March 2001
Bert Speelpenning
Christmas is not going away anytime soon. The way it is celebrated in the USA is vital, strong, and popular. Kids like it, then grow up and pass it on to their kids, primed by churches, reminded by media and shopping malls. Rare indeed is the American neighborhood without any Christmas lights inside or out, and Christmas carols waft from speakers in every business district. Nobody escapes, though of course only a Grinch or a Scrooge would try.
Many people who don't consider themselves Christians partake gladly of the Christmas season, get Christmas trees, string Christmas lights, meet family for Christmas dinner, and sing Christmas songs about the baby Jesus. At the very least, all accept the Christmas vacation days off.
In the wake of the success of Christmas, the Jewish festival of Chanukah - always a rather minor affair compared to the High Holy days in the fall - has steadily gained stature within the Jewish year. Chanukah, also in December, has grown as an occasion for gift giving to children, and Jewish parents surrounded by Christmas can tell their children "we don't do Christmas - but we do Chanukah!"
An outside observer of earth culture would notice another aspect of the Christmas ritual. Every year, like clockwork, there will be people, heard on the mass media and listened to respectfully, who say that Christmas has become corrupt and that we need go back to an earlier age where Christmas was a pure celebration of the birth of Christ. No less than Christmas trees, this is a Christmas hallmark.
How did one festival come to have such sway over popular culture, literature, art, and commerce, eclipsing by far in this sense the core Christian holiday of the Resurrection, Easter? It didn't happen overnight, but there is evidence for very deliberate beginnings. Christmas is a great example of co-opting - the use of existing practices, honoring their strength and relying on their vitality, while shifting the meaning of these practices to make room for the new thing, even to make the new thing appear inevitable.
The earliest Christian church did not celebrate the birth of Jesus. Their attention was on Jesus the man and Jesus the son of God. Centuries later, as interest in the person of Mary the mother and Jesus the child grew, the church needed to pick a birthday for Jesus, for none was fixed in the New Testament or in tradition. In Rome, since 274 AD, there had been the pagan feast of the Winter Solstice on December 25 - the rebirth of the Unconquered Sun(Sol Invictus) - a festival complete with evergreens and lights, which took place after the Saturnalia, starting December 17, involving eating, drinking and the giving of gifts. With Constantine as emperor in 324 AD, there came official sanction for Christianity in the Roman empire, and church fathers must have been looking at how to entrench the church into Roman life and how to deal with the more popular manifestations of the surrounding pagan culture. Should they ignore these? Battle head-on? - Or could they co-opt them? By 354 AD there is clear evidence of Christmas celebrations on December 25 throughout the Roman church. The pick must have seemed ingenious: keep a familiar and popular festival, based in themes of birth and hope and goodwill for all, but anchor it in this new religion. Your chariot, our charioteer, together victorious. A brilliant strategy, and successful beyond imagining.
Yet for all we know, there might have been much simpler dynamics at play, involving kids. Even in long-ago Rome, you can imagine early Christian parents telling their children "we don't do Winter Solstice - but we do Christmas!"