Snakes, saints and brothels: the truth about Christmas
Was Jesus really born in a manger? Why do we bring a tree into our homes at Christmas? And how did Santa become the patron saint of pawnbrokers? In a new book, Mark Forsyth examines the myths and traditions of Christmas
The Nativity The only New Testament gospels with a Nativity in are Matthew and Luke, which were probably written some time around AD80-90 – around half a century after Jesus’s death. Let’s start with Luke. It’s the story we all know. Joseph and Mary are living in Nazareth when Mary becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit, but there’s a census and they have to go to Bethlehem. When they get there, there’s no room at the inn. So Mary gives birth in a stable and lays the baby Jesus in a manger. Then some shepherds who were abiding in the fields see an angel who tells them to go down to the stable. They do and everyone is much amazed. That’s the Christmas story and we all know it well.
Now, Matthew. Mary and Joseph are living in Bethlehem. In a house. Mary then becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit. She gives birth. Then some Magi come from the East, bringing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The Magi stop off in Jerusalem and ask King Herod where the Messiah will be born, and Herod tells them to have a look in Bethlehem and report back. The Magi go to Bethlehem, find the house and hand over the gifts; but they’re warned in a dream not to report back to Herod, so they don’t. Herod gets angry and orders that all the children of Bethlehem should be killed. Mary and Joseph are warned in a dream and flee to Egypt. Then they decide to come back to Judaea, but as Bethlehem is still too dangerous, they move to Nazareth.
There’s no manger in Matthew, no stable, no census and no shepherds. There is no star in Luke, no Magi, no myrrh and no flight to Egypt. The way to remember the difference is that Luke is the poor man’s gospel. Shepherds were poor. Moreover, when they were out abiding in the fields all night, they weren’t able to do any of the ritual washing that a devout first century Jew was supposed to do, so they were unclean. Luke’s Jesus comes for the poor, the oppressed, the unclean. Matthew’s is the grand gospel. The second his Jesus is born, the very stars in the sky change. Gentiles arrive, kings are concerned. It is surprising how few people notice these differences, although it may have something to do with the thousand Nativity scenes we’ve all seen with the Magi and the shepherds standing side by side, Jesus in his manger
and the star hanging above the stable. Each story is read out at the carol service and, like the carols themselves, the elements just blend together in our minds.
Advent calendars
Almost everybody knows that Advent begins on the first day of December, and almost everybody is wrong. Or they’re wrong six years out of seven. Advent begins on the Sunday nearest to 30 November, which is St Andrew’s Day. A hundred years ago everybody would have known this. The reason so many people get it wrong these days is down to one German chap called Gerhard Lang; or you can, if you like, blame his mother.
Mrs Lang used to make Advent calendars for her son Gerhard. This wasn’t new. Home-made Advent calendars had been around in Germany since the 1850s, and before that, people had lit candles or crossed off chalk markings. But Mrs Lang was particularly inventive with hers, apparently because her son was particularly obsessed with Christmas. Mrs Lang would attach sweets to her Advent calendar with string, and Gerhard would get to eat one sweet every day.
Then Gerhard grew up and became a publisher. In 1908, he became the first person to mass-produce Advent calendars. Previously, they had all been made by solicitous (or irritated) hausfrauen. The thing about mass production is that it needs standardisation. If Lang had insisted on his calendars beginning on the nearest Sunday to St Andrew’s Day, he would have had to make a new design every year, and wouldn’t have been able to sell last year’s stock. So from the 1920s onwards he just stuck to 1 December, and so most of us do as well.
Christmas trees
Christmas trees are one of those classic cases where people will either say “it must be Victorian” or “it must be pagan”. Both are wrong. The pre-christian pagans of Northern Europe did worship trees, but they worshipped oak trees, and they worshipped them all year round, and they worshipped them outdoors. What makes the Christmas tree different is that it’s indoors in midwinter and it’s decorated with baubles. The explanation for this is surprisingly simple.
“What is the one thing you need for a play about the Garden of Eden? You need a tree, decorated with apples”
Medieval Christians loved plays, partly because most of them couldn’t read. But even priests, who could read, liked plays. They particularly liked plays telling stories from the Bible. They would put them on in church, and they got so enthusiastic that, in 1210, the Pope banned priests from acting on stage because it was beginning to look undignified. So the plays simply got a new cast. Usually it was members of guilds who would perform the biblical stories. The guilds were just groups of people who worked in the same profession and understood the mysteries of metalwork, or haberdashery, or whatever it happened to be. So the guilds were sometimes called “mysteries” and the plays were called “mystery plays”.
A lot of these plays were about Adam and Eve and the fall of man. They were called “paradise plays”. What is the one thing you absolutely need for a play about the Garden of Eden? You need a tree. You need a tree decorated with apples. The stage directions of Le Jeu d’adam – a medieval paradise play from Arras, in northern France – quite specifically describe it and its purpose: “Then shall a serpent, cunningly contrived, climb up the trunk of the forbidden tree; Eve shall put her ear up to it as if listening to its advice. Then Eve shall take the apple and offer it to Adam.”
Paradise plays were popular all over northern France and northwest Germany until the Reformation, when the fun had to stop. Christmas trees were their legacy, but for centuries they were just a German thing. They only properly arrived in Britain with our most famous German immigrants: the Royal Family.
Christmas cards
Christmas cards are, without doubt, the most annoying custom of Christmas. They can be blamed on one man: Sir Henry Cole. Cole did some good things with his life: he was instrumental in setting up the British national penny-post system with a single stamp that would take a letter to anywhere in the country. But four years later, he ruined it all by commissioning the first Christmas card, from the artist John Callcott Horsley.
Actually, he only ruined it for the rich; the original Christmas card cost a shilling, which was about a day’s wage for a manual labourer. Each one had to be printed in black and white and then coloured in by hand. The picture showed a jolly family sitting around a table looking out at you as though you were there, or they wanted you to be there. The genial patriarch looks very like Henry Cole. The children are all drinking wine, which is something. Less than a thousand copies of the original were sold. But unfortunately for everybody, printing techniques were improving. Soon Christmas cards were expected from the middle classes, and eventually even the poor proletariat. They really took off in the 1870s, with the introduction of the halfpenny post, which meant everybody was now in on the chore.
Father Christmas
Santa Claus – or Saint Nicholas – was born in the Turkish town of Patara in AD270, or thereabouts, and it was clear right from day one that he was an unusual child. Back in those days, priests were meant to fast on Wednesdays and Fridays – and on Wednesdays and Fridays the newborn Nicholas refused to breastfeed. At his baptism, when he was still only a few days old, he stood, unsupported, on the altar for three hours to signify his devotion to the Trinity, and when he did breastfeed he only ever suckled from his mother’s right breast, to signify his intention to stand at God’s right hand.
When Nicholas grew up, he despised women and drinking; and thus, according to one biographer: “He preserved unquenched the lamp of his virginity, maintaining its fullness especially with the oil of charity.” He also exuded sweet odours. He smelled so good, in fact, that he was made the patron saint of perfumiers. He smelled so great that they made him bishop of Myra, a city in southern Turkey that was named after the myrrh that grew in the mountains nearby.
Nicholas was an only child, so when his parents died, he inherited all their money. But as he didn’t like women or drinking, he had nothing to spend it on. So he turned to charity, the last refuge of the rich. And thus his legend began: “There was a certain man among those who were recently famous and well born, and he was a neighbour, his home being next to Nicholas’s. Owing to the plotting and envy of Satan, who always has a grudge against those who prefer to live a life in accord with God, he [the neighbour] was squeezed by great poverty and lack of resources. He had three daughters who were both shapely and very attractive to the eye, and he was willing to station them in a brothel so that he might thereby acquire the necessities of life for himself and his household. For no man among the lordly or powerful designed to marry them lawfully, and even among the lower classes and those who owned the least bit of something, there was no one well-minded enough to do this... By this logic he came to assent to situating his daughters in the abyss of such dishonour.”
But Bishop Nicholas was having none of it. He decided to give the girls some money for their dowries. Rather than knocking on the door, he threw the money in through his neighbour’s window in the middle of the night. On the third night, his neighbour caught him at it. This is why Nicholas became, unofficially, the patron saint of people in financial difficulties and, officially, the patron saint of pawnbrokers, who, to this day, hang three balls outside their shops in memory of the three gifts of Nicholas of Myra.
You can get a rough idea of how popular a saint is by counting how many churches are dedicated to him. By the medieval period Nicholas was the most popular saint not mentioned in the Bible. In England alone there were 800 churches named after him. And he was made patron saint of practically everything. Children, repentant thieves, sailors, bargemen and bootblacks, drapers and druggists, grocers and grooms, lawyers and lovers, orphans, merchants and murderers. In all, he’s patron saint of more than a hundred professions, eight countries and innumerable towns.
“Saint Nicholas only ever suckled from his mother’s right breast, to signify his intention to stand at God’s right hand”