The list of what’s familiar during Christmas seems to get not just longer but worse each year. There are not just the carols, the tree, the turkey, the pudding and the gifts. There are also the laments and the taunts.
In private, Christmas is that special family time whose tugs-of-war goad almost everyone to wish to belong toa ‘normal’ family, not the one they actually have.
In public, there are the arguments about commercialisation, secularisation and paganism.
Is it the secular pagans who are taking over the feast? Or is it all Christianity’s fault for having, 2,000 or so years ago, recklessly taken over the customs of one or two pagan midwinter feasts, so that what we are seeing today is simply the pagan feasts of lights and Saturnalia returning home?
Then, in the background, like radiation, there is the news of Christmas and Christians in the Middle East...
A Christmas without arguments about it is a bit like Christmas without Scrooge, the midnight sermon and nostalgia for simpler, warmer Christmases.
Come to think of it, it’s a lot like that. Child preachers, nostalgia and Scrooge all came into being in debates about the feast’s meaning.
The child’s sermon has its roots in the mediaeval Church’s attempt to instil humility in the hierarchy.
As power was devolved to the lower clerical orders, more of the rituals of feasting took on the form of burlesque revelry. As the adults misbehaved, responsibility was handed over to children, with a choirboy appointed temporary bishop.
He had miniature vestments made for him and the responsibility of collecting money for the feast of December 28, the Holy Innocents – the children said to be massacred by Herod in his quest to eliminate the baby Messiah.
Many of the current staples of a British Christmas do not date much earlier than the mid-19th century. The turkey replaced the goose because of the growing size of the Victorian family.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, eager to redefine the royal family, greatly influenced the iconic ideal of Christmas, with pictures of the royal tree decorated with candles reproduced in magazines of the period.
The first card was commissioned by Sir Henry Cole in 1843. It showed three generations of a family toasting the recipient with additional scenes of the giving of food and drink to the poor.
Encouraging charity, however, went hand-in-hand with shrewd commercialisation from the start. Cole wanted to spread the use of the Penny Post, an idea he had helped introduce only three years earlier.
There was a ready audience for this kind of sentiment, which was shaped not just by religion but by the economy. Growing industrialisation was reorganising the shape of the family: its size, its shift off agricultural land to cities, and its dispersal.
It’s no coincidence that Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in the same year that the Christmas card was launched. The novella brings together both the pressures of work that tore parents away from the family as well as the nostalgia for simple families gathered around the hearth.
From a Christian perspective, the real betrayal of the feast’s spirit would be to reduce it to nostalgia for a past community
The early cards seldom showed religious themes. The favoured ones were, instead, of children and animals, often depicted humorously. As designs became more elaborate, it did not take long for a reaction to set in: a counter-trend of homemade cards, saving on money but also making a statement against commercialisation.
In short, the debates about the meaning of Christmas are as traditional – hand-me-downs – as the feasting customs themselves. Some date not much longer than the time of our great-great grandparents; others are truly millennial.
The fact that the debates are old need not trivialise them. The real issue is whether the debates are frayed, worn and hackneyed – or whether they are still capable of helping deeper truths emerge.
The trivialisation begins by accepting to debate who owns Christmas. When Christianity borrowed and adapted the Roman and Nordic feasts of midwinter, the aim was not to hijack them.
For the theologians, the serious point was that contained in the story of the Magi: pre-Christian cosmic beliefs (the Magi could have been Zoroastrian) contained truths whose sense was sharpened and enlarged by the birth of Christ. They were truths that could lead to greater ones, a new power in an old world.
The pagan origins of Christmas feasting – indeed, the conventional dating of the birth of Christ to coincide with the lawlessness of the Saturnalia, just as his resurrection conventionally coincides with the rites of Spring – are only embarrassing to Christians who have forgotten the original point. It was not to replace the old world but to give it new vitality.
From a Christian perspective, thereal betrayal of the feast’s spirit wouldbe to reduce it to nostalgia for apast community.
Christmas without memories – not least the memory of the birth of Christ – would be nonsense. But from the beginning the feast linked that memory to a new frontier, a new beginning for person and community.
The idea was there in the solemn rhetoric of a new covenant as well as in the madcap antics of the 12 days of Christmas, which offered a glimpse of an alternative social order.
Today, that spirit of Christmas remains vivid in the deaths and persecution of Christians around the world.
What’s new each year is the increase in global persecution, now steadily on track to reach a quarter of Christians worldwide by 2020.
In the global south – and not just at the hands of communist or Islamist regimes – Christians attract the wrath of State and society because they refuse to sanctify either and point to alternatives.
They separate State from divinity. The conviction that they can be reborn leads them to reject the idea that human dignity depends on social status. With such witness, they reject authoritarianism and hardline communitarianism.
They point with their lives to what should anchor our debates about what makes a good Christmas: Have we experienced anything profoundly new?
ranierfsadni@europe.com