12/1996
USN Cover Story
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/23xmas.htm
IN
SEARCH OF CHRISTMAS
Imagine a purer, less commercial, more
spiritual Christmas .But don't call it history.
Get links and more on the Christmas story
The yearning begins with the first shimmer of tinsel on a street lamp
downtown, the first tree glimpsed
through a frosty window, the first
familiar notes filtering into
consciousness at the grocery store or at
the mall. It is a longing impervious to the assaults of the season: to the
car salesmen dressed up as reindeer, the 1,652nd reprise of "White Christmas" on the radio, the 14th marital spat that ends with
"She's your relative!" And as the season ripens, it grows, displacing a year's worth of weariness,
cynicism and general, late-20th-century anxiety. You can see it in the eyes of a child
dragging a Christmas tree across the snow in Maine, in the faces of carolers at New York City's South Street
Seaport, in the Santa hat atop a "cattle crossing" sign near Blanco,
Texas.
Christmas is an American passion--96 percent of Americans say they
celebrate it in some form, according to a recent U.S. News/Bozell
poll. Yet for most people, the holiday
triggers an intense search for some
dimly remembered Christmas past, a nostalgia for a time when yuletide was more
pious and more peaceful, when it was free of gaudy commercialism and focused
more on the birth of the Savior than on the 20 percent-off sale at the local
department store.
The only problem is that, as historians are increasingly discovering,
this purer, simpler,
more spiritual past is more a product of our cultural imagination than of historical fact. A series of new studies suggests that the
observance of Christmas was never an
entirely religious affair, that many of
the most popular seasonal traditions are
relatively modern inventions and that
complaints of crass overindulgence and gross commercialism are nearly as
old as the holiday itself.
An affront unto God. Through most
of its history, the Christmas season has been a time of raucous revelry and bacchanalian
indulgence more akin to Mardi Gras or New Year's Eve than to a silent, holy
night. So tarnished, in fact, was its reputation in colonial America that
celebrating Christmas was banned in
Puritan New England, where the noted minister Cotton Mather described
yuletide merrymaking as "an affront
unto the grace of God." In a new book, The Battle for Christmas,
University of Massachusetts history professor Stephen Nissenbaum
describes the annual birthday celebration of the Prince of Peace as a perennial battleground for competing
cultural, religious and economic forces.
"There never was a time when Christmas existed as an unsullied
domestic idyll, immune to the taint of commercialism," Nissenbaum
writes.
The earliest celebrations of the Nativity were surprisingly late. There
is no record of official
observance of Christ's birth until the fourth century, when
Constantine, a Christian convert, was
emperor of Rome. The absence of a Nativity celebration before then, scholars say, reflects at least in part
the fact that no one knew for sure when Jesus was born. While some church traditions
place his birth between 6 B.C. and 4
B.C.--near the end of the reign of Herod the
Great--the gospels are silent on the year, let alone the exact month or
day.
Lacking any scriptural pointers to Jesus's birthday,
early Christian teachers
suggested dates all over
the calendar. Clement, a bishop of Alexandria who died circa A.D. 215, picked November 18 Hippolytus,
a Roman theologian in the early third century, figured Christ must have been born on a Wednesday the same day God created the sun. The De Pascha Computus, an anonymous document believed to have
been written in North Africa around A.D. 243, placed Jesus's
birth on March 28, four days after the first day of spring.
But even if they had known the date, says University of Texas historian Penne Restad,
the earliest Christians simply weren't
interested in celebrating the Nativity. "They expected the second Coming
any day," writes Restad in her 1995 book,
Christmas in America: A History. To celebrate Christ's birth would have seemed
to them pointless. Moreover, she says, they "viewed birthday celebrations as
heathen." The third-century church father Origen had declared it a sin to even think of
keeping Christ's birthday "as though he were a king pharaoh."
Raised from the
dead. What interested the early Christians more, historians say, was proclaiming the central message of their
faith: that the crucified Christ had
been raised from the dead. So important was the Resurrection to church life that the Apostle
Paul, writing in about A.D. 56 to the church in Corinth, asserted:
If Christ has not been
raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. . . . But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead.
The early focus on the
Resurrection explains why the Pascha, the Easter festival commemorating the Crucifixion
and Resurrection of Jesus during the Jewish Passover, was the only annual
celebration known to the early church, says Brian Daley, a theology professor
at the University of Notre Dame. Today, Easter remains the most important event on the Christian
calendar, even though 70 percent of
Americans--including 62 percent of those who attend church
regularly—told U.S. News/Bozell pollsters that they consider Christmas the most
significant Christian holiday.
The fact that the earliest gospel--St. Mark's, written about A.D.
50--begins with the baptism of an adult Jesus at the start of his
public ministry is yet another indication that the earliest Christians lacked
interest in the Nativity, scholars say.
Only St. Matthew's and St. Luke's gospels, written two to four decades
later, include stories about Christ's birth. By that time, says Paul Maier,
professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, "Christians,
believing in both the divinity and humanity of Jesus, were curious to know how
he came to be." Even
so, there is no mention in the New Testament of Christians
gathering to commemorate the birth of
Jesus.
It was conflict that eventually propelled the church toward celebrating
the Nativity, some
scholars contend, as it attempted to counter heresies
growing within its ranks. Among the most
contentious of the heresies was Docetism, the belief that
Christ was a spirit and did not possess a human body. "This had momentous
significance for the Christian view of salvation," says Paula Fredriksen,
professor of ancient Christianity at Boston University. "If Christ had no body,
then there was no bodily Crucifixion or
Resurrection." But by the fourth century, the official stand of the church in Rome
was that Christ was raised in both body and spirit and, consequently, both the believer's body and soul are redeemed in
salvation. Celebrating the birth of Jesus then, says Fredriksen,
"was one way of emphasizing that
Christ had a real human body."
Matter of conjecture. Exactly when
the church began celebrating Christmas, however, is unclear. The first mention of a Nativity feast,
scholars say, appears in
the Philocalian calendar, a Roman document from A.D. 354, which lists December 25 as the day of Jesus's
birth in Bethlehem of Judea. How the church arrived at December 25, when the
actual date of Christ's birth was unknown, is a matter of conjecture.
Most widely held is the view that the holiday was an intentional
"Christianization"
of Saturnalia and other
pagan festivals. In the third and fourth centuries, the church in Rome found itself in fierce competition with popular pagan
religions and mystery cults, most of
them involving sun worship. From the
middle of December through the first of January, Romans would engage in feasts and drunken
revelry, paying homage to their gods and marking the winter solstice, when days
began to lengthen. In A.D. 274, Emperor Aurelian decreed December 25--the solstice on the
Julian calendar--as natalis solis
invicti ("birth of the invincible sun"), a
festival honoring the sun god Mithras.
In designating
December 25 as the date for their Nativity feast, says Restad of the
University of Texas, Rome's Christians
"challenged paganism directly." They also were able to invoke rich biblical symbolism
that described Jesus as the "Sun of Righteousness" and God's "true light," sent to
dispel darkness in the world.
A second view suggests that church leaders arrived at the December 25 date based on the
belief, inherited from ancient Judaism,
that significant religious figures are
born and die on the same day of the month. One prominent church tradition of
the time held that Jesus died on March 25--the same date as his conception,
according to the tradition. Were that the case, he would have been born nine
months later, on December 25.
Whatever their reasons, by assigning Christmas to late December, when
people already were accustomed to celebrating, church leaders ensured widespread observance
of the Savior's birth. But in doing so,
says Nissenbaum, the church also "tacitly agreed to allow the
holiday to be celebrated more or less
the way it had always been." As one historian put it: "The pagan Romans became
Christians--but the Saturnalia remained."
Not surprisingly, the combination of the sacred and the profane made
some church leaders
uncomfortable. St. Gregory of Nazianzus,
a fourth-century
theologian and bishop of
Constantinople, cautioned against "feasting to excess, dancing and
crowning the doors" and urged celebration of the Nativity "after
an heavenly and not after an earthly
manner." But while there were always people for whom Christmas was a time of
reverence rather than revelry, says Nissenbaum,
"such people were in the minority." Christmas, he says, "has always been an extremely difficult holiday to
Christianize."
The custom of honoring Jesus's birth on
December 25 quickly spread to the Eastern Church, which at one time observed Epiphany,
January 6, as a joint feast of the Nativity and the baptism of Jesus. Over the
next 1,000 years,
Christmas observance followed the expanding church from Egypt to
northern Europe. In Scandinavia, it
became entwined with a pagan midwinter feast known as yule. And
by 1050, the words Christes maesse
("festival of Christ") had entered the English language. "From the 13th century
on," notes Restad, "nearly all Europe kept Jesus's
birth."
Pagan
pleasures. Indeed, they kept it much as the Romans had--in gluttonous feasts and
raucous public revelry. Leading clergy,
from time to time, tried to rein in abuses of Christmas merriment but usually to little avail. In
England, Restad notes, "celebrants devoted much
of the season to pagan
pleasures . . . discouraged the
remainder of the year." Writing in 1725, Anglican minister Henry
Bourne said the way most people behaved at Christmas was "a scandal
to religion and an encouraging of
wickedness." For many, he said, Christmas was "a pretense for drunkenness
and rioting and wantonness."
England's Puritans inveighed against keeping the holiday at all and succeeded for a
while in having it banned. The Puritans,
says Nissenbaum, "were correct when they
pointed out--and they pointed it out
often--that Christmas was nothing but a pagan
festival covered with a Christian veneer."
When Christmas landed on American
shores, it fared little better. In colonial times, Christ's birth was celebrated as a wildly social
event--if it was celebrated at all. Virginians hunted and danced and feasted, while poor city dwellers
partied and thronged the streets in
boisterous demonstrations, often begging food and drink at the homes of the well-to-do.
Puritans in New England flatly refused to observe the holiday.
In some cities, says Nissenbaum, the rather
benign English tradition of wassailing took on an increasingly menacing edge. In New
York City and Philadelphia, bands of young men would march into houses of the
wealthy, who were expected to proffer gifts of food and drink, sometimes in
exchange for a song or
an expression of goodwill. Often, says Nissenbaum,
exchanges included "an
explicit threat" as contained in one surviving wassail song:
We've come here to claim our right . . . And if you don't open up your door We will lay you
flat upon the floor.
Variations on the practice were common. In some cities, Christmas
revelers would cross-dress or
wear blackface as they went noisily from door to door. But in
each case, says Nissenbaum, Christmas exchanges amounted to a
passing of goods from master to servant, patron to pprentice and wealthy to poor. It as
a time, the historian says, "when the social hierarchy itself was symbolically turned
upside down." Into the early 19th century, quiet family celebrations and
gift exchanges among family members were largely unknown.
But Christmas in America was about to change. And when the changes came, they came
quickly and quite deliberately. By the
early 1820s, cities had mushroomed with industrialization and their Christmas
celebrations had turned
increasingly boisterous and sometimes violent. In 1828, according
to Nissenbaum,
New York City organized its first professional police force in response to a violent Christmas
riot. A concerned group of New York patricians
that included Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore, author of A
Visit From St. Nicholas, began a
campaign to bring Christmas off the streets into the family circle.
Invented
tradition. Moore's classic poem, written in 1822, provided the new
mythology for this
Christmas makeover. Moore's St. Nick--far from being the creature
of ancient Dutch folklore— was an "invented tradition," says Nissenbaum,
"made up with the precise purpose of appearing old-fashioned." To Moore's patrician audience, the
midnight visitor who "looked like a peddler" would have evoked plebeian wassailers. But rather than demanding food and drink, this
"jolly" and unthreatening
visitor bore gifts for the children who, until then, had played a rather
insignificant role in Christmas celebrations.
The poem quickly caught on, and newspapers soon began to editorialize
about the "domestic
enjoyments" of Christmas. Giving gifts to children and loved
ones eventually supplanted the wassail as the mainstay of holiday celebration.
And by the
mid-19th century, what began in New York had spread throughout the country.
Even some New England Presbyterians and congregationalists,
heirs to the Puritan legacy, became open celebrants of the Nativity. Christmas,
says Nissenbaum, had been taken from the streets and
domesticated.
Not surprisingly, the nation's merchants were favorably disposed to this
turn of events.
The new tradition of Christmas gift giving created an instant retail bonanza,
and merchants and
advertisers soon began to promote the season nearly as much as
they promoted their wares. By
the 1870s, one historian observes, "department stores often
outdid the churches in religious
adornment and symbolism, with
pipe organs, choirs, . . . statues of saints and angels" in a manner that
bathed "consumption in the reflected glory of Christianity."
Indeed, the holiday was on its way to
becoming what Princeton University professor of religion Leigh Eric Schmidt
called in his 1995 book, Consumer Rites, a "grand festival of
consumption."
By the early 20th century, stores had largely abandoned overtly
religious motifs, says Restad. But they "continued to undergo
marvelous alteration at holiday time, becoming strikingly `other' places." As competition for the
attention of holiday
shoppers escalated, so did the Christmas displays. During the 1940s, Chicago's
Marshall Field & Co. began to turn its huge department store into "a glittering
fairyland" at Christmastime and each year came up with a secret new theme for its decorations.
Santa on parade. To expand
holiday profits, many stores made Thanksgiving the official springboard for Christmas sales; others
started as early as Halloween. In 1920, Gimbels
in Philadelphia organized the first
Thanksgiving Day parade and featured Santa Claus as the main attraction. And in 1924, both Hudson's
in Detroit and Macy's in New York followed suit.
So vital was Thanksgiving in
launching the Christmas season, says Restad, that commercial interests
"conspired in resetting its date." In 1939, after years of
Depression-deflated sales, the head of Ohio's Federated Department
Stores argued that by advancing the date of Thanksgiving one week, six days
of shopping would be added. Convinced by
his logic, says Restad, President Franklin Roosevelt moved the
feast from November 30 to November 23. And
in 1941, Congress
set the annual date of Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in
November--ensuring a four-week shopping
season each year. The nation's recognition of Christmas as a powerful economic force had reached its
highest levels.
In the years since, the reinvented traditions of this modern American Christmas have
permeated the culture through a potent
combination of commerce and new communications media. Annual reruns of holiday television specials and
films like Miracle
on 34th Street have become rituals in
themselves, homogenizing the Christmas experience for many Americans.
And retailers have
come to count on yuletide
sales for up to 50 percent of their annual profits. The shopping season now
pumps an estimated $37 billion into the nation's economy--making the American
Christmas larger than the gross
national product of Ireland.
What many historians find most fascinating about the reinvention of
Christmas is that its
commercialization, now so frequently denounced, is what spawned
the transformation in the first place.
The "commercial forms" associated with Christmas and other holidays, says
Schmidt of Princeton, "have become integral to their survival." The consumer culture
"shapes our holidays," Schmidt says, "by taking in diverse, local traditions
and creating relatively common ones." To turn Christmas into a purely
religious celebration now might cheer those who want to "take back Christmas," he
says. But such an observance "would lack the cultural resonance and impact of a holiday deeply
rooted in the marketplace." If Christmas came to that, adds Restad, "we probably wouldn't keep it as a
society."
Piety or profit. Yet there
seems little danger of that happening. Christmas has far too powerful a grip on American culture: It is no more the
church's sole possession today than it was in ancient Rome. But given its long history of
controversy and the unremitting tension between piety and profit in its observance, the
"battle for Christmas" is all but certain to persist.
No matter how people choose to keep it--in the quiet of their homes or
churches, or in the noisy
cathedrals of suburban shopping malls--the arrival of Christmas, says Restad,
prods celebrants once again to
"confront our ideals" and to "examine our relationships with our
families, our communities and our
faith." Adds Nissenbaum: Christmas rituals,
whether old or new, sacred or
secular, will serve as they always have to "transfigure our
ordinary behavior" in ways that reveal
"something of what we would like to be, what we once were or what
we are becoming despite ourselves."
As thoughts return to a Bethlehem manger, the search begins again. And, at
least for a
season, it seems "peace on Earth, goodwill toward men" might be
possible after all.
BY JEFFERY L. SHELER
POLL
Many Americans think Christmas is too commercial: Forty-eight percent say the Santa
Claus tradition and gift giving detract from the religious celebration.
Forty-four percent of Americans think they spend too much money on gifts at
Christmas; 48 percent say they spend
just the right amount.
The spiritual aspect of the holiday is important to many Americans: Eighty-two percent agree that "Christmas
is a time of reflection for me."
U.S. News/Bozell poll of 1,003 adults
conducted by KRC Research Nov. 6-10,
1996, with consulting by U.S. News pollsters Celinda
Lake of Lake Research
and Ed Goeas of the Tarrance
Group. Margin of error: plus or minus 3.1 percent.