Christmas is crackers

HEN it comes to Christmas, people don’t half talk a load of old baubles. Each year, the season brings a sleigh load of festive fake news. The internet and the media fill up with supposedly historical “facts” about Christmas.

So you’ll see online posts and articles claiming it was originally a Roman festival, or that Christmas trees are some kind of pagan symbolism.

It’s not just the Christmas conspiracy theorists either. A lot of the stuff people sing in church is historically dubious. I mean, I don’t know about you, but if I were a new mother the last thing I’d want is a little drummer boy turning up for a solo while you’re trying to get the baby to sleep.

And as for I Saw Three Ships… Well, given that Bethlehem is 45 miles inland without any rivers, canals or other waterways, all I can say is those vessels must have built up a heck of a head of speed when they hit the coast.

All of these baubles are the reason I wrote a book exploring the history of the festival. But this year, one of the biggest of these crackers has been the idea that Christmas is somehow “under threat”. There were dark mutterings about how the pandemic would destroy Christmas, or even that the Government would curtail the festivities.

As if! It would take more than Covid- 19 to kill Christmas. Not that governments haven’t tried. One of the myths challenged in my book is the oft- repeated claim that Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas. In fact, it was the Scots who had the first go, some 80 years before Cromwell came along.

In 1561 the Puritans in Scotland banned Christmas and fined anyone who dared to sing carols, dance or play games. The English parliament didn’t follow suit until 1647. It didn’t work in either case. Most people found ways to celebrate in secret. “The people of England do hate to be reformed,” an exasperated Puritan MP complained to the House of Commons.

One of the earliest depictions of Father Christmas comes from this time. Written anonymously in 1646, The Arraignment, Conviction, and Imprisonment of Christmas, is a political satire in which Father Christmas – described as “an old, old, old, very old, grey- bearded Gentleman” – gets taken away by the Puritans and banged up in prison. However, he escapes, leaving only some “hair, and gray beard, sticking between two Iron Bars of a

TAKING OFF: Santa got his flying reindeer and white beard in a 19thcentury US makeover

Window”. You see? Even in 1646 Christmas could be locked down.

Which is not to say that things won’t be different this year. But this “old, old, old, very old” ce celebration has an endless capa capacity for reinve reinvention.

I mea mean, it had to be inve invented in the first pla place. The early Church didn’t celebrate Christmas for a number of reasons, not least the fact that they didn’t actually know when Jesus’s birthday was.

The date isn’t given in the Bible. And a lot of other things aren’t specifically mentioned either. No donkeys, cattle, three kings or innkeepers. There’s not even a stable: the story says that Jesus was laid in a manger – in first century Judea, mangers for feeding livestock were kept inside houses.

The only hint about the date is that shepherds were in the fields, which would mean sometime between March and November.

So why did the church choose December 25?

Well, it wasn’t, as some claim, because there was an existing Roman festival on that day which they just took over. The evidence, as my book shows, is that Christians in Rome were already

MISSING: No mention of manger in the Bible celebrating Christmas on December 25 in AD336, some 20 years before the first known reference to the pagan festival.

We don’t really know why they settled on that date, but it must have been something to do with the fact that it was midwinter, the time of the winter solstice, when the days start getting longer again – and thus, the perfect time to celebrate a festival which is all about light in the darkness.

The date aside, the fact is most Christmas traditions are much more recent than we think. The first mention of mistletoe being hung up comes from the 17th century. The first Christmas trees are recorded around 1419 – and rather than being a remnant of pagan sacrifices in some Teutonic forest, they probably originated with medieval plays about Adam and Eve, performed every year on Christmas Eve.

Even that traditional carol service is young. For me, listening to the nine lessons and carols from King’s College is the true start of Christmas. But the service itself only dates back to 1880, and it was first put on in Cambridge in 1918.

As for traditional food, turkey has really only been a Christmas staple since the mid19th century. It originally came from Mexico and only became called turkey because of the Turkish traders who transported the birds around the Mediterranean.

IN MEDIEVAL times the real Christmas treat was brawn or frumenty – a kind of glutinous porridge made of parboiled wheat and dried fruit. Yum. King Henry V’s Christmas lunch, on the other hand, consisted of mottled cream, carp, roasted eels and lampreys, and meat garnished with hawthorn leaves, which really should be in Heston Blumenthal’s latest cookbook. Christmas, you see, is all about reinvention. For the ultimate example, look no further than Santa Claus, who, unlike the turkey, did actually come from what we now call Turkey. The original Saint Nikolaos, to give him his proper name, was a bishop from ancient Lycia on the Turkish coast. He was probably killed during a bout of persecution. ( Analysis of his bones shows that he had a broken nose – you never see that in the pictures of Santa, do you?) Through a case of mistaken identity, he became the patron saint of sailors.

So, as they travelled the world, they built churches dedicated to him in exotic ports like Constantinople, Venice and… Deptford. Very popular in Amsterdam, Saint Nicholas there was shortened to Sinterklass. Then in the 19th century he crossed to New York and got a makeover. Writers and illustrators gave him a red suit, a white beard, a sleigh, flying reindeer and eventually relocated him to the North Pole.

( Oh, by the way: the only reindeer that have antlers during the winter are female. So if you see Rudolph with antlers he’s also reinventing himself – as a girl.)

So Christmas this year will be just the latest in the history of this continuously reinvented festival. Whatever tiers we are in its true meaning will shine brightly as ever.

Because Christmas is all about light in the darkness and hope in times of hardship. It’s about faith and friendship and families and the radical idea peace on Earth might actually be possible. And those, surely, are ideas that this year of all years, we can all celebrate.