Holy day or holiday? You be the judge

AS BING Crosby, Johnny Mathis and innumerable others might croon: “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” But what, precisely, does Christmas look like? In particular, is it a holy day or a holiday?

In Christmas: A biography, social historian Judith Flanders questions the widespread assumption that “a deeply solemn religious event” has been “sullied” by our own secular, capitalist society. “From nativity to church, to family, to commerce” goes the commonly held view of the season’s history, “a story of high beginnings, a cosy, warm middle and the chill of cold cash at the end”.

This hardly matches the facts, as Flanders repeatedly shows: Yuletide has almost always been more rowdy and secular than reverent or religious.

Flanders begins with the background of Christmas festivities. First off, forget the Druids: “No convincing evidence of winter solstice celebrations in pagan Europe has survived.”

However, Mithraism – the most popular pre-Christian religion of the Roman Empire – did honour the solstice as “the birth day of the unconquered sun” when Mithras “emerged from his birth place in a cave, witnessed by two shepherds”.

Early Christian leaders apparently recognised that, because many converts were used to commemorating that day, it made sense to co-opt it, even though Christ was probably born at some time in spring or summer.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Christmas season was always a time of feasting, drinking and carnival, when social and sexual hierarchies were flouted and overturned. Various lords of misrule and “wild men” oversaw the merrymaking and wassailers drank one’s health in exchange for food or money.

In the Renaissance, some Protestant denominations, such as Scotland’s austere Kirk, high-mindedly “declared all of Christmas a nasty pope-ish invention and banned the holidays entirely”.

During England’s Civil War, the more fanatical reformers labelled any festivities “a mark of the Antichrist”. Nonetheless, such strictures were widely ignored..

About the same time, in the Netherlands, St Nicholas began to give small presents to good children, while “his Moorish helper, Zwarte Piet” – Black Peter – administered punishment to the bad. In Switzerland, the gift bringer was called Samichlaus, “Swiss-German for Sankt Klaus, that is, Niklaus”.

By the end of the 17th century, the English were already singing some of our most famous carols: Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly; The First Noel; God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen; We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

Over in the American colonies, high-spirited young men fired off guns on Christmas Eve and spent the next day in taverns. As Flanders writes: “One Boston newspaper in 1735 took it for granted that men would ‘keep drunk all the Christmas Holy-Days’, given the opportunity.”

Gift-giving gradually increased, especially of books, although these could be gimmicky and vulgar. Flanders reprints an advertisement for The Boghouse Miscellany, this companion for the privy being described as “an excellent ChristmasBox, or New Year’s gift”.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, antiquarian nostalgia for the imagined customs of Merrie England, along with popular works by contemporary writers, began to transform Yuletide into an intimate family affair. By the time of

Christmas Carol (1843), Dickens was celebrating Victorian consumerism as much as Christian charity: “Cooking the turkey, playing games, drinking toasts, or buying a toy for your child… became the quasi-religious observances of the new middle-class domesticity.” The New Monthly magazine soon groaned that January was made up “entirely of fog, wind, sleet, and Christmas bills”.

From this point on, Christmas: A biography grows increasingly sociological, just as the holiday itself grows increasingly oriented toward children. Little escapes Flanders’s notice, as she reflects on the film It’s a Wonderful Life, the nation-binding importance of Britain’s annual carol concert from King’s College, Cambridge, or performances of The Nutcracker.

In short, our Christmas rituals honour “not the lives we have, but the lives we would like to have, in a world where family, religion, personal and social relationships are built on firm foundations”.

Even though that world never really existed, the true magic of the holiday season is that “by repeating the rituals, we can go back there every year”.

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