A Brief History of Christmas
By Rev. Dr. Karin Case
December 13, 2009
Third Sunday of Advent
Lessons: Isaiah 12:2-6, Zephaniah 3:14-20, Luke 3:7-18
The first two Sundays of Advent our worship explored some pretty weighty themes like apocalypse and judgment. Today, on this third Sunday of Advent, instead, we are headed to the shopping mall! At least, I propose we take a look at the mall and its place in our celebration. As we wait with joyous anticipation for the coming of the Christ child, we are caught up in a culture that threatens to eclipse the awesome, mysterious gift of all gifts—God’s presence with us.
Ours is a culture of profligate spending, a culture of excess, a culture focused on self-satisfaction through acquiring more stuff. I confess that I shrink from our culture in the Advent season. I fantasize about running to a far away place where no one celebrates Christmas—or more accurately—where people do not worship consumption. I know, I sound like scrooge. Bah humbug!
But honestly, can’t a good Christian girl get a little peace and quiet? What do office parties and Play Stations and canned holiday music have to do with Christmas? Not much. The rituals of indulgence, buying and selling have to do with our human hunger for consumption, sensation, novelty, glitter, and revelry, none of which is inherently problematic. But over the centuries, our celebration of Christmas has been ceded to these hungers, and to the culture of consumption and excess.
The haunting strains of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” our opening hymn this morning, draw us in. The hymn expresses something we feel so deeply—a yearning to be set free from the world as we know it. We feel acutely the exile of living in a culture of excess, a crassly material world, a world at war, alienated from our deepest, relational-spiritual selves. Advent gives us license to be fully present to our deep yearning to be touched by the holy. We wait for one who is coming with a gentle hand, a peaceful presence, a word of judgment, a winnowing fork, a baptism.
In my family, we have unanimous consensus that Thanksgiving—not Christmas—is our favorite holiday. It’s low-stress. We simply get to be together: to talk, play Boggle or box hockey, take a nap, cook, share food. These are great blessings, and they are very simple. We’ve been trying to trim the excess stuff and stress from Christmas for a long time. This year I hit upon the idea of renaming Christmas and calling it “Thanksgiving with a tree and a baby.” This admittedly flippant formulation captures something important. The desire to embrace the true gifts of thanks-giving—a day of rest, simple joy in one another’s company—and to strip away the stress we inherit from our culture.
I have just read Bill McKibben’s little brown book, “Hundred Dollar Holiday: the Case for a More Joyful Christmas.” You’ll remember Bill, creator of 350.org, our guest preacher in mid-October, who spoke so powerfully about climate change. In this tidy little volume, Bill argues that consumerism is the biggest impediment to a joyous celebration of Christmas. He writes, “if we make stuff the center of our holiday, we help school [our children] in the notion that transcendent joy comes from things.” This is the message they get everyday of their lives, because of the culture we live in. But placing things at the center of our celebration of Christmas “somehow seems to make the consumption holy, sanctifies it with the aura of angels and stars and the worldview of the mall and the breathless catalogue.”*
Friends, how did we get into this predicament in which we celebrate Christmas with inflated snowmen on the lawn, a frenzy of shopping, sky-high expectations for gift-giving, and enough time at the mall to drive a sane person completely nuts? How many couples have argued over what color the lights should be on the Christmas tree? Little white lights, tiny colored lights, or large colored bulbs? Is there anyone here, with children, who has not made a midnight run on Christmas Eve to obtain one last needed thing? How many of us have felt social pressure to give gifts? It’s not that we lack generosity, or have a scrooge-like nature. It’s just that gift-giving has taken
on a compulsory nature, that has nothing to do with the deep meaning of the season.
How did we get into this predicament? Allow me, if you will, to sketch out a brief history of Christmas. The gospels give us no clue as to when Jesus was born—neither month nor season. There’s even debate as to the year. The first Christians didn’t much care about Jesus’ birth date. They were awaiting the second coming of Christ and pinpointing the date of his birth was of little interest or consequence.
In the second century, Clement of Alexandra chose November 18th as Jesus’ birth date. Others suggested dates in March, April, and May. It took four hundred years before December 25th was marked as the Feast of the Nativity and this date was selected, not because of any great new revelation, but because on the Julian calendar, December 25th was the Winter Solstice. The new Christian religion—the religion of Constantine’s empire—was not about to compete with a pagan celebration. So why not co-opt it for Christian purposes?
As it turns out, this way led to trouble. Solstice celebration entailed deeply established rituals of merriment and excess—drunken revelry and partying in the streets. Hundreds of illegitimate children were born every year in September and October, the result of Solstice “partying.” The celebration of Christ’s birth could have evoked mystical contemplation of God’s presence with us, or reflection on our human yearning for redemption. It could even been marked a simple, ordinary feast day. But instead, Christmas was soon yoked to debauchery and abandon.
Having wedded itself to a pagan celebration, the church immediately began to rebel against this rather unholy marriage. Hear these words Gregory of Nanzianzen, a fourth century Archbishop of Constantinople. “Let us not adorn our streets, nor feed our eyes, nor gratify our ears with music, nor any of our senses, touching, tasting, smelling, not with any of those things that lead the way to vice and are the inlets of sin.”
In medieval times the practice of wassailing developed. Christmas became a sanctioned occasion for peasants to intrude forcibly on the lord of the manor, demanding food and drink. This familiar lyric comes to mind: “We want some figgy pudding; we won’t go until we get some; so bring it right here!” There is, in the spirit of wassailing, a thinly veiled threat of violence to person and property. And there is a slightly unhinged reversal of the social order going on—perhaps an appropriate way to celebrate the in-breaking of God! And yet, wassailing came with a wildness and disorder that definitely spelled trouble.
Things got so out of hand, that our Puritan ancestors banned the celebration of Christmas in Boston! A 1659 edict from the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony declares:
"For preventing disorders, arising within this jurisdiction by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other
, to the great dishonor of God and offense of others: it is therefore ordered by this court that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county."
When the ban was revoked in 1681, it was with a stern warning from Increase Mather:
"The generality of Christmas-keepers observe that festival in such a manner as is highly dishonourable to the name of Christ. How few are there comparatively that spend those holidays (as they are called) after an holy manner. But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in mad Mirth..."*
There is much more to say about the perennial tension between religious observance and secular celebration and the invention of Christmas, as we know it.
The tradition of the Christmas tree with lights—was, perhaps, invented by Charles Follen of Lexington, MA. We can thank Clement Clarke Moore, author of “The Night Before Christmas,” for the invention of Santa as “a right jolly old elf,” whose belly “shook when he laughed—like a bowlful of jelly.” The reindeer and sleigh—also Clement Clark Moore. Mrs. Santa, the North Pole, Santa’s workshop and his elves—all inventions. Around the turn of the century, an entrepreneur named. F. W. Woolworth stocked some German glass ornaments in his retail store. They sold out in two days and the idea of targeted Christmas marketing was born! Our focus on gift-giving at Christmas developed in the early twentieth century, not surprisingly, with the rise of consumer culture.
The problem with a consumer orientation? First, and quite obviously, it has nothing to do with the actual meaning of Christmas. Second, the focus on things is actually deadening in a culture like ours that is already flooded with things, doused in sensory perception, and focused on pleasing ourselves. It’s a spiritual dead end.
Moreover, the stress about stuff is layered on top of the inevitable complexities of life that we’re already juggling at the holidays. It’s complicated figuring out who will be around the dinner table, how to share time with multiple branches of our families. What to do in the aftermath of divorce. It’s complicated to negotiate one’s first Christmas away from home as a young adult, or to navigate the return home as one who has grown and changed, while things at home have remained more-or-less constant!
Many of us have experienced a first Christmas after the loss of a loved one, Christmas with illness or physical decline, or depression. For some, Christmas reminds us that our lives are not what we wish. There are plenty of struggles to find the wholeness we long for without the added stress of consumer culture.
Friends, there is a middle path between excess and asceticism, a path that allows us to center deep down into the Spirit of the season, a spirit of abiding hope, nascent love, and peace. Let us together, in this place, celebrate a holy Advent and Christmas.
Remember that Christmas as we know it—with rooftop reindeer and stockings full to bursting—is an invention. It has been made by complex cultural forces over many years. But the One we celebrate and whom we await, is with us now and for all time. Let us be intentional about our celebration. Take a moment now in silence to reflect on what matters most to you in this season.
A time of silence…
Closing prayer: Holy God, accept the longings of our hearts and all our hopes for this season. Open us to your mystery, to the miracle of birth, and to your presence with us now and always. Amen.