Christmas under construction

Let’s get to the heart of Christmas. The celebration’s all made up. From flying reindeer, to indoor trees and e-cards, as retired Australian minister Rex Hunt says in his book Cards, Carols and Claus, ‘Christmas is a celebration still under construction.’ And that may be a jolly good thing.

Sifting through the history of Christmas and all its weird and wonderful traditions raises some interesting questions about what that heart of Christmas is and, if Christmas is still under construction, what Christmas will you and I build?

In about 6 BC, somewhere near Bethlehem in late December, a child was born and his parents named him … something that wasn’t ‘Jesus’. Because, he was some other child, unknown to history. Because, of course, we all ‘know’ Jesus probably wasn’t born on Christmas Day. Actually, we have no idea what month or day Jesus was born.

The first record of a Christian Christmas celebration is in 336 AD and the decision to celebrate on Christmas Day was made about 20 years later. The first celebrations of Christmas as Jesus’ birthday were, in fact, a takeover of old mid-winter festivals. Christians did as they often did with pagan festivals and gave the celebration a Christian theme. This was a great way of weaving the gospel story into people’s everyday lives!

But having picked a day to celebrate, soon scribes and scholars were coming up with reasons why Jesus had to be born on 25 December. They insisted he was born on that exact day. Yet to the early Christians, what mattered was that Jesus came to save the world, not if he did it on a Tuesday.

Does it matter if we know Jesus’ birthday? What’s so special about this birth that we set aside a day to celebrate it?

Although the initial Christian events on Christmas Day started off low-key compared to the big mid-winter festivals, the two quickly combined into a huge community festival in the Middle Ages.

Christmas began with 40 days of preparations (mostly fasting), then 12 days of celebration from Christmas Day to 6 January. It all sounds like great fun, with huge street parades, plays, fairs and feasts. While the church was mostly supportive, at various points religious leaders felt it all got too secular, particularly too much drinking in pubs, but also too much eating and, shockingly, people buying and selling on Christmas Day. Or, in the case of the Puritans in 1600s England, there was the view that this was all pagan nonsense that should be banned. Different religious leaders tried either forcing businesses to close and people to go to church and focus on Christmas, or forcing businesses to open and people to go to work and ignore Christmas. But it turned out you can’t ban people enjoying themselves.

That tension continued when our modern Christmas was invented in the 1800s. That’s when the German tradition of Christmas trees and the Dutch tradition of Christmas stockings became popular in the English-speaking world. In 1843, the first Christmas card was also made (as a specifically commercial activity). Father Christmas was also reshaped and popularised, mixing Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’ with much older traditions.

Father Christmas’s origins are probably as a Scandinavian dress-up game. Looking for something to do in the months of dark and cold, those quirky northern Europeans would get someone to dress up as ‘winter’ and go round people’s houses where they would ‘welcome’ winter. Gradually, this figure got mixed with saints’ stories, in particular St Nicholas of Myra, and this mythic figure became popular in Christmas plays and celebrations.

Fortunately for advertisers, Santa’s revival came along just as the tradition of giving people presents to start the new year was shifting to giving presents on Christmas Day. New Year gifts were associated with sharing love, blessings and support for the new year, and with fun. In the Christian Christmas, gifts were associated with remembering the ongoing gifts of God and the start of the amazing story of God’s greatest gift to us.

But Father Christmas was a marketer’s dream. No other figure has been so closely associated with the commercialisation of Christmas that people have been complaining about ever since.

C.S. Lewis, talking about Christmas, argued there are three types of Christmas: the religious celebration, the secular holiday and the commercial event.

Many people, regardless of their religious beliefs, don’t like the commercialisation of Christmas. We recognise we’re being pushed to excesses that are bad and we shouldn’t get into—over spending, over indulging.

In Cards, Carols and Claus, Hunt argues that the spirit of both secular and religious Christmas is very much goodwill, love and peace. Everyone looking to celebrate that needs help from being sucked too far into the commercialisation of Christmas, from feeling judged, jealous and isolated, feeling like lesser people if they don’t meet up to commercialisms standards.

So, why do we give gifts at Christmas? Which of the three Christmases will we celebrate: the religious, the holiday, or the commercial?

Hunt suggests that the secular world also uses Christmas as a spiritual time where they discuss and promote Christ-like values, but in a different way to Christians. He says Christmas is a tremendous opportunity to connect if we’re prepared to meet people where they’re at in their own religious experience of Christmas, rather than being people who tell them they have to cut out Father Christmas, not have presents, or complain there aren’t more religious symbols on secular, commercial Christmas things like Christmas cards or Starbuck coffee cups.

And, through it all Christmas continues as a celebration, an opportunity to celebrate peace and love in our world as it is, not as some idealised place.

Perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it best in one of his Christmas sermons: ‘Despite it all, Christmas comes. Whether we wish it or not, whether we are sure or not, we must hear the words once again: Christ the Saviour is here! The world that Christ comes to save is our fallen and lost world. None other.’

We try and spread that good news with the phrase ‘Merry Christmas’. Yet, for many, Christmas is not merry. It’s a time of stress for the socially isolated, who can be made even more isolated by the feeling that Christmas is not for them—that it’s not for people who don’t relate to a white Father Christmas, and worse, that it’s not for Muslims, Jews or other non-Christians. In demanding that Christmas is only a Christian festival, we risk shutting out these people and removing Christ from their Christmas.

Christmas is also a time when, despite our talking about peace and love, people are still caught up in wars, hunger and all manner of suffering. That doesn’t sound like good news.

As author Steve Maraboli says: ‘Want to keep Christ in Christmas? Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the guilty, welcome the unwanted, care for the ill, love your enemies, and do unto others as you would have done unto you.’

Jesus came to our world—will we? What does it look like to others when we do?

Finally, what we do on Christmas Day was probably decided by Charles Dickens more than any other. His most powerful effort in the reshaping of Christmas happened in 1843, when he wrote A Christmas Carol. By the 1800s, Christmas was a dying festival, but Dickens’ story and constant championing of Christmas was at the heart of its revival. Most of what we think a ‘true Christmas’ is, was popularised or revived by Dickens. A celebration held on one or two days, with a family Christmas dinner featuring turkey. Even the white Christmas, the key role of children and being generous to the poor are all things Dickens attached or reattached to Christmas. He also helped revive carols.

Carolling comes from the French word ‘caroler’, meaning to dance in a circle. In the 1300s, people added Christmas-themed words to fun, popular songs and you had excited people dancing in a circle while singing about Jesus’ birth. They were so joyful, in fact, that (probably for practical purposes) the dancing was banned from churches—so people started going house to house carolling. How much more joyful can you get?

Christians have a reputation, sadly often deserved, as fun suckers. The Bible talks a lot about joy, but at our worst we turn that to smug contentment or earnestly telling people we’re joyous while looking glum and refusing to have fun. But Christmas at its best captures the sheer child-like fun of celebration, and in carolling we have a great celebration of the overwhelming joy of the Christian Christmas story.  

How excited are we by our ‘good news’? Do we have space for carolling in our churches and outside of them?

So, what is the heart of Christmas? In the end, if you strip it all back, what we celebrate as Christians at Christmas is a ridiculous story of astounding proportions: God become man! God become a helpless baby in a dirty, unsanitary stable. A refugee, a homeless man and a condemned criminal who came that people might have ‘life and have it to the full’. Who came to help us into a relationship with God!

Christmas, as Bonhoeffer said, ‘Really goes beyond all comprehension: the birth of a child is supposed to lead to the great turning point of all things and to bring the salvation and redemption of all humanity. What kings and leaders of nations, philosophers and artists, founders of religions and teachers of morals have tried in vain to do—that now happens through a new-born child. That is the mystery of the redemption of the wold; everything past and everything future is encompassed here. The infinite mercy of the almighty God comes to us, descends to us in the form of a child, his Son.’

Isn’t that something worth having a day to celebrate? Worth remembering in ways that reflect that love and goodwill? Worth finding a way to share that peace, love and goodwill with others who need it, regardless of their beliefs or situation? Isn’t that something worth so much joy that you might just find yourself carolling?

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by Robin Raymond (c) 'War Cry' magazine, Christmas 2015, pp 16-17.
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