Christianity
The Trappings of Christmas
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, October 06, 2001
Wednesday, 20 February, 2008
How Victorians Saved The Winter Festival
Did Dickens invent Christmas? Did Albert the Prince Consort? Dickens was referring to the Christmas tree in 1850 as “the new German Toy”. Christmas is always being modified by such people as Charles Dickens or the Prince Consort but basically it is instinctive in western man, its spirit rooted in pre-Christian history, says John Pudney. Extreme Puritans may spike this instinct, yet it survives and flourishes. It is surely a Good Thing.
However disenchanting the plastic trees, the fake snow and ice, the miniskirted Father Christmasettes, there is the fundamental comfort that we are all trying to love one another. The overall image is benign. In the application of it, it is spiritually, mentally, physically liberating. Too often Christmas is regarded as a static image. Yet even with its unvarying ingredients and atmospheric adornments, and the chorus of “we always do this and that”, no two Christmases are ever exactly alike. Age alone is a potent variant. One only has to think of one’s attitude to Christmas age ten, 20, 30 and so on, and of the groupings and regroupings of family and domestic life, to realise how personally this is a variable feast. It demands flexibility. It thrives on novelty and surprise as well as revival and tradition. You want to improve on that Christmas of your childhood.
No wonder then that there has been so much change over the years in this continuing festival. Changes in attitude, customs, observances, habits, equipment, magic and myth. Though the commonest ingredient of all is a longing for the “good old days”, the present offers an abundance and diversity of festival element which can never have been approached in the past. There is indeed surfeit. Discrimination is necessary. Yet everything basic has its roots in the tradition of good will and owes only its promotion and slant to the convivial Dickens and the home-loving, great-great-grandfather of Queen Elizabeth.
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens’ choice of A Christmas Carol as the title of the book which did so much to establish the Victorian Christmas, had little or nothing to do with the specific promotion of the carol as a musical item. Dickens did did not invent this or any other aspect of Christmas. Rather he brought together all the traditional threads of festivity, folk lore, myth, custom and religion, and orchestrated them on a grand scale.
He was not just a propagandist finding good material in Christmas and writing in cold blood. He believed passionately in the season of goodwill. He identified himself with the whole event. In his study of the youth of the author, The Making of Charles Dickens, Christopher Hibbert writes:
There was one memorable Christmas, in particular, the one after he finished the Christmas Carol. He had been utterly absorbed in the theme of that book, throwing himself into the writing of it with an enthusiasm that he had scarcely ever felt before, sharing the joys and sorrows of his characters as though they were his own. He had always been liable to do this, being as moved to tears by the tragedy of Little Nell, as to laughter by the comedy of his letters—George Putnam noticed in America how, when he was writing to his friends at home, Dickens’ face would be “convulsed with laughter at his own fun”. Now, over the Christmas Carol, he “admitted that he wept and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition; and thinking whereof he walked about the back streets of London 15 and 20 miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed”. He had finished it in less than two months, despite a great deal of unaccustomed rewriting, and then, again in his own words, “broke out like a madman”.
And so at Christmas that year there were “such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blindman’s buffings, such tbeatre goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones” as had ever taken place “in these parts before”. And at a children’s party at the Macreadys’ house his excitement was feverish. He performed a country dance with Mrs Macready. He displayed his remarkable skill as a conjuror, producing a plum pudding from an empty saucepan and heating it up over a blazing fire in Clarkson Stanfield’s hat (“without damage to the lining”), changing a box of bran into a live guinea-pig. Jane Carlyle, who was at the party and watched him exert himself until “the perspiration was pouring down”, thought that although he seemed “drunk” with his efforts, he was “the best conjuror” she had ever seen.
Christmas Tree
The custom of bringing an evergreen tree into the home and festooning it with lights, candies and gifts came to us from Germany but it is of Aryan origin. The Christmas tree is the most obvious aspect of ancient Pagan celebrations which were later incorporated into church rites. Only in the last 50 years or so has developed the cheerful custom of householders placing it in a window so it is visible in the street. Behind it is the pre-Christian cults of Teutonic tribes in the forests of Prussia and Central Europe celebrating the winter solstice.
The Christmas tree became popular in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, partly because of the example set by Queen Victoria and the German Prince Consort, Albert. The Prince Consort’s promotion of the Christmas tree was not a conscious effort to improve the festivities of the nation he had married into. Nor was he the first with it, though his introduction of it to the royal family circle at Windsor in 1841 was to lead to widespread popularity. There were already merchants settled in Manchester who had transplanted the tree custom from Northern Europe where it had been popular for centuries.
The Christmas fir tree, because it keeps its green needles throughout the winter months, was believed by pre-Christian Pagans to have special powers of protection against the forces of nature and evil spirits. Particular trees and groves were accounted sacred and could be approached only by priests. In its Christianized form, the Christmas tree is derived from the so-called paradise tree, symbolizing Eden, of German mystery plays. The use of a Christmas tree began early in the seventeenth century, in Strasbourg, France, spreading from there through Germany, into northern Europe and Great Britain. Prince Albert’s trees proliferated during the following years, spreading to the United States. The trend was soon reflected in the trade. By the early 1850s, Christmas trees in their hundreds were changing hands in Covent Garden market.
Mistletoe
These tree novelties were but a variation of a most ancient theme, the symbolic display of evergreens at the time of the winter solstice. Christmas festivals today incorporate many Pagan customs, such as the use of holly, mistletoe, Yule logs, and wassail bowls. The Romans began their Saturnalia in mid-December, hanging up laurels and evergreens as decorations, and this custom spread throughout the territories they occupied. Christianity adopted dates and customs from Roman sources and from the mythologies and beliefs of the Norsemen and Druids.
This parasitic growth, with its white berries, is more heavily loaded with Paganism than any other Christmas emblem. As far back as history goes, it has been held in superstitions awe. Early Christians hated it and by canon law they rigorously excluded it from church decorations. To this day many orthodox Christian clergy regard it as incorrect, if not blasphemous, to place it within a church. The mistletoe has an ancient connexion with fertility rites, as the custom of kissing under the mistletoe dimly commemorates. The continuance of such kissing reflects a triumph for tradition. The ancient British Druids, according to the Roman naturalist, Pliny, used the juice as an aphrodisiac and a cure for sterility. More widely, it was used as a semi-magical cure for a variety of ailments. Even today it is used by practitioners of witchcraft as one of their staple emblems.
In the Middle Ages, Christians tried to bring it within their system by devising the legend that the mistletoe was once a proper tree—the one used by the Romans for Jesus’s cross. As a punishment it was shrivelled up and made parasitic. The creation of this legend illustrates the deep antipathy felt towards a plant that was widely regarded as an evil growth. Yet, in spite of long centuries of censure and disapproval on the part of officialdom, mistletoe has stubbornly held its own as a midwinter decoration.
Holly and Ivy
The custom of bringing evergreens into the home for the midwinter festival dates back to before the dawn of known history. In Britain in mediaeval times there were the 12 days of holiday for Christmas with holly, ivy, bay, rosemary and mistletoe in profusion. Mistletoe was for kissing, but never for church decoration. Because Christians hated mistletoe so much, they laid stress in particular on holly, the prickles and red berries being held to be emblematic of Jesus’s passion. Ivy was more simply of decorative value, another alternative to mistletoe, though the bitterness of the berries was held to allegorize the Passion. But holly is the main Christian decoration for both home and church.
John Stow in his Survey of London written in the sixteenth century leaves no doubt about the traditional evergreens:
Against the feast of Christmas, every man’s house, also their parish churches, were decked with holme, ivy, hayes and whatsoever the season afforded to be green.
Yule Log
The burning of the yule log, a custom which lasted into the present century and is still not entirely extinct, was a ceremonial way of producing midwinter heat and light and had sacrificial significance. To an accompaniment of jollity, the log was dragged into the house on Christmas Eve and set to burn throughout the feast. The word “Yule” is of Norse origin and refers to the midwinter festival. For many centuries it has existed in the English language as a recognised alternative to Christian terms.
The seventeenth century Puritans who, under Cromwell, tried to ban Christmas celebrations for being both Popish and Pagan, used as one motto—“Yule-tide is fool-tide”. They made it a criminal offence to eat mince pies. The word “Noel” may mean the start of the New Year, but for at least eight centuries it has been used as a musical shout of joy for the birth of Jesus.
Christmas Carols
There is abundant proof of the potency of the evergreens for our ancestors in the form of the carol. Defined originally as a ring dance with vocal accompaniment the carol has suffered its ups and downs. Chaucer associated “karolying” with an invitation “to dauncen”. As a popular form of self-expression they waxed with the ballads in the fifteenth century and flourished throughout the sixteenth. Percy Dearmer wrote:
The truth is that carols are a national creation. The carol arose with the ballad in the fifteenth crntury, because people wanted something less severe than the old Latin office hymns, something more vivacious than the plainsong melodies.
So we in this century are the beneficiaries of the treasure of pop poetry, often garlanded with traditional greenery.
The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.
We all know it though some of us may not be aware of its pagan origins and the delightful symbolism of the masculine holly and the feminine ivy. But two centuries ago it would have been quite unfamiliar, for carols suffered such a decline during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that they were almost extinct at the time of the boyhood of Charles Dickens, when William Hone in The Everyday Book was writing:
Carols begin to be spoken of as not belonging to this century&hellip
Fortunately, about that time in the 1820s a versatile character named Gilbert Davies came to the rescue and published a oollection of traditional carols. Davies was a president of the Royal Society, MP for Bodmin—many carols had been preserved in Cornwall—was associated with Sir Humphry Davy and was responsible for choosing Brunel’s design for Clifton Suspension Bridge. He wrote of carols being sung in the west of England “up to the latter end of the late century”.
During the Victorian age the carol gradually re-emerged, though it was not until the end of the century that Cecil Sharp rescued The Holly and the Ivy from oblivion.
The Christmas Card
Charles Dickens was well launched on Christmas before the greeting cards, which subsequently so often reflected his sentiments and his characters, were under way. Indeed the date of the first publication of A Christmas Carol coincides with the production of the first Chritmas card of all. It was designed by John Calcott Horsley, later a Royal Academician, on the initiative of Henry (later Sir Henry) Cole. It cost 1 shilling, sold about 1000 copies, during that first Christmas of 1843, and came under attack as “encouraging drunkenness”.
But the idea took on. Some ten years after Dickens’ death the Christmas card had proliferated to such an extent that The Times wrote of it:
Although the popular use of Christmas cards is no doubt condemned by’ stern philosophers of the unemotional school as so much worthless sentiment, it is not only… productive of considerable moral benefit, but it also works in operation a substantial good by the development of a new department of art.
Christmas Presents
Such was the Victorian blessing bestowed upon the entry of the card into big business. But the “stern philosophers” in the earliest Christian times were against anybody giving anybody anything. Present-giving, like the greenery, was a part of the Roman Saturnalia. The early Christian fathers frowned on its pagan origins and for some centuries Christians did not exchange gifts at the time of the winter solstice, though they had adopted its date for Christmas Day. Present-giving, which of course vanished with all Christmas customs under the Puritans, was well re-established before Victoria came to the throne. A German innovation which may well have stemmed from the influence of the Prince Consort was the Christmas stocking and all the fun of secrecy and concealment associated with present giving.
Robin and Wren
The wren and robin redbreast, which appear on so many Christmas cards, also reflect folk-memories. Since pre- Christian times, people have been superstitious about the wren, the tiny bird with a big voice. It was a sacred bird which flew higher than any other bird by sitting on the back of an eagle before taking off on its own, and which could be hunted only on one day, in midwinter. The ceremony of hunting the wren on 26 December lasted at least into the nineteenth century. In Wales, the dead wren was ceremonially carried in a decorated wren house.
Because of its tameness, the robin was regarded as a friend of man and it supposedly took part in church services and funerals. Stories about the robin and the wren appear to have come to Britain from the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. They are linked together in the oldest of nursery rhymes, “The Marriage of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren”, and its better-known sequel, “Who Killed Cock Robin?” Both are adaptations of ancient traditions it is now impossible to reconstruct.
Snow and Stagecoach
The modern image of a “white Christmas” sprang up during the nineteenth century. The familiar and almost deathless Christmas card scene of a stagecoach struggling though snowdrifts and laden with Christmas gifts, and passengers wrapped up tightly against the cold might be a recollection of the great frost of 1847 when many coaches got stuck in drifts and Christmas mails were delayed. Stage coaches like these were observed in real life by Washington Irving, the American writer (1783-1859), born of English parents, who contributed impressively to the buildup of the Victorian Christmas.
In the course of a December tour in Yorkshire, I rode a long distance in one of the public coaches, on the day preceding Christmas. The coach was crowded both inside and out, with passengers, who, by their talk, seemed principally bound to the mansions of relations or friends, to eat Christmas dinner. It was loaded also with hampers of game, and baskets and boxes of delicacies; and hares hung dangling their long ears about the coachman’s box, presents from distant friends for the impending feast.
Irving’s relish is a reminder that the feast really was a feast by long tradition—long before Tiny Tim rounded off A Christmas Carol by observing “God Bless Us Every One”.
The Feast
Throughout Europe and Western Asia people have traditionally held a festival in midwinter with fire and light and with green boughs and brancbes. Such festivals have usually been associated with nativity. The Egyptians celebrated the Nativity of the Sun in midwinter with the cry, “The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!” The Persian Mithraic religion honoured the re-birth of the sun on 25 December. A festival is a feast! Laurence Whistler writes in The English Festivals:
In great homes, the main dish was the boar’s head, once eaten in honour of the “golden-bristled sun-boar”, still garnished, with rosemary and bays for the summer returning, and still with its mouth propped open on a solar apple or orange.
From the Middle Ages onward the royal, the noble and the wealthy favoured exotic birds such as roasted swans or peacocks at Christmas. The goose was for everybody who was not destitute. The turkey which arrived in this country in the 1540s only gradually took over the Christmas table, and has never entirely suoperseded the goose. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, nearly 1000 Christmas turkeys arrived in London in a single day from the Norwich area, and this was but one source of supply.
A lost tradition is that of Christmas pie. In 1770, Sir Henry Grey’s housekeeper in the country made one for her master and sent it to him for his Christmas dinner in London.
It contained four geese, two turkeys, four wild ducks, two rabbits, two curlews, seven blackbirds, six pigeons, four partridges, six snipe, two woodcock, and two neats’ tongues. The pastry was made with two bushels of flour and 20 pounds of butter.
Christmas puddings first appeared about 1670 superseding an earlier dish of stiffened plum porridge. Mince pies were known to Shakespeare, and in the sixteenth century they contained mutton, tongue, chicken and egg as well as fruit and spice.
The sense of togetherness, of all ages and all classes mingling for the feast, was a tradition which Dickens refocused in A Christmas Carol, and this is still the basis of our contemporary Christmas though we have improved it by opening it up with a wider sense of community. There is a feeling now that everyone should participate and the institutional Christmas is something we do very well. Television and radio, street decoration, community carol singing are manifestations of the universality of Christmas which would have delighted Dickens—and what a TV show he would have put up.
On the debit side there is much hysteria, gross surfeit, vulgarity, waste and commercialisation. Disillusionment starts with the suspension of belief in Father Christmas which for the tiniest tots means merely an autumnal ride to the nearest shopping centre and goes on from there. These elements must be freely admitted. There have always been just complaints about the feast of the winter solstice. Few have been more self-righteous than that of the Puritan Hezekiah Woodward in a tract in 1656:
The old Heathen’s Feasting Day, in honour to Saturn their Idol-God, the Papist’s Massing Day, the Profane Man’s Ranting Day, the Superstitious Man’s Idol Day, the Multitude’s Idle Day, Satan’s—that Adversary’s—Working Day, the True Christian Man’s Fasting Day… We are persuaded, no one thing more hindereth the Gospel work all the year long, than doth the observation of that Idol Day once in a year, having so many days of cursed observation with it.
But, no amount of harsh puritan piety, commercialisation, or exposure and rationalisation, can destroy a mystique which has infected so many civilisations of mankind for thousands of generations at the time of the winter solstice.
The Star
What are the origins of the various ingredients of the now traditional nativity scene, shown in thousands of pictures, models and p1ays? It rests upon no single authority. It is a synthesis of different traditions brought together over the centuries. S Francis of Assisi in 1224 AD was the first to introduce a crib into church. The sources of the various elements are:
- Matthew provides the star and the wise men and also Herod’s massacre of the innocents, and the flight to Egypt
- Luke provides the stable, the manger, angels and the shepherds
- Mithraism often makes the stable a cave, and the wise men shown as three kings
- various other speculations provide the ox, the ass and Joseph shown as a white bearded old man.
The star is an emblem which appears over and over again in Jewish thought of the period. It dated back to the prophecy of Balaam in the Book of Numbers, “A star shall come forth out of Jacob”. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the expected messiahs is called “the star” and he is to be the interpreter of the Law. The messianic Simon bar Kosiba, who led the Jews in revolt against the Romans in 132-135 AD, was nicknamed “Son of the Star” and the coins he minted showed the Jewish temple with a star.
Wise Men
The Greek word for wise men in Matthew really signifies astrologers. “From the East” means from Mesopotamia or Persia, the home of the Zoroastrian faith, a religion which, with its angels, its conflict between darkness and light and its teaching on the immortality of the human soul, preceded Judaism. Heaven and hell were originally, Zoroastrian ideas.
In mainstream Christian tradition, the wise men are called kings although it has no scriptural warranty. The presumed sources were Isaiah: “The nations come to your light and kings to your dawning brightness” and Psalms 72: “The kings of Sheba and Seba will offer gifts; all kings will do him homage”. So the wise men became kings.
The ox and the ass in the stable also have no New Testament basis. They will have been from Isaiah: “The ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib”.
Then it is customary for Joseph to be depicted as an elderly man, again without New Testament warranty. But, as with so much else, this is not accidental. It arose because of the orthodox Christian theology that Mary remained perpetually a virgin. Since the New Testament refers plainly to Jesus’s brothers, Joseph had to have been a widower who had already had a family and that the brothers were really only half-brothers. An elderly man fits this image.
The complete development of the classic Christmas scene took many centuries. In the early Church the feast of the Epiphany, commemorating the wise men and Jesus’s baptism, was more important than Jesus’s birthday. It was not until about 330 AD that Christmas was recognised as a feast. The importance of it grew as part of a conscious policy of Christianising the Pagan midwinter rites which had already long existed. The first model crib, for placing in church, we saw was made by S Francis of Assisi as late as 1224.
So by a rich combination of tradition, legend and interpretation there developed the Christian Christmas.
Santa Claus
The present red-robed figure of Father Christmas is a combination of three traditions—Christian, Pagan and commercial. The latest addition to the Father Christmas legend came as recently as 1939 with “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer”.
On the Christian side, Father Christmas is S Nicholas, an old man who was Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor in the fourth century. Although he was bad-tempered, he was kind-hearted and became the patron saint of children. Up to the nineteenth century, pictures showed S Nicholas distributing gifts to children wearing not a Santa Claus outfit but bishop’s vestments.
The Pagan Father Christmas was a more sinister figure, connected in southern Europe with the god Saturn and with fertility rites. There were also Nordic legends of a mysterious personality who appeared in midwinter. The Lapps had the “Yule Swain”, an 11 foot high giant who rode around on a goat on the days before Christmas.
The present stereotype of Santa Claus, a jolly gentleman with a white beard, red robe and sledge with reindeer, was a nineteenth-century American invention, the definitive pictures being drawn by the commercial artist Thomas Nast (1840-1902 AD). Around Nast’s Santa Claus gathered a sub-Christian theology that he was a universal spirit of love and goodwill. The New York Sun printed every Christmas for half a century the seme reply to a little girl who had written in to ask if Santa Claus really existed.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. I and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.
According to European customs, especially in France, the Netherlands and Hungary, S Nicholas had distributed gifts to good children on his feast day, 8 December. Accompanying him on his rounds was an assistant with a birch rod. Children who had been naughty during the year got a whipping instead of presents. The new Santa Claus was transferred to Christmas Eve, and gave presents to all children, good and bad. A quite separate tradition of Christmas gifts was that of masters rewarding their servants and other people of inferior status. The recipients carried around “boxes” into which employers were expected to drop coins. So, 26 December was called “boxing day”.
