 Christmas comes in many different wrappings. There's pagan Christmas, with holly and mistletoe and the other reminders of our Druidic past. There's sentimental Christian Christmas, with gold, frankincense and fluffy sheep. And there's commercialized Christmas for the feelgood generation. Andrew Walker gets through the wrapping paper to discover the true meaning of it all – the crisis of God entering the world to win it back to himself.
MOST OF US KNOW that in significant ways Christmas is a pagan invention. European "Father Christmas" can perhaps claim a longer life than the American "Santa Claus", but both these jolly creatures are a bastardization of 4th-century St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, whom legend has it gave gifts to children and also contended for the full divinity of Christ at the Council of Nicea in AD325. Christmas trees are a 19th-century recreation of German pagan tradition, and mistletoe and holly harp back to the folk fertility of Druidic religion.
Indeed, Jesus is welcomed into the festive season not so much because it is his birthday but because he is a symbol of the Christmas spirit. Witness the tableau of the holy family with adoring mother fawning over adorable child while an elderly Joseph looks on, pleased as punch. See the gift-bearing kings from exotic lands. Watch rough hewn shepherds with their fleecy baby sheep. Add cows and donkeys for good measure, perhaps a hovering angel or two, and together it all adds colour to the Christmas spirit, which is arguably not even Dickens any more but a hazy warm feeling – an "atmosphere" – created by market forces and unrestrained hedonism. IF WE ARE COMMITTED Christians we are quick to blame the corruption of Christmas on pagan innovations – not to mention commercial interests – but we are slow to concede that we too have corroded the Christmas story through the sugary acids of sentimentality. And sad to say it may have begun in the 14th century with Francis of Assisi.
Lest Protestants lay all blame at the pierced feet of St Francis, or the decadence of Italian art, we should perhaps recall Martin Luther's carol, "Away in a manger", where lowing cattle and the laid-down oh so sweet head of Jesus almost switches off the true light which has come into the world. All of this is perhaps the more sobering when we realize that we don't even know if the early Church celebrated Christmas at all. We do know that by the 3rd century the Eastern Churches had added Epiphany to the great liturgical feasts of Easter and Pentecost. This great theophany – this public announcement of God's intentions – remains to this day in the Orthodox Church as an event as important as Christmas. Epiphany is not understood as the celebration of the Magi, as it has become in the West, but a celebration of the baptism of Jesus, some 30 years after his birth. The Eastern Epiphany is seen as a trinitarian declaration on the banks of the river Jordan that in Jesus what you see is none other than the revelation of God to the world. THE CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION ITSELF emerges from the shadow of Easter in Western Christianity sometime after the imperial edict of toleration in AD311, when the of December 25th was chosen as the official birthday of Jesus. In itself this date is quite arbitrary, as the Bible gives no hint as to what time of year Jesus was born. The scholarly consensus is that December was chosen to celebrate the birth of the "sun of righteousness" as an evangelistic marker against the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. For those of us living in colder climes, the solstice is now so intertwined with Christmas that the festive season is a veritable Yuletide with all the gloss of chocolate logs, snowmen, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, reindeer, frosted window panes, Santa and elves in Lapland, and even shepherds wrapped up against the cold on a billion Xmas cards. In the United States, you can even visit Christmas shops in the Deep South at the height of summer, and as you walk in you stumble on a winter wonderland like Lucy pushing through the coats of the wardrobe only to find her feet scrunching in the snows of Narnia.
Christmas should be the season when the Church calls us to remember the inauguration of God's rescue mission for humankind. Jesus the Word of God, Son of the Father, in obedience to the divine love, divested himself of his power and glory, and in the power of the Spirit joined himself irrevocably to human flesh. The at-one-ment of God with the world may have culminated at Calvary, but it began in Nazareth with God's wooing of Mary through the angelic messenger, and her voluntary acceptance of the divine proposal. The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem was God's initiative, but one that was in full co-operation with the chosen maiden of Israel. Christmas, in other words, is the recollection and retelling of salvation history: it is the crisis event in the story of the world that changes it for ever. Time itself, as C.S. Lewis reminded us, turned a corner with the incarnation. Let us, by all means, buy our family presents, eat our mince pies, wallow in sentiment if we must, and even sail close to the pagan winter wind. But let us, by no means, fail to announce to the world that Jesus the son of Mary is none other than Immanuel – God with us. Andrew Walker is Professor of Theology and Education at King's College London and Consultant Editor of Ship of Fools. Formerly the Director of the C.S. Lewis Centre, he is the author of several books, including Restoring the Kingdom (revised 1998), and Telling the Story (1996). Top of Page | Archive | Ship of Fools Central © Ship of Fools 1999 |
We tend to accept such pagan importations into the Christmas story because they all seem to be part of the "spirit of Christmas" – a time of giving, family, merriment and mulled wine, carols, decorations and snowflakes. This is "quality time" for us that is conjured up by residual images of a Victorian Christmas strained through repeats and rehashes of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It is a world of humanitarian decency which allows a sanitized and sentimental baby Jesus to slip-in with barely a rustle of discomfort from either the religiously indifferent masses or the cohorts of interfaith watchdogs.
A great preacher and popularizer, as well as self-elected pauper, St Francis embellished the Gospel stories in order to make them fresh and vivid to ordinary people: the dark cave of the outcast God-child, for example, took on the glow of a rural idyll as sweet hay and wooden manger turned the landlord's outhouse into country stable. Franciscan spirituality was also expressed through homely iconography so that the stories were imaged in frescoes and church windows. By the time of the Renaissance, 100 years later, Christmas scenes were skilfully animated by artists who increasingly saw religious art as a triumph of technical flair and imaginative creation over dogmatic content.
The pagan accoutrements of the Christmas story – of Santa, trees, red berries, and winter pleasures – are not evil in themselves and are, in their own way, delightful. The problem lies elsewhere. The true meaning of Christmas has been buried beneath an avalanche of nostalgia for a "feel good" experience – remembrances of a childhood past, of magic, of reconstituted joy.