by Keith Bassham
I really don’t want to add fuel to the Christmas feud flame, but I want to go on record with a few things. I know, for instance, that no one knows the date of the birth of Jesus, and even if we did, the Bible in all probability would not instruct us to observe the date. Thus Christmas and Easter are in that sense “man-made” holidays, and not Bible-sanctioned. Not wrong in and of themselves, you understand, but if secularists want to stake their own claims on the holidays and tell Christians to shove off, I do not feel compelled to get out the pitchforks, torches, and boycott threats. As a Christian, a secular Christmas is not so much an oxymoron as it is a paradox.
I also stipulate that secularists and Christians have had to share an uneasy truce in this business, and our long-forgotten syncretistic forebears on both sides probably knew that going in. Southern Europeans had been celebrating something called Saturnalia hundreds of years before Christians began holding any type of festival honoring the birth of Jesus Christ. No one knows just when, but within the first 200 years after the resurrection of Jesus there had been observances of Epiphany (the appearing) connected with Jesus’ baptism in early January, and perhaps some of that celebration drifted back into December and combined with a birthday observance. Some early Egyptian theologians began placing the date of the nativity in late December in the 28th year of Emperor Augustus, and the matter was argued at length until the late 300s when you actually see some regular type of nativity festival taking on a life of its own. The date set, December 25, corresponds with the celebration of Saturnalia and another celebration at the time called Natilis Solis Invicti: the birth of the sun. That’s s – u – n, and it was a winter solstice festival marking the shortest day of the year and the first of the days leading up to spring and summer. In northern Europe, they did something similar under different names, but the celebration itself was about the same — making merry, giving gifts, eating a lot — which when you think about it seems a sensible thing for people to do in a bleak part of the year.
There was something else going on in those midwinter celebrations you should know about. Saturnalia celebrants would for a brief time reverse the social arrangement of servants and masters. That is, during the celebration, the servants would themselves be “served,” or at least appear to be served, by their masters. All could legally wear a hat signifying their freeman’s status, and a servant could even pretend to be disrespectful without fear of punishment. It was a way of turning things upside down, a nod to a long-forgotten “Golden Age,” or maybe a longing for one in the future.
The common theory is that the Church adapted itself to these festivals, even adopting some of the cultural elements to create what would become, much later, Cristes mæsse, or Christ Mass. At times, the celebration even mixed with the medieval Feast of Fools, patterned after the ancient Saturnalia (think Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), insofar as it was a time of revelry, drunkenness, gift-giving, and the like. The Catholic Church officially condemned the Feast at various times, but it was hard to extinguish something so deeply embedded in the culture. English Puritans, during the time of Cromwell, recognized all these pagan influences, and noting how the Christmas observances in their day had become so degraded and imitative of the folk festivals, sought to do away with Christmas altogether. Parliament in 1644 declared the so-called “twelve days of Christmas” a time for fasting if observed at all; businesses were to remain open regular hours, and even the “traditional” Christmas treats, plum pudding and mincemeat pie, were condemned as heathen.
I think I’m right in what I’ve written above, and if so, modern secularists, both in government and in the marketplace, are not really shoving Jesus out (though they think they are) because there has never been a “pure” Christian Christmas observance for them to hijack. In fact, in a curious reversal of the modern situation, you could make the case that English Christians in the 17th century made their own “war on Christmas” for an opposite reason. On the other hand, I don’t want the secularists to think we hijacked their celebration either. Christmas as we know it does not have an unbroken line of ancestry back to the Roman Saturnalia observance (though there are similarities) especially when you factor in the borrowed elements from all the other midwinter festivals throughout Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the present. The truth is, most of what we think of as a traditional Christmas today is very much British and American and not all that old either.
Last year I wrote that, overall, maybe observing a season of Advent makes sense. Advent (and Lent, for that matter) was noted in the Almanac section of the first King James Version Bibles in 1611, so that should make it sort of okay. And before you object mightily to embracing this new bit of liturgy, you might remember that before 1820, observing Christmas among Baptists was almost unheard of, just as it was among Puritans, Presbyterians, and Quakers in the U.S. Congress even met on Christmas Day from 1789 to 1855, public schools met in Boston on Christmas until 1870, and the first state to make the day a legal holiday was Alabama in 1836.
The most popular American Christmas song, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” was written by a Jewish person and makes no mention at all of God or Jesus. It’s all about going home and being with friends and remembering good old days. And it reflects Christmas the way it is observed in our culture — almost certain to be mostly secular, materialistic, and commercial. If there is some religious significance for people, it is usually more sentimentality than anything else.
So I don’t think we have to go to the mattresses if a municipality presents a “holiday” tree, but human resource managers really ought to lighten up if they are ready to discipline a clerk for having the temerity to wish a customer a Merry Christmas, and the same goes for school administrators who confiscate red and green crayons in December.
Advent, on the other hand, is all about the appearance of Jesus into the world, which is what we want Christmas to be about.