A Brief History of Christmas

No other holiday seems to polarize people quite like Christmas. Depending on your relationship with your family, your god and/or your neighbors, Christmas can be either a time of great joy, an inconvenience to be endured, a time of profound depression, or any combination thereof. My wife often feels steamrolled by Christmas since her birthday is just 10 days prior. Growing up, woe to the relative that decided to combine her birthday and Christmas present into one "big" gift. That still holds true today by the way.

Every year the same scrooges trot out the same grievances in an effort to give the rest of us the same case of the "bah-humbugs" from which they suffer. Atheists demand the removal of Nativity scenes lest they gaze upon one and singe their eyes. Anti-consumer groups point out the amount of money wasted on junky gifts for people we don't even like. Health officials highlight the dangers of overconsumption. The fact that Christmas has been commercialized to the point of self parody hardly needs to be mentioned; and the last minute rush to the stores is never enough to save the retail establishment from yet another mediocre shopping season.

John Steele Gordon opining in the Wall Street Journal last Friday points out that Christmas is actually a celebration of two distinct and separate occurrences:

Christmas famously "comes but once a year." In fact, however, it comes twice. The Christmas of the Nativity, the manger and Christ child, the wise men and the star of Bethlehem, "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" is one holiday. The Christmas of parties, Santa Claus, evergreens, presents, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Jingle Bells" is quite another.

But because both celebrations fall on Dec. 25, the two are constantly confused. Religious Christians condemn taking "the Christ out of Christmas," while First Amendment absolutists see a threat to the separation of church and state in every poinsettia on public property and school dramatization of "A Christmas Carol."

The Christmas of parties and presents is far older than the Nativity. Most ancient cultures celebrated the winter solstice, when the sun reaches its lowest point and begins to climb once more in the sky. In ancient Rome, this festival was called the Saturnalia and ran from Dec. 17 to Dec. 24. During that week, no work was done, and the time was spent in parties, games, gift giving and decorating the houses with evergreens. (Sound familiar?) It was, needless to say, a very popular holiday.

Proof that it was not all about skull crushing and raping and pillaging your neighbors during the Middle Ages:

By the high Middle Ages, Christmas was a rowdy, bawdy time, often inside the church as well as outside it. In France, many parishes celebrated the Feast of the Ass, supposedly honoring the donkey that had brought Mary to Bethlehem. Donkeys were brought into the church and the mass ended with priests and parishioners alike making donkey noises. In the so-called Feast of Fools, the lower clergy would elect a "bishop of fools" to temporarily run the diocese and make fun of church ceremonial and discipline. With this sort of thing going on inside the church to celebrate the Nativity, one can easily imagine the drunken and sexual revelries going on outside it to celebrate what was in all but name the Saturnalia.

Those looking to place blame on somebody for making Christmas a national holiday need look no further:

In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law a bill making the secular Christmas a civil holiday because its celebration had become universal in this country. It is now celebrated in countries all over the world, including many where Christians are few, such as Japan.

My feelings regarding Christmas are pretty simple: if you don't like it, don't celebrate it. If you are really, truly offended by all things Christmas, consider a vacation to Saudi Arabia this time of year. I bet you won't hear Jingle Bells even once. Most of all, don't use Christmas as an excuse to feign some grievance in an attempt to advance your own agenda; whatever it may be. It's also probably not wise to do what these Kiwis recently did as you may end up in jail.

If there's one thing that we can all agree upon it's that jail is no place to spend Christmas.