By Christopher Orlet on 12.23.04 @ 12:06AM
The Holiday season has a long history of revelry and gift-giving.
There is a popular conviction this time of year that Christmas
has been sold out, commercialized, co-opted and corrupted by
Madison Avenue. From churches that remind us that "Jesus is the
reason for the season" to Buy Nothing Day, gift-giving is getting a
bad rap. It may surprise many to learn that Christmas -- and its
many pre-Christian precursors -- has long been a time of
overindulgence, excess, and generosity. And gift-giving and revelry
have always been a main component of the season.
The Roman counterpart to Christmas was a feast called the
Saturnalia, the festival of the god Saturn marking the winter
solstice. Besides the tradition of gift-giving to mark the new
year, saturnalias were wont to dissolve into -- as Hunter S.
Thompson might say -- bad craziness and drunken debaucheries, not
unlike some contemporary holiday office parties. Customarily master
and slave would change roles at this time. This custom survived
into recent times when English lords would invite their peasants to
dine with them at Christmas.
Closer to the contemporary Christmas was the Germanic festival
of Yule, a time for feasting celebrated on the winter solstice.
Even today the term Yuletide is often used to describe the
Christmas season. If you intend to enjoy a smoked ham this
Christmas it is probably because the pagan Scandinavians commonly
butchered a pig or wild boar at Yule as a sacrifice to Frey, their
god of fertility, who was often depicted with an enviable phallus.
Frey, incidentally, lived in the far northern town of Elfhome. It
was also at Yuletide on the nights between Dec. 25 and Jan. 6, that
the mythical god Wodin (coincidentally a descendent of Saturn)
descended on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir rewarding those who
were good with gifts and punishing those who lacked civility.
The yule log, holly, laurel, mistletoe, the custom of decorating
trees, and nearly every other Christmas tradition (save the
nativity scene and mass) originated with this pagan feast. Since
winter solstice marks the beginning of winter, surviving the
solstice meant you had a good chance of making it to spring.
Traditionally, relatives and close friends would share precious
foods and other essentials on this day, particularly with those
with fewer supplies. Thus gift-giving was literally a matter of
life and death for some.
For those who think Santa Claus is a recent invention created by
Madison Avenue to boost fourth-quarter sales figures, it may
surprise you to learn that "St. Nicholas" has been leaving gifts
for children since the 12th century. It was then that a few French
nuns began honoring their patron saint by leaving candy in the
shoes of local children. As for Christmas, the early Church didn't
observe the day at all since it smacked of the observance of the
feast days of pagan gods. (The word Christmas, or "Cristes Maesse,"
does not appear in English until 1038.) According to the Church's
founding father Origen, "in scripture sinners alone, not saints,
celebrate their birthday." (Fifteenth-century Puritans in England
and America would also ban Christmas for similar reasons.)
Similarly early Christian leaders tried to stamp out all vestiges
of Yule and the Saturnalia, but eventually gave it up as a hopeless
job and absorbed many pagan traditions into St. Nicholas Eve (Dec.
5).
Today in much of Europe rather than the paunchy elfin figure of
Santa Claus you will find St. Nicholas dressed in red or green
ecclesiastical robes and miter. Indeed, the very name Santa Claus
is but Washington Irving's Anglicization of the Dutch Sinterklaas,
and arrived on these shores with the early settlers of New
Amsterdam, now New York. The Dutch were honoring St. Nicholas of
Myra, a fourth century Anatolian bishop known for his generosity,
in particular paying the dowries of poor local girls. The
Dutchman's St. Nick was an amalgam of the Byzantine Empire's bishop
and Wodin. Like Wodin, St. Nick rides a winged horse and instead of
elves, he is assisted by Black Peters, or Moorish slaves from
Spain.
During the Reformation, Martin Luther put an end to the
celebration of saints' feast days, including Nicholas's, and
instead adopted Christkind, and this was soon adopted by the
Protestant English. Both German Protestant churches and the Church
of England exchanged St. Nick for the generic Father Christmas.
Stubborn Dutch Protestants, however, continued to celebrate the
feast of St. Nicholas. Even today in the Low Countries it is a more
important holiday than Christmas.
Those who object to gifting at Christmas are simply ignorant of
the long tradition of the holidays. Long before Pope Julius
established the birth of Christ (in AD 350), Europeans were
celebrating the Yuletide season with numerous toasts and presents.
Just as the early church failed to stamp out revelry and
gift-giving 1,500 years ago, so too, I predict, will the
anti-consumerists fail today.
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NATO
