So—it is about to be Christmas. And the News—and Facebook—are full of people decrying the commercialization of Christmas. This awful, tasteless trend is a product of relentless advertising and new media, right?
Well—not really.
The other day, I listened to a sermon (I go to church) about what Christmas means. Like many people, the minister giving the sermon thought that people were more religious in the past; and that Christmas was celebrated more as a religious festival in honor of Christ's birth.
Not really. An examination of John Stowe's superb history of London (1598) does a fine job of illuminating the roller-coaster of change that is history—on all subjects and in all times. In the late 14th century, we learn, there were Christmas celebrations. They seem to have peaked in the late 15th century, when (Catholic) London seems to have splurged on feasts, tournaments, and reckless extravagance in a very modern manner. Christ never entered into it all that much—but they did have Christmas trees and gifts.
In the early 16th century, though, Protestantism raised its head (ugly or not as it pleases you). Protestants didn't believe in festivals (both because, on the one hand, they wanted men and women to have direct contact with God without the intermediaries of what they saw as false pageantry and commercialism, and because the upper-middle class burghers of London and Antwerp didn't want their employees to get 56 fully paid vacation days a year, which is what Catholicism gave them). Christmas ceased to be. Christmas was not, to all intents and purposes, celebrated in mid to late 16th c. England.
By the mid-18th century, our forefathers in Colonial America and Canada would not, probably, even had mentioned that it was Christmas (well, they might have mentioned it, and there were always the Catholics in New France or New Spain.) There WERE no Christmas decorations in Colonial Williamsburg. But then—our forefathers in the USA (and Canada) were a bunch of free-thinking Atheists and Deists who would have spat on the "peasant superstition" of celebrating anything as backwards as the birth of Christ. Nothing amuses me more than the modern casting of Ben Franklin as a man of God.
In the 19th century, for complex reasons, the English speaking world had a sudden reaction and a nostalgic back-turning to many things Medieval—including Gothic architecture and Christmas. From this period we see the restoration of "ancient traditions," many of them made up, and the sudden placing of Christmas on the festival calendar of the English speaking protestant world.
Given that the festival of the nativity went on the Roman church's calendar to supplant the widespread Pagan celebrations at the winter solstice....
Can we all just enjoy our trees, our food, and our presents? If you are genuinely religious, you practice your beliefs every day—don't you? And you don't need a festival to help focus you. And you certainly wouldn't want someone else telling you how to worship, would you?
And you certainly wouldn't want to use a cultural holiday that waxes and wanes to justify—well, anything. Because that would constitute a misuse of history. And we don't do that, because history matters.
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