‘Christmas: A Biography’ explores holiday myths
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Dreaming of a less commercial Christmas, just like the ones you used to know?
So did a fourth-century bishop who complained his flock spent the day partying, not praying. By 1616 playwright Ben Jonson was waxing poetic about Christmases “in the old days.”
The proclaimed war on Christmas is not new we learn in “Christmas: A Biography,” a charming, authoritative and brave nod to the secular side of the holiday.
Author Judith Flanders points out that religion is only one element in Christmas as we know it. Because Dec. 25 is the day established by the Christian church to mark the birth of Christ, we assume that the old — the idealized Christmas — was a deeply solemn religious event. But Ms. Flanders shreds that idea with as much zeal as a 3year-old with paper wrappings on Christmas morn.
Ms. Flanders has snowballs and she’s not afraid to throw them at a number of deeply held traditions. She starts at the beginning: the often reputed date of the Christmas Day itself. Gospel accounts by Matthew and Luke differ. Biblical scholars insist that mid-April, late May or even mid-September were more likely the time of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem.
It wasn’t until centuries later that Julius I, the Bishop of Rome (337-352), decreed that the birth would be celebrated on 25 December. And the author, with painstaking research, points out that the date was more than likely tied to winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and a time of Saturnalia and other pagan festivals when work ceased and there was plenty of eating, drinking and gifting.
It wasn’t long until A.D. 389, Gregory, Archbishop of Constantinople, felt compelled to issue a stern warning against the “dancing ... feasting to excess” that was occurring on that day.
While celebrations took on varying forms in various countries, what can be said with certainty is that from Julius through the Middle Ages, many of Christmas’ ecclesiastical developments were less religious liturgy than they were entertainment. Consider the Middle Ages Feast of Fools, recorded as a time when priests “danced as women, panders or minstrels, sang wanton songs” and “ran through the church with indecent gesture.”
The custom was eventually banned, but the holiday impulse at courts across Europe remained focused on food and frivolity, even while the church tried for more solemnity and in the fifth century instituted Advent, as a time of pre-holiday fasting.
Other tasty tidbits from this groaning board of trivia:
How Hallmark and Woolworths got their start by taking advantage of Christmas. How the Capra celluloid “It’s a Wonderful Life” has become the Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” of the 21st century. How Santa Claus, the hefty old man in red used to shill for everything from tobacco to alcohol sales, remains a symbol of love and generosity against those who “have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age”(from the 1897 New York Sun editorial). How the Victorians and their sooty coal stoves brought about the use of wrapping paper. How Latvians take credit for the tradition of the holiday tree, which they used to hang upside down from the ceiling.
But perhaps most enlightening is Ms. Flanders’ findings that the most profound changes in celebration of Christmas around the world accompanied the four greatest revolutions of the modern period in the West: The civil war that toppled Charles I and brought Oliver Cromwell to power; the American Revolution;, the French Revolution; and the Industrial Revolution. These brought modernization while contributing to a communal desire for the past and for a place and time that never existed, a time whenwe were loved and protected. A time when we gave from our largess — and our need.
The book also reminds us that at Christmas it is hard to separate what is true from what we like to believe is true. (Spoiler alert: Such facts can get your tinsel in a tangle.) Still, this unusual read is as illuminating as any mall light display.
“Christmas: A Biography” by Ms. Flanders, a New York Times best-selling author and expert on the Victorian era, makes for a fine last-minute present. The truth at Christmas — and anytime — is a gift that keeps on giving.