Christmas Gift!

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all!  We are having a tense morning at the ancestral Mead home today, jumping whenever the telephone rings.  There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the other person’s presents.  I’ve never known anybody to actually get an extra present this way, but we all continue to try.  If you call us on Christmas Day, don’t expect anybody here to answer with “Hello?”  and give you a chance to say “Christmas gift!”  We are onto this trick and to protect our rich hauls of presents we always answer the phone with an aggressive “Christmas gift!” to get in first.  So don’t call us unless you are ready to part with a present.

Today the Christmas blogging continues; this is the second of what could end up being as many as thirteen Christmas posts.  The series started yesterday on Christmas Eve and will, as time and energy permits, continue through January 6, the traditional end of the Christmas season.  Unless something truly exceptional happens, I’ll be taking a break from the political and historical blogging until the new year, and for much of the time I’ll be conducting important research into tropical ecosystems in Belize.  Internet access may be intermittent; it’s possible also that the heavy snorkeling schedule that the intensive research requires will cut into the blog time.

When I was a kid my parents used to set up a manger scene every year.  During Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, Mary and Joseph would set out en route to the manger, passing through the different rooms of the house and getting a little closer each day.  On Christmas Eve they got to the manger and on Christmas morning, they would be there with the baby Jesus, an ox, a donkey and the requisite shepherds and angels.

That was also the day the figures of the three wise men would set out toward the manger, retracing Mary and Joseph’s journey through the house until they joined the baby and the shepherds on January 6.  By then we were all pretty sick of Christmas and were happy to pack up the manger scene, take down the Christmas tree, and get on with our lives.

The manger scene these days really is the face of Christmas for most people.  The first one seems to have been assembled by St. Francis of Assisi in 1223.  It was a bit more dramatic than the ones we see today; he used actual living people rather than plastic figurines.  The animals were real, too, although there isn’t any direct evidence in the Biblical story that there were animals anywhere nearby.

Christmas has been a contentious holiday at least since then. St. Francis introduced the manger scene hoping that it would draw attention away from gift giving and secular celebrations to the religious meaning of the season.  This does not seem to have worked very well; the last time I checked, the score at the mall seemed to be Santa Claus ten million, St. Francis zip.

In Anglo-American history, the Puritans gave up on trying to ‘put the Christ back in Christmas’ and just tried to get rid of Christmas completely.  They banned it completely in Massachusetts and did the same thing in the old country after the English Civil War.  Well into the nineteenth century, Christmas was ignored by many New England Christians; according to one report, no college in New England celebrated the Christmas holiday as late as 1847.  After all, there’s no date given for Christmas in the Bible; our custom of celebrating Jesus’ birthday on December 25 has nothing to do with the scriptures, and everything to do with the way the ancient church tried to take over pagan festivals.  Two of the classics of Christmas literature, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and The Night Before Christmas (most likely by Clement Clarke Moore), come from the early nineteenth century when Christmas was fighting for wider acceptance in the English speaking world.

It’s sometimes hard to know which pieces of Christmas come from the Bible (shepherds, manger, baby, parents, angels, wise men), what comes from paganism (date, trees, mistletoe, lights, logs, presents), what comes from pious legends (animals, crowns for wise men, one of them being black), what from medieval custom (manger scenes, carol singing), what comes from sentimental Victorian literature (named reindeer, flying sleigh, Santa Claus as a fat and jolly elf, Tiny Tim) and what comes from modern commercialism (dreaming of a white Christmas, Rudolf, the little drummer boy, the grinch).

Christmas meanwhile reigns as both the world’s most popular and universal modern holiday and the world’s most repressed and despised one.  The spirit of St. Francis is still very much with us; the pulpits of Christendom thunder every December with orations urging us to turn away from the secular festivities at the mall and spend more time and energy on the ‘true spirit of the season’.  Some of the pushback is more in the spirit of Cotton Mather and John Winthrop: religious zealots and scripture-thumping clerics in much of the Islamic world today frown on both the secular and the religious celebration of the day.  In Iraq today, many churches were closed due both to fears of fanatical Sunni-based terrorists and a concern for awakening Shi’a hostility; this year Christmas comes very close to the day on which Shi’a Muslims commemorate the Battle of Karbala and the death of Husayn ibn Ali. In some of the countries in the Arab speaking world, all public expression of Christian faith is banned by law, and putting up so much as a holiday wreath or a picture of Santa Claus where the public can see is strictly verboten.  In Gaza, Palestinian Christians report persecution from Islamic extremists.  St. Nicholas, an early Christian bishop based in what is now Turkey who lived 300 years after Jesus and whose legendary generosiy and good deeds led to his metamorphosis into the modern figure of Santa Claus, was persecuted for his faith under the Roman emperor Diocletian; this Christmas Christians still face persecution in many countries around the world.  While improving, conditions in China and Vietnam are still far from perfect.  In South Asia, mob violence can still be a problem in both India and Pakistan.

There are a number of organizations working to promote religious freedom for both Christians and non-Christians around the world.  An end of year gift might be one nice way to celebrate the season and promote religious toleration.  One in particular with whose work I am familiar seems both responsible and wise; the Institute for Global Engagement led by Chris Seiple works effectively with both religious and political figures in many countries around the world to find solutions to problems of religious intolerance.

Internet access and snorkeling commitments permitting, Yule blogging will continue during the rest of the holiday season.  And, by the way, Christmas gift!

You all now owe me a present.