Some traditions are best left to history books
You’ll have seen that story from the town of Cleburne, Texas, earlier in the month. The one in which a local church was holding a children’s event called ‘‘Breakfast with Santa’’, and a man called Aaron Urbanski stood outside telling everyone entering that Santa Claus did not exist. Urbanski was arrested and charged with criminal trespass. This being America I believe that Urbanski’s objection was that the Santa myth was distracting innocent souls away from the literal truth of the Christmas story, virgin births, angels and all.
My instinctive response was to feel irritation about the partypooping Santa-denier. But when I thought about it, I realised that probably more remarkable was the desire of the authorities to preserve uncontradicted the tradition of telling children absurd lies about a fat man in red who brings all the presents. I dare say the mayor and the police chief of Cleburne had both been brought up on Santa and had brought their kids up on Santa and imagined that their kids’ kids would be told the same thing. Fine, but how long can a foolish custom like this be expected to survive?
It is odd how some things escape change. A conversation in our house last week (someone my eldest daughter’s age had proposed marriage to someone else) brought me up short. Now, my generation of north Londoners never reckoned that much to marriage.
My sister married because of the pension implications and my wife and I were wed when on holiday with the three children in Borneo for the same reasons. When I saw the Steve Martin version of Father of the Bride I regarded it as partly an exercise in anthropology. Why would anyone do all that, spend all that, worry all that just to absurdly and publicly overemphasise a commitment which can only ever be one of the private heart?
What was even more disconcerting was discovering that, right now as 2018 shades towards 2019, engagement is still a thing. This got me thinking about which traditions endure, which don’t, which shouldn’t and which we could usefully borrow from elsewhere.
Just because something is a tradition that helps in some way cement a society doesn’t make it worth preserving. Over the summer archaeologists working in Mexico City discovered further evidence of an important ritual carried out by the Aztec people.
They discovered the full extent of the tzompantli, the great rack of human skulls created by the Aztec priestly caste to accompany their human sacrifices.
What seems to have happened was that after the unfortunate victims were deprived of their beating hearts, they were decapitated, their heads were stripped of flesh and the skulls were threaded together with those of others. So I wonder whether, as the last Aztecs grew old, they ever looked back with nostalgia on the days when you could go and see a sacrifice and follow it up with a walk round the old tzompantli.
But, as I discovered in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago, what can seem like an odd tradition can turn out to be a genuinely useful one.
Outside the big gothic cathedral of Saint Eulalia they have dozens of stalls selling something called a pessebre. This is essentially a cross between a Nativity scene and a landscaped train set, in which people populate a rural tableau with model houses, trees, rocks, holy family and traditional figures: Mary, Joseph, angels, shepherds, innkeepers, a man defecating . . .
Oh yes. When I first saw the caganer, as he is called, a squatting man in peasant clothes in the act of producing a copious movement being sold on many of these stalls, I thought that it must be a modern piece of vulgarity. Not so. The caganer goes back as far as the 17th century. The church tolerates the custom.
It is right to. Once you get over your surprise and mild disgust, you realise that the caganer is actually a great tradition. It is fundamentally democratic: as novelty caganers sold from some of the stalls make clear, defecation is common to peasants and royalty. The tradition punctures pomposity, it undermines false piety. It is also, unlike Santa, true.