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For Donna Leon
Legend
Carnival and riot
Drinking – and drunkenness
Food and feasting
Gifts and gift-giving
The gift-bringers: Saints to Santa
Greenery: The holly and the ivy
Music and dancing
Religion: Ritual and rite
A partial holiday calendar
January
1
Feast of the Circumcision, or Holy Name of Jesus
5
Twelfth Night
6
Epiphany
February
2
Candlemas
March
25
Lady Day
June
24
Midsummer
September
29
Michaelmas
November
1
All Saints’ Day
2
All Souls’ Day
11
St Martin
December
6
St Nicholas
13
St Lucy of Syracuse
21
St Thomas the Apostle
25
Christmas Day
26
St Stephen
27
St John the Evangelist
28
Feast of the Holy Innocents
31
St Sylvester
When Mince Pies Reign
A history of Christmas might sound like a fairly simple undertaking. From nativity, to church, to family, to commerce – a story of high beginnings, a cosy, warm middle and the chill of cold cash at the end. That is how the story is often told. But is it the real story? For a start, every Christmas is different. The traditions of Catholic Spain are different from the traditions of Catholic Portugal and Catholic South America; Protestant Germany is different from Protestant Denmark, much less the differences between Protestant England and Protestant New England.
But religion, as we will see, is only one element – ultimately, and surprisingly, a small element – in Christmas as we know it. For there is Christmas the way it is celebrated in our own culture; Christmas the way it is celebrated in our own home; and Christmas the way it is celebrated in the mass media, in books and newspapers and magazines, on film and on television. All these Christmases are related to each other, but they are not identical. Because then, of course, there is that wondrous, nostalgically flawless day that is seared in our memories, the day that we can never quite recapture, the perfect Christmas. The poet C. Day Lewis got it right when he wrote, ‘there are not Christmases, there is only Christmas – a composite day made up from the haunting impression of many Christmas Days, a work of art painted by memory’.* That is the key.
Each of us is a storehouse of Christmases, a repository of all the happiness – and sometimes sadness – of seasons past. Christmas is therefore magical: it enables us to be like Alice in Wonderland’s White Queen, who could believe six impossible things before breakfast. We believe dozens of impossible things – often dozens of mutually contradictory things – about Christmas without even trying. Often without even realizing it.
For the holiday piles legend upon legend. Santa Claus was created in the Netherlands, or maybe his red suit was invented by the Coca-Cola Corporation; Prince Albert was the person to bring German Christmas trees to Britain; in the Middle Ages, the great feudal lords kept seasonal open house and fed anyone who appeared; the Roman Saturnalia was the origin of Christmas Day, or maybe it was the feast of Woden. Except – except, of course, that none of these things is true. At Christmas, and about Christmas, what is true, and what we think is true, is hard to separate from what we would simply like to believe is true.
The two most common assumptions about the holiday are, first, that it was religious in origin and second, that the traditions of each speaker’s own country embody the real Christmas, the ones that others only palely imitate.
That Christmas was once religious, and only in our debased, commercial age has been reduced to its current shabby, market-driven modern form, is such a common idea that it comes as a surprise when the actual make-up of the day is examined. First and foremost, of course, Christmas is the day established by the Christian church to mark the nativity of Christ. Today, therefore, we generally assume that the old Christmas – the real Christmas – was a deeply solemn religious event that our own secular, capitalist society has sullied.
The second assumption, that Christmas is native to ‘our’ culture, whichever culture that may be, is equally reflexive. To most people in Britain, in America, in Germany, Christmas is really a British, American, German holiday. Germans consider their Teutonic solstice myths, their trees, advent wreaths, seasonal markets, roast goose and red cabbage to be the authentic customs, the ones that produce a Weihnachtsstimmung, or Christmas feeling, that cannot properly be replicated anywhere else. The British and, in particular, the English, think their mince pies and plum puddings, their trees, their ghost stories and Dickens readings, their domesticity and child-centred festivities, to be the very essence of the holiday. In the USA, birth-place of Santa Claus and of Christmas stockings, of giant outdoor trees, turkeys and eggnog, Christmas is, just as obviously, American, and the rest of the world participates in their customs only by imitation.
And yet, even while we consider ‘our’ Christmas customs to be the true ones, we – most people in the West today who celebrate Christmas – in reality don’t adhere to ‘our’ customs, but to an amalgam of traditions drawn primarily from the Anglo-American world and the German-speaking lands. These were then shaken up, mixed together with a couple of centuries of newspapers, magazines and books, not to mention a hundred years of radio, film and television, to end up not with one culture’s Christmas, but with something entirely new, a holiday that is recognized across the globe, but comes from nowhere in particular.
And it is that Christmas, that strange hybrid growth that we all think we know so well, so well that we possessively refer to it as ‘ours’, that is the holiday, its history, myths, traditions, stories and symbols, that we will now explore.
Chapter One
The Bible is reticent on the birth of Christ. The nativity is mentioned only in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. Luke was probably written around 80 CE, Matthew perhaps a decade later. Both may well have relied on a common source, for some details of their stories are identical. Luke describes how a census obliges Joseph to travel to Bethlehem, the city from which his family originates. There, Mary gives birth and her son lies in a manger, although there is no mention of a stable. An angel announces the birth to shepherds in the fields, who hurry to see the child. In Matthew, in the reign of Herod, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as though this were his parents’ permanent place of residence. Unnumbered, unnamed wise men from the east follow a star (no brighter, in this telling, tha
n any other), bringing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the house where child lies. In the later, non-canonical protogospel of James, probably written towards the end of the second century CE, Mary gives birth in a cave, beneath a star that shines more brightly than the rest.
Historically, as is well known, much of the story as we have it is problematic. There was a census carried out in 6 CE, but that was ten years after the death of Herod, while there is no record of any census that obliged people to return to their place of ancestral origin to be counted. Further, these censuses enumerated property-owners. If Joseph owned property, why weren’t he and his wife able to lodge there? And even if Joseph had to be counted, why did his pregnant wife go too, when women were not included in censuses? If Mary gave birth in December – and there is no mention in the Bible, nor in any early church writings, of the date of Christ’s birth – why were the sheep still in the fields in the winter months, when they should have been taken in to the villages for warmth?
Moving from historical plausibility, it is likely that these writings made no reference to the nativity because birthdays carried little religious significance in the early church: the important day was the day of baptism, the day of religious rather than physical birth. From the second century, the Eastern churches marked 6 January as Epiphany, a Greek word meaning ‘showing forth’, indicating the day that Christ’s divinity was revealed to man and, at least among some Egyptian Christians, the day was understood to mark Christ’s baptism, although we have no knowledge of why that date was chosen.*
Constantine the Great extended tolerance to Christianity in the Roman Empire in 313; the establishment of Christmas as a church festival followed not long after. The earliest evidence we have for a celebration of Christ’s birth is when Julius I, Bishop of Rome (337–352), decreed that Christ’s nativity was to be observed on 25 December. Even so, from the start Christmas seemed determined to break away from religion: sometime before his death in 389, Gregory of Nazianzus, Archbishop of Constantinople, found it necessary to warn against the dancing and ‘feasting to excess’ that were occurring on the holy day. Nobody issues warnings about things that aren’t happening, so we can therefore assume that, only thirty years after it was first mentioned, Christmas was already being spent as a day of secular pleasure. And so it continued. By the mid-seventh century, Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, was reminding his followers that while it was fine to eat well at Christmas, the church frowned on gluttony. It is difficult not to conclude that many were indulging on the day.
But why 25 December? According to biblical scholars’ calculations, based on the Gospels and other church writings, 17 April, 29 May and 15 September are all more likely dates. The choice of 25 December seems instead to have been tied to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.*
No convincing evidence of winter solstice celebrations in pagan Europe has survived. Instead, the first instance of such celebrations that we know of was in Roman times, with three festivals clustered around this date. Saturnalia, when religious offerings were made to Saturn, the god of agriculture, began on 17 December and lasted for seven days. Work ceased, shops closed, gifts of candles were given and gambling, eating and drinking prevailed. This holiday was followed by the Kalends, a secular, civic New Year festival, officially from 1 to 3 January, but often unofficially continuing to 5 January. Buildings were decorated with greenery and people ate, drank and watched races and processions, while small tokens, wreaths and garlands, or lamps inscribed ‘Happiness in the New Year’ were exchanged.
Libanius, a pagan Greek philosopher, described the Kalends celebrations of the fourth century, and they already sound familiar, featuring ‘carousals and well-laden tables’, ‘abundance’ for the rich, and for the poor ‘better food than usual’. It was a time of spending: ‘People are not only generous towards themselves, but also towards their fellow-men.’ There was also a strong element of society turned upside-down, as masters waited on their slaves and senators dressed as plebeians. By the sixth century, wrote one Church father, these topsy-turvy traditions had prevailed, ‘the heathen, reversing the order of all things’, not just masters and servants trading places, but even men dressing as women. As with Gregory, two centuries before, he too worried that ‘the majority of men on those days became slaves to gluttony and riotous living and raved in drunkenness and impious dancing’.
Between Saturnalia and the Kalends came the celebration of the solstice. By the first century, Mithraism had spread from the Middle East to become the most widely practised religion in the Roman Empire. Yet, despite its prevalence, we know little about it today. The central event is speculated to have been the slaying of a sacred bull by the god Mithras, probably a spring fertility ceremony. The birth of Mithras, however, was marked at the winter solstice, when, on the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the birth day of the unconquered sun, Mithras emerged from his birthplace in a cave, witnessed by two shepherds. By the third century, Sol Invictus was the main god of the Empire and Dies Natalis his primary festival, which now began to assimilate many of the Kalends traditions. This merging of holiday customs continued after Christianity became the established religion of Rome, in 380: ‘when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival [of Sol Invictus], they … resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day’. In other words, 25 December was chosen because it was already the commemoration of a sacred figure’s birth. By the end of the fourth century, Eastern Christians in Constantinople were also celebrating Christmas on 25 December, rather than Epiphany on 6 January, as were Christians in Gaul. The holiday itself now expanded. In 567 the Council of Tours made the days between Christmas and Epiphany into a single holiday, which was confirmed by Alfred the Great in 877 in Wessex: his law code named the twelve days a general holiday, when even servants supposedly did no work.
In northern Europe, too, there were markers of the year-end. Most Germanic languages contain some form of the word ‘yule’, meaning midwinter. The Venerable Bede, in c.730, claimed that the ancient Britons called December and January Giuli, or ‘Yule’, but in the British Isles from the seventh century, Yule was used to mean Christmas.* That Old English word, Geol, had derived from Old Norse Jól. Although today in Scandinavia jul means Christmas, originally it merely meant ‘festivities’, and we know little of these Norse ceremonies or beliefs. There may have been some form of ancestor worship, to mark the return of the dead, a not uncommon idea as the sun waned and the old year ‘died’. Some said this was the day when in various northern European legends the ‘wild hunt’, that army of the dead, rode across the sky with their baying hellhounds led by Odin, or Wotan, on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir.* Or it may have been a festival following the harvest and autumn slaughter, which was also the annual time for beer-brewing. The older oral tradition recorded in the thirteenth-century saga of the Icelandic bard Snorri Sturluson describes a midwinter festival of feasting and drinking, when the king drikke jól, or ‘drank yule’. Bonfires and candles, or burning logs, as well as greenery, may have been part of the observances – we simply don’t know. By 960 King Haakon of Norway had Christianized the day, decreeing that Jul was to be marked on 25 December, to coincide with the Christian festivities.
What can be said with certainty is that in the Christian tradition, from the early days through to the Middle Ages, many of the Christmas ecclesiastical developments were a matter less of religious liturgy than of entertainment. By the eleventh century in France, a star was hung over the altar for an Epiphany play that was incorporated into the Mass, and the story of the Magi, of Herod, the Massacre of the Innocents and the Flight into Egypt, were acted out. In the twelfth century English churches also staged these plays, and as late as the sixteenth century church records show that painted and gilded stars continued to be made. Another form of theatre originated with Francis of Assisi, who in 1223 first produced a replica of a stable, with a manger, an ox and an ass. This became popular across much
of western Europe, as did, in the Rhineland, Kindelwiegen, or cradle-rocking, services, where a life-sized cradle with a Christ child was rocked by the altar to the rhythm of Wiegenlieder, or cradle songs. In the Netherlands, two cradles, one on the altar, one near the congregation, were decorated with little bells that rang as they were rocked.
A distinctive seasonal feature in England was the miracle play. These plays were religious in content but, unlike Epiphany plays, they were in English, not Latin, and, unlike the Kindelwiegen or the nativity scenes, they were produced under the patronage of civic guilds, not the church. We know little about the early plays, but from at least 1392, guilds in Coventry staged The Pageant of the Shearman and Tailors, which recounted the events of the annunciation, the nativity, the adoration of the kings, the Flight into Egypt and the Massacre of the Innocents. A fragment of surviving stage direction indicates how the drama played out: ‘Here Herod rages, in the pageant cart, and also in the street.’
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