Christmas: Pagan and Commercial

There are those who insist Christmas is a pagan festival. They are right, and they are wrong.

Christianity took over the pre-Christian, indeed pre-history, pagan mid-winter festival and thoroughly Christianised it. Even so a number of its themes and symbols survive. The use of evergreen decoration, for example, and feasting (even if few of us now enjoy a roast boars head) – and (a little sadly from my point of view) indulgence in misrule and upsetting the proper social order is now safely contained in pantomime[1].

The Christian festival didn’t start till about 440 – in direct challenge to the Mithraic mystery religion identification of December 25th as ‘the birth of the invincible sun’. It took hundreds of years before the pagan festival was effectively squeezed to the edges of the celebrations. Down the centuries the fortunes of the festival waxed and waned – it was banned by the Puritans in the Commonwealth - and by the late C18 and early C19 it was pretty well in decline and little observed.

But, just as some say this is a pagan festival are right and wrong, so also those who insist that Christmas is a Christian festival are right, and they are wrong.

In the mid C19, associated with Charles Dickens in this country and Washington Irvine in the United States, Christmas received a complete makeover. The old Christmas was idealised and plundered for ideas. Christmas cards were invented, Christmas trees imported from Germany, Santa Claus as we know him now was made up. And although Christmas remained a Christian celebration this reinvention was not really a Christian. It became a time of generalised goodwill: a family time with children at its heart, and also a celebration of the extended family of the nation in which it was important to remember the poor members of the nation-family. It was predominantly a festival of sentimentalised humanitarianism.

And Christmas was also re-invented as the great commercial festival of production and consumption[2]. In fact Christmas has not really been commercialised. More the other way round: being so commercial is what has made Christmas so popular. From the second half of the C19 till today stores have been able to put on much greater displays, including religious displays, than churches could ever manage. And the growth of non-specific ‘seasons Greetings’ and non-religious imagery is a built into the commercial imperative to include as many people as possible in this festival of spend and indulge.

Now just as the pagans no doubt resented the Christian takeover of their feast, so the Christians may resent the way that commercial interests marginalize the celebration of Christ’s birth – and just like the pagans before them the Christians are on a loser. Christmas is a commercial festival, like it or lump it.

1. Christmas is a commercial festival grounded in a sentimentalised humanitarianism, in the family and care for the poor – so let’s enjoy it. Let’s enjoy being with the family – and also take the opportunity to care for others – a collection will be taken during the next hymn.

2. If Christians wish the story of the incarnation to be heard against the noise and distraction of contemporary Christmas, then we have to sharpen up our act considerably. We need to tell with much greater clarity the Christian account of God with us: the revelation of God in the person of Jesus; the story of our salvation told in flesh and blood, told in the mess of a stable and the mess of ordinary, unidealised human life.

3. In the face of the sentimentalism of the Christmas feast we need to go back to the story in the Bible – and discover again not simply its fairy-tale aspects. The result of God-with-us is not only signs and wonders, the glory of God made visible, but also its harsh dimensions: the massacre of the innocents, the exile of the holy family and the making of refugees as a consequence of the state’s exercise of power, the knowledge that this infant is born in order to be put to death.

Just as the pagan mid-winter feasting was a defiance of the darkest time of the year, and of the worst of the weather yet to come, so too Christianity may yet contradict the triviality of our age, and the secular superficiality around us. I can do so by facing the whole of life in all its beauty and its horrors, and defiantly re-asserting – God is with us.

So at the end of this service may we go out into the dark rejoicing in the knowledge that God’s light is born anew, and nothing –not commercialism nor sentimentality, not progress nor destruction, nor birth nor life nor death itself, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

[1] I have drawn on The Making of Modern Christmas, J.M. Golby and A.W. Purdue, (London, B.T. Batsford, 1986) for the history of Christmas, and on a number of internet sources including http://www.hope-of-israel.org/23xmas.htm

[2] The commercial, pre-Christian, and Christian festivals are all based on a mythological approach. Capitalism, no less than religion, depends for its vitality on willing participation and belief in the myth of renewal and re-creation in the face of possible annihilation.