History of Christmas

Via Atrios, here is a Web site from the History Channel (once popularly known as the Hitler Channel not for their politics but because they used to show so many documentaries on the Second World War) on the History of Christmas.  It has a number of interesting tidbits on the evolution of Christmas customs.  For example, the guy flying around on a particular night of the year concerning himself with who had been naughty and nice:

In Germany, people honored the pagan god Oden during the mid-winter holiday. Germans were terrified of Oden, as they believed he made nocturnal flights through the sky to observe his people, and then decide who would prosper or perish. Because of his presence, many people chose to stay inside.

Shoot, I'd stay inside, too!

It's pretty well known that the Christian Church adjusted its festival schedule to the winter solstice celebrations of the Roman Empire:

In Rome, where winters were not as harsh as those in the far north, Saturnalia—a holiday in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture—was celebrated. Beginning in the week leading up to the winter solstice and continuing for a full month, Saturnalia was a hedonistic time, when food and drink were plentiful and the normal Roman social order was turned upside down. For a month, slaves would become masters. Peasants were in command of the city. Business and schools were closed so that everyone could join in the fun.

Also around the time of the winter solstice, Romans observed Juvenalia, a feast honoring the children of Rome. In addition, members of the upper classes often celebrated the birthday of Mithra, the god of the unconquerable sun, on December 25. It was believed that Mithra, an infant god, was born of a rock. For some Romans, Mithra's birthday was the most sacred day of the year.

In the early years of Christianity, Easter was the main holiday; the birth of Jesus was not celebrated. In the fourth century, church officials decided to institute the birth of Jesus as a holiday.

For our conservative friends who are entertaining themselves this Christmas by gnashing of teeth over the alleged campaign against Christmas, this could be an embarassing little piece of information:

... Christmas was not a holiday in early America. From 1659 to 1681, the celebration of Christmas was actually outlawed in Boston. Anyone exhibiting the Christmas spirit was fined five shillings. By contrast, in the Jamestown settlement, Captain John Smith reported that Christmas was enjoyed by all and passed without incident.

After the American Revolution, English customs fell out of favor, including Christmas. In fact, Congress was in session on December 25, 1789, the first Christmas under America's new constitution. Christmas wasn't declared a federal holiday until June 26, 1870.

For a run-down on the self-styled champions of Christmas 2004, see The Grinch who saved Christmas by Eric Boehlert Salon 12/16/04.

One of the most interesting things about the history of Christmas is that there has always been a tension on whether the holiday should be celebrated as a solemn religious event or as a real party time.

Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud's English friend and biographer and longtime president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, wrote an essay called "The Significance of Christmas," originally written in 1931 and expanded in Essays in Applied Pycho-Analysis Vol. 2 (1951). Including this passage, which has one of my favorite Christmas anecdotes at the end:

The feeling, however, that Christmas is in some deep sense a pagan festival has evinced itself with a strange persistence throughout the ages.  The Western Church was responsible for its incorporation in the Christian religion, and the Eastern Church for long protested against what they regarded as a pagan innovation.  Behind this world "pagan" surely lies the idea of Mother-Goddess worship, the attraction of which so often seduced the patriarchal monotheistic Hebrews and indeed the Christian Church itself.  It is perhaps fundamentally what Protestantism protested against, following the Hebrew prophets.  Our own [English] Puritans have felt very strongly on the matter, and an Act of Parliament in 1644 forbade the celebration of Christmas as being a heaten festival, until the Merry Monarch [Charles II] once more sanctioned it.  To this day [1951] many Protestant sects, notably in Scotland, look distinctly askance at Christmas as being something alien to the pure faith.  Ever since the Reformation this attitude of suspicion has connected Christmas with what has often been called the "paganism" of the Roman Catholic Church.  An amusing example is recorded of a fanatical member of Parliament moving that, in order to eliminate any association with the [Catholic] Mass, the world itself be purified by being changed to Christ-tide; by way of answer, however, he was exhorted to initiate the change by altering his own name from Thomas Massey Massey to Thotide Tidey Tidey!

Jones speculates that the establishment of Christmas as an important Christian festival in Roman times had to do with what we might call a marketing strategy, meant to give greater visibility to Mary.  And that was occasioned by the competition of Christianity with the religion of Mithraism.  A number of religions featuring some kind of savior-god who died and was resurrected were competing to replace the declining Roman religion of Jupiter and his many cohorts.  Jones notes that the two leading contenders, Chritianity and Mithraism (the latter he notes was "the religion especially of the army") both did not feature a powerful Mother Goddess, which the lesser popular competing faiths all did.  And both, he says, had many similar beliefs and rituals.

I should point out in the following quote that Jones' use of "masculine" and "feminine" did not imply some sort of ideological acceptance of the sex roles in the Roman Empire or a value judgment, as such.  In fact, the psychoanalysts did as much as anyone to explore the ways in which sex roles are socially developed and taught.  Also, "Mariolatry" refers polemically to the idolizing of Mary in a way that implies worship.  Contrary to popular Protestant notions that persist even today, Catholics do not "worship" Mary.  But even in the Catholic Church, excessive emphasis on the adoration of Mary is sometimes criticized as being excessive.

But Mithraism had one serious weakness, on which the Christians seized and thereby ensured their ultimate success.  Its attitude [Mithraism's] and beliefs were exclusively masculine.  In its ritual the young God took up the challenge of the wrathful father, slew him and reigned in his stead, whereas in Christianity he submits in a more feminine fashion to the will of the Father and by sacrificing himself assuages His wrath.  Consistently with this solution Mithraism made the conflict one entirely between two males; there was no feminine element, no goddess, in its theology, and women were excluded from its worship.  Christianity here saw its chance and incorporated from the other religions the element that had been msissing in both itself and Mithraism.  Isis, Cybelel, Rhea, Astarte and the rest began a new lease of life.  Mary, who had been little but the necessary vehicle for the begetting of a son, was rapidly raised in status and from being the Mother of God was given in the fourth centruy the exalted title of Queen of Heaven.  Her virginal conception, the usual belief then attaching to the birth of heroes and gods, had long been established.  From then on the increasing Mariolatry demanded that more attention be paid, not only to her intercessory and saving powers, but especially to her maternal role.  Mother and Infant, resembling Isis and Horus, began to play a more central part in Christianity, as it still does in Roman Catholicism, so that the circumstances of the birth, including its date and the appropriate festival, assumed a cardinal imortance.  One might even wonder whether Christianity would have survived had it not instituted the festival of Christmas with all that it signified!

I don't know enough of the specific history of that period to make a good judgment as to whether his description is consistent historically with the religious struggles in the Empire at the time the Christians made Christmas a major festival.  But whether or not there was a conscious effort to promote the image of Mary in connection with the Christmas festival as a marketing ploy, the idea that part of Christianity's appeal was the way in which it incorporated feminine as well as masculine elements into its image of God and the divine makes a lot of sense to me.  There has been a lot of work done since Jones wrote this on the worship of mother goddesses and on the historical development of the image of Mary; I'd be curious how Jones' speculations and historical descriptions hold up in light of the most current research.

It's worthnoting in relation to this is that the emphasis on the adoration of Mary is associated in the Catholic Church in more recent centuries with the more conservative trends, i.e., defense of the ecclesiastical hierachy's authority, opposition to women's rights, divorce, freedom of religion, etc.

Incidentally, I don't see any problem from a Christian perspective in recognizing that Christianity incorporated some elements of other religions in its understanding of God.  Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular didn't survive for all these centuries without some flexibility!

The bottom line for Jones on the signficance and psychological appeal of the Christmas festival he described as follows:

Historically expressed, the festival of Christmas is thus a fusion of many strains of pagan customs and beliefs, but one which Christianity has inspired with a fresh spiritual significane.  Psychologically it represents the ideal of resolving all family discord in a happy reunion, and to this it owes its perennial attraction.  These two points of view are seen to be identical when one remembes that the ultimate signficance of all religions is the attempted solution on a cosmic stage of the loves and hatreds that take their source in the complicated relations of children and parents.

Jones was a philosophical materialist and an atheist.  Which makes his careful reflections on the function and meaning of Christmas all the more interesting.  It's ironic that sometimes, people like Jones and Freud that were proudly non-religious themselves took religion a lot more seriously than many people who count themselves as believers.

Tags: christmas, ernest jones, significance of christmas