the crown of thorns said to have been worn by Jesus when he was crucified, was offered as a replacement evergreen instead. Even carols, traditionally songs sung by Pagans celebrating the summer solstice and the importance of the early autumn harvest, were taken up by the church and re-written to praise the birth of Jesus Christ.

It was during this period that the tradition of the Nativity and the displaying a crib started, when, in 1223, St Francis set up a representation of the Nativity of Jesus outside a church in the small town of Greccio in Italy. Crib making flourished in Europe long before it became popular in the UK, suggesting that the British observance of Christmas was less Christian and more Pagan in nature than it was on the European mainland.

From the middle of the 17th century, Christian Puritans (people who wanted to rid the Church of unscriptural ideas and celebrations and to revert to a 'pure' Christian creed) worked hard to suppress the excesses of Christmas celebrations in both Europe and America. As Christ’s birth date was unknown from the Gospels and because Christmas had become too entwined with the old Pagan ways and the excesses of the Saturnalia celebrations, the Puritans decided to ban all Christmas activities including the decorating of houses, partying and even cooking or eating mince pies.

VICTORIAN TRADITIONS
Out with the Puritans and enter the Victorians - named after the reigning Queen of the time, Victoria (1837 to 1901) - who took Christmas to their hearts in a big way, mainly thanks to Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, being such an enthusiast for Christmas and for having such influence over people in the country. In 1840, Albert had the first Christmas tree in England erected at his home in Brighton. What Albert did, others aped and soon everyone wanted to have a Christmas tree of their own.

Not only did the Victorians have Albert, they also had Dickens, Charles Dickens - author extraordinaire. In 1843, Dickens sat down and wrote the apocryphal story of A Christmas Carol: capturing the imagination of people on both sides of the Atlantic with its moralistic tale of salvation, redemption and philanthropy. Suddenly, Christmas was all right again and something which could be celebrated after the Puritanical years without any sense of guilt or shame.

In many ways, it is the Victorians who moulded Christmas into the shape and form that we recognise it as today: the fir trees, the evergreens, the carol singing, the present giving, and the exchanging of Christmas cards - an idea borrowed from Valentines’ Day and reworked for the Christmas market when you could send someone love and festive wishes without having to sentimentalise them as a lover.

Whilst many of the traditions revived by the Victorians date back to Medieval Britain, the modern day Christmas is heavily influenced by the rest of Europe and by America. Having Christmas trees in the home is an idea borrowed from Germany. Rudolph comes from the pen of an advertising exec in the USA (see page: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer). Santa Claus - who is real, of course - is a mix of Turkish Bishop, Nordic legend, American poem, and Coca-Cola advert (see Santa Claus - His Story).

ADVENT
Advent is the period of celebration marking the birth of Jesus Christ. It starts each year on the Sunday closest to 30th November and lasts until Christmas Eve. Many children have Advent Calendars and these usually run from 1st to 24th December (though some go to 25th December). Traditionally, Advent Calendars are like posters with little doors cut into them. Each day, you open a numbered door and behind it you find a new picture. Originally, Advent Calendars depicted religious icons, but over the years the pictures have become more commercial and many companies now produce tacky Advent Calendars which offer a small gift (a chocolate, for example) behind each door.

The word Advent comes from Latin ‘adventus’ meaning ‘coming’ and was originally a period of penitence when followers were expected to fast. This tradition has long since died out.

Advent wreaths - their circular shape reminding us of the perfection and eternity of God - are popular, especially in churches, and usually are made from evergreen firs (Pagan influence again) and contain four candles. One candle is supposed to be lit each Sunday during Advent. The four candles represent hope, peace, joy and love.

CHRISTMAS TODAY IN THE UK
Christmas is the Christian Festival most celebrated by non-believers - though most of those are celebrating the Pagan relics and modern day factors far more than they are celebrating the birth of Christ: in many ways Christmas is being reclaimed as a celebration of the winter solstice that happens to coincide with the Church’s arbitrary decision to nominate 25th December as Jesus Christ’s birthday. Most people take part in the exchanging of gifts, the decorating of their homes, the sending of cards, the singing of carols, and the thrill of being visited by Father Christmas as a homage to their love of life: the religious element is increasingly regarded as non-focal in such a secular society.

Many people are unhappy that Christmas has become so commercial and crass; angry that shops start selling Christmas goods in late August or early September. But with carols, trees, office parties, television programmes, pop songs, visits to Santa in retail outlets, and much, much more, Christmas is fundamentally just a time to forget about the worries of life and to party for hours with family and friends.

I wish you all, a very Merry Christmas - however you might care to celebrate it.

Your faithful friend

Christopher Christmas - The Lord of Misrule

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