Host
I’ve had a kind of ongoing sound bite in my head since the season started taking shape.

Marc Anthony
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

Host
If we step back and look at Christmas: what it is, how we got here, what it means. You know, really look at it. What happens? Does it change?

Yeah. I’d say there’s no doubt that the holiday is going to seem to change.

But how?

Does it get better? Does its meaning change? Could the holiday we know, disappear completely? Man, I’d hate for that to happen – to tell a story that takes away something, you know, anything from Christmas. But I don’t think that means that we can’t ask the question: what is Christmas?

I started looking into Christmas because I thought it was a simple story, something ancient, something that’s maybe been oversimplified but cohesive, linear. But maybe that’s not true.

Maybe a Christmas comes at us from the side, you know, someplace we’d least expect. And maybe – the way we actually celebrate, you know, without thinking, what just happens every season. Maybe that’s closer to why we have Christmas at all.

This season, we’re going to figure out why we celebrate Christmas And if that changes your view of the holiday – stick with me, because on the other side, maybe that’s where the true Christmas magic begins.

Welcome to Creative Christmas Season 2.

Audio
Keep coming back to the start.

Host
Back where I grew up. There was this urban legend.

whispers

Host
A sort of whisper. That kids shared as the year moved closer to the holidays. It might have started with someone saying it outside the parking lot, but by December, this whisper made its way inside our church, into the Bible school.

Cut-Away
Well, you know, Christmas. It started as a pagan holiday.

Host
Now, pagan. That’s always been a tricky word for me. Its negative connotation always seems to outweigh its pretty vague, nonjudgmental definition. So hearing this rumor back in high school, it was too tempting not to repeat, you know, throw it in the faces of the adults that acted like they had everything figured out. Now, like all urban legends, this myth had a way of disappearing and reappearing every year.

I might have been the one that brought it back one season, the night in early December, and when I did:

Cut-Away
Man, Christmas started as a pagan holiday.

Host
That wasn’t my opening line to a larger thought. It was the entire statement. I said it, but it didn’t really believe it. I didn’t believe it because how could I? Christmas is Christian.

It’s right there in the name right?

Now, I don’t know. Because, you know, every story has two sides, and this one has even more than that. When we look back at the roots of modern Christmas, what we find is something so different from our current celebration. Nothing like it really at all. Its roots are completely crazy compared to today. Totally wild.

And if we try and find a linear path from these older traditions, does one even exist? Or is our Christmas story really the story of 100 faded traditions, finally running into something that we created ourselves?

So today on Creating Christmas, part one of our two part series, Making the Holiday the World Needed.

Music

Host
To consider Christmas. You have to first consider the long, cold darkness of winter.

Poetry Reading:
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches…
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

No more the scarlet maples flash and burn

The steel-blue river like a scimitar

Lies cold and curved between the dusky hills.

The frost performs its secret ministry,
The owlet’s cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.

“Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.”

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!

The Call

Dark, and the wind-blurred pines,
           With a glimmer of light between.
Then I, entombed for an hourless night
           With the world of things unseen

Then, lift your head and bark.
It’s just the call of the lonesome place,

O Winter!

Lo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings
To his strong bones, strides o’er the groaning rocks:
He withers all in silence, and in his hand
Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.

Host
This idea – of winter – starting there, it changed the entire way. I was looking at our holiday season. I’ve been looking at it like this :

We can trace back our Christmas holiday when it breaks down into just a series of traditions and we can start there.

Or we can go even further back to when those traditions dissolve into just general celebration.

But if we go even further back, back to a time when all that remains is a series of stories.

To when so little was known about the world, almost beyond what can be studied – There was winter and we can start there.

This way of beginning our Christmas story really got me, so I had to reach out to the author.

Bruce David Forbes
I’m Bruce. I’m a professor emeritus of religious studies at Morningside College, although now it’s known as Morningside University.

Host
Now this ancient winter. This was multiple thousands of years ago. And even though much that history is hard to trace, we can imagine the impact of the season on our ancestors by thinking about the effects of winter on us, even today.

Although we have all this technology, I mean, sure, we have heat and electricity, but we also have full spectrum light bulbs and therapies, hotlines, and still we are hugely impacted by winter.

Bruce David Forbes
Our college has May interims where we often travel and I’ve led three student groups to Alaska. Every time we would spend some time in Willow, Alaska, this little village an hour and a half north of Anchorage. The rest of it is really undeveloped until you get to Denali. And we talked to this minister in a mission church who said – we were there in May which is like when spring was about ending – he said, if you really want to know the challenges of Alaska, you have to come here in December or January because that’s when it – depending on where you are – you can have only three and a half hours of daylight a day and you could the temperature gets to 50 below zero even before you calculate wind chill. And he said, When I bring in seminary interns to work with me, I bring them in December and January, because that’s where people need help. You can imagine domestic abuse, various kinds of addictions. You have all kinds of problems that people struggle with.

And I thought, yes, and then my imagination gets going and I think:

What about people in central or northern Europe? In the Middle Ages? I mean, in a way, I think approaching winter is a little like walking into death and you hope you’ll come out on the other side.

So if that if I can see that about winter, I started to imagine what would I guess that human beings would do to try to cope with winter And I’ve got a good guess.

Let’s try to have a great big blowout mid-winter party. Wouldn’t that be a good idea? And I could guess when it would be and what it would be like.

Host
So but still, the winter party.

Bruce David Forbes
First of all, when would you have the Blowout Mid-Winter Party? You’d have it when the days stopped getting shorter and level out and they’re ready to start getting longer again, which would be mid to late December. And what would it be like? It would feature lights. Push back the darkness. Because winter is not just cold. It’s dark. So you’d have candles of burning logs and bonfires and things like that that you could do.

It would feature evergreens – because when it looks like everything else is died, the evergreens look like life. And in fact, you could also feature other plants that not only stay green in the middle of winter, but bear fruit in the middle of winter – like mistletoe, like holly. And you would obviously have gatherings because with winter separates people so you’d have family gatherings or gatherings in the Village Tavern or something like that.

You would feast. You would probably drink a lot. You would maybe dance and play games and maybe give each other presents.

And then guess what? That’s exactly what happened.

Host
This sounds reasonable. I mean, I can imagine it, except maybe this all feels a bit too simple, too easy, and I might not believe it, except all these separate cultures and all these different places in Europe independently created these very similar mid-winter celebrations.

Bruce David Forbes
Right. Right.

Host
And they were disconnected from each other, but they still kind of came up with the same ideas.

Bruce David Forbes
Right. Simply because it’s it’s the seasons that are the uniting factor. Yeah. It’s not like, oh, we had committees in each place. And, oh, isn’t it a coincidence that they came up with the same party. It’s just that if you’re experiencing the seasons, it just is natural that human beings, even in pre-history, would do something like this. And indeed, they did.

Host
There is one factor that we left out when we were building our party, and it heavily contributed not only to the creation of these early mid-winter parties, but it stayed an important cornerstone to this time of year for a very long time. And that’s the harvesting of crops and the slaughtering of animals.

It was right around this time each year that the last the harvest was brought in. It was a time of abundance something very rare in the world for thousands of years. There’s an abundance of food and beer.

Also, with farming completed, there was less work to do. So people had more downtime.

All these things came together to give us a shape of these mid-winter festivals. So in its most raw form, this is where our mid-winter celebrations began : organically. Which gives us this question.

And if this isn’t just about the heart of Christmas, it’s about something very close to it:

If we think of our Christmas being in some way an ancestor of these first winter celebrations, is Christmas a human condition? And if it is, look, I’m going to ask something crazy here. But bear with me. If these really are human conditions, does that mean that Christmas is in all of us?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

But I can’t say that these simple homespun parties didn’t stay that way for long. Our essential winter celebration became something different as certain practices became repeated yearly is the start of winter traditions. And what I mean is expected annual events that became attached to these mid-winter gatherings – to the point that you could say these were more than just parties.

They were now holidays.

While many cultures develop their own certain practices and beliefs around this time of year., we’re going to jump ahead to the Roman times.

By this point, there were two main European celebrations that stick out Saturnalia and Yule. They both had a large adoption. And most importantly, there’s actually recorded history about the traditions and the holidays themselves.

The evolution from these basic winter parties leaned heavily on the party aspects of early celebrations, and the shift they took looks very different from anything we would now recognize as a mid-winter party at Christmas.

Host Cut-Away
Are you ready to Saturnalia?

Host
Some popular forms of Saturnalia celebration were drinking and making out. But there was also an emphasis on social inversion. It was common for people to cross-dress or dress as animals, masters and servants to change places – where the master would serve their servant. And we had the appearance of one of my personal favorite aspects of the holiday “The Lord of Misrule”.

Bruce David Forbes
A person would select a servant and say, “You’re in charge for the day and you can do anything you want”. And that meant that other people who were in charge would have to serve the servant and the people that that servant chose. But it also – and I think this is where people just wanted to take advantage of their power – as they would make people do silly things.

Lord Of Mis-Rule Scene :
Lord
You there, servant. I declare you Lord of misrule of me.

Servant
Uhh, me? Well, roll in the mud, lick my shoe, and call me King.

Lord
A merry Saturnalia to you as well sire.

Host
quick note. Misrule wasn’t all this innocent, especially by today’s standards, as you can imagine, when someone is encouraged to create mischief, things can get a little bonkers.

Bruce David Forbes
It was pretty licentious and lots of drinking and it was wild. But guess what? In that celebration, which was kind of early to mid-December, it had bonfires, it had greenery. It had presents. It had, you know, these gatherings.

Host
So even with these new, rowdier traditions, these celebrations were built on to the long standing organic winter festivals and held on to those characteristics. They maintained one additional thing that is often left unsaid, but underlines a bigger shift in our thinking.

When we look back at Saturnalia and the other celebrations at the time, these were community events out of the house, adult group celebrations. The domestic aspect of celebrating that we now associate with Christmas was completely absent from these holidays.

So here we are in the golden age of Rome, with most of Europe celebrating a winter festival that is centered around abundance and excess.

After the break, indulgences meet sobriety. Christianity steps into the holiday mix.

Audio

Biblical Reading
And so it was that while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And suddenly there was with the angel, a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying glory to God in the highest end on earth. Peace, goodwill toward men.

Host
Now we add in Jesus first the Roman Empire, and it’s Saturnalia celebration span the time before, during and for a while after the life of Jesus Christ. Not to mention the many other winter celebrations that were spread throughout Europe spanning the same timeframe. So to go back to myself in high school:

Cut-Away
“Man, Christmas started as a pagan holiday”

Host
Clearly, there was an established celebration prior to Christianity that beat Christmas to Christmas.

But what that was. Well, that would all change, right? Because Jesus and birthdays.

Bruce David Forbes
I think when I talk to audiences, one of the things that surprises the most is that the early Christians did not have a Christmas – or better way to put it, as they did not have an annual celebration for the birth of Jesus.

Host
Wait, what?

Bruce David Forbes
Well, first of all, if you wanted to have a birthday party for someone, it would help to know the month and the date, wouldn’t it? And we have no idea.

Another problem is that the early Christians really believe that Jesus was going to come yet soon, even within that generation. So they weren’t worried about setting up, you know, annual celebrations or anything like that.

A third one, which I think it interests me a lot, is there was an early influential Christian theologian named Origin. I know it’s kind of an unusual sounding name, but Origin wrote about this and he said that Christians would not celebrate birthdays. That was just what the pagans, in other words, the non-Christians do.

Host
Now, I grew up in the Christian church and I might have said that Christmas had a pagan past, but this is hard for me to believe. Christmas just is Jesus birthday, right?

How could no one have ever tipped me off that what I believe was wrong? So I reached out to a friend who happens to be a pastor.

Pastor Matt Kelly
Hi. My name is Matt Kelly. I’m a United Methodist pastor. I also have a doctorate in biblical studies from Emory University. And I’m just kind of a big Bible nerd.

Host
Is Christmas actually Jesus’s day of birth?

Pastor Matthew Kelly
Probably not.

Host
Oh, man.

We’re going to devote an entire episode to Christianity and Christmas later in the season. But there are a few things that we can avoid talking about right now, because this intersection of Christianity and winter celebrations has a major impact on the holiday, but maybe not in the way you might expect.

Pastor Matthew Kelly
There’s really no way of knowing exactly what date or time of year Jesus was born, strictly based on the Bible. There are two different birth narratives in the Gospels, one in Matthew, one and Luke. They’re both extraordinarily different. And neither of them give give a specific time of year.

Host
Do you think any of this information is widely known? Do you think that the majority of people know that this December 25th date is not historically accurate? Or do you think there’s just a general belief that Jesus was born on Christmas?

Pastor Matthew Kelly
I don’t know that most people have been asked that question, honestly. I think they just sort of roll with it.

Host
Did you know any of this stuff growing up?

Pastor Matthew Kelly
No, I think I started asking those questions probably starting at high school, maybe when I started to understand, when I started to really study the Bible more seriously in college and and whatnot.

Host
So if this is news to you, it’s probably also new information to many of the people, you know.

Let me ask you a question. As a pastor, do you think it matters that we celebrate a day for Jesus’s birth on the day that he was actually born? Or is it more that we’re celebrating his birthday, and any time we celebrate that, it is the celebration unto itself?

Pastor Matthew Kelly
I think the very fact that we celebrate that he was born, that God has come incarnate into the world in a very powerful way is important, more so than the day of the year.

Let me make an analogy to actually the place of Jesus birth. So, the place that Jesus is said to have been born is is in Bethlehem, not far from Jerusalem.

There’s a place there called the Church of the Nativity. That’s kind of in the center of town, kind of higher up on the hill. And it is a place that was venerated as the place of Jesus birth for several centuries. But in the fourth century, the mother of the Roman emperor builds this church over the place in Bethlehem, where people had for a while had been saying Jesus was born.

And about ten, ten years ago, I made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and we visited a lot of these places. And the guy leading our tour at one point asked all of us,

“how much does this matter to you if it happened on this exact spot or not?”

And that was a really interesting question. Do I care whether Jesus plopped out of his mother’s womb on this exact spot that is in this grotto underneath the altar, in this beautiful ancient church where I can touch the stone?

Honestly, not really. I’m not as concerned whether that is the exact spot, whether it was two feet there, whether it was another town, whatever, going there and feeling the presence and frankly, the weight of the generations of Christians who have venerated this spot, who have come to this place to make it more real for them, has made it very holy, whether historically it happened here or not, I don’t really know. And I’m not as interested in that as the fact that this has become this place of deep meaning for people.

So it brings you back around your question of the date. I’m not as concerned about the date as I am about or what is it that we do as a people, as a community, faith, as maybe as even a whole culture.

What is the deep meaning that we are accessing by doing this as this regular practice?

Host
So here we have another question to you. Does this change Christmas?

Biblical Reading
And suddenly there was with the angel, a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill, toward men.

Host
Jesus’s birthday was added to the Christian calendar and three 354 A.D.

It’s a bit unclear how exactly the church saw their new religious holiday working in a world that already had a rowdy winter celebration at the same time. That is, until Pope Gregory, the first known as Gregory the Great. He made it real clear.

As Saint Augustine went out to spread the gospel, Gregory told him to essentially graph Christianity on the preexisting customs.

Pope Gregory
The Idol temples of that should by no means be destroyed, but only the idols in them. Take holy water and sprinklers in these shrines built altars and place relics in them. Thus, while some outward rejoicing in the preserved, they will be able more easily to share in inward rejoicing. It is doubtless impossible to cut out everything at once from their stubborn minds.

Just as the man who was attempting to climb to the highest place rises by steps and degrees and not by leaps.

Bruce David Forbes
It never starts as a pure Christian celebration, and then other things get mixed in. When it gets started, it’s already fuzed with the Midwinter Festival.

Host
So what does that mean for the types of celebrations that would happen that immediately calmed down the celebrations that were happening? Or did Christian Christmas just become kind of a crazy holiday?

Bruce David Forbes
Well, I think it’s from the beginning, it’s always been kind of a struggle. It’s like a compromise, and you’re trying to decide…there’s one author who says it’s always been difficult for Christians to Christianize Christmas.

So I think if people today, like if they come from Christian background and they feel it’s kind of a struggle of how to balance it, this should make them feel good because it’s always been that way.

Host
So we had the beginning of a religious holiday that relied heavily on preexisting winter celebrations. It would actually be hundreds of years later in the 11th century when the world would finally have a branded holiday. What we now celebrate is Christmas coming out of midnight mass is named Christ Mass.

Something else especially interesting about the 11th and 12th century is who the number one most popular saint was more popular than the Virgin Mary. It was a bishop for modern day Turkey whose legend included Raising the dead and giving away bags of gold. His name was Saint Nicholas.

SFX
Ho Ho Ho

Host
This brings us to the 16th and 17th century. Now, most Europeans were celebrating Christmas in a more or less indulgent Carnival style, which included heavy drinking wassailing, gambling, kissing, more drinking, cross-dressing and mumming.

And these weren’t French celebrations either. These were the sorts of things that happened at parties that King James, the first was throwing in the castle. So to go back to those struggles that Bruce mentioned –

They came to a head in the 1600s Protestant, specifically Puritans, went on the offense and ended up with control of England and the English colonies for roughly 20 years.

There’s a second urban legend that you’ve heard passed around the parties. It probably has to do with this period – the Puritan period – when Christmas was canceled in time.

English Proclamation
For preventing disorders arising in several places within this jurisdiction by reason of some still observing such festivals as was superstitious to be kept in other countries – to the great dishonor of God and offense of others. It is therefore ordered by this Court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way upon such accountants as aforesaid.

Every person so offending shall pay of every such offense five shillings as a fine to the county.

Host
Oh, so Christmas dead – sort of.
This period of canceled Christmas all has to be tempered with the check on what this actually meant in the real world.

First, there just aren’t too many accounts of people being punished or fined for celebrating. Most of the legal side effects of this for court’s not allowing charges to be dismissed because the person said they were celebrating Christmas.

And on the other end of things, there was a significant enough pushback against canceling Christmas in London that often shops had to close anyway to avoid angry crowds and riots.

Secondly, I want to point out that while this is going on in England and its colonies, the rest of Europe isn’t following suit. Countries like France, Germany and Sweden continue their annual Christmas celebrations, and not just in their home countries, also in their colonies.

So why no Christmas?

It’s easy to assume the most obvious story. The Puritans objected to passing out drunk, cross-dressing and strangers making out, you know, Christmas parties – and to believe that it was this sort of celebration alone that led to them wanting to cancel Christmas. But we’re actually dealing with something deeper here.

Bruce David Forbes
The story for that is that when the Church of England breaks from the Catholic Church and this is in the 1500s, when all kinds of other Reformation stuff is going on, it, first of all, is just an institutional break. They’re pretty much still a Catholic Church. It’s just the pope isn’t in charge anymore. The king is in charge.

But there are some folks who are influenced by Luther in Calvin, mostly Calvin, say, well, now that we’ve done this, let’s do it right and let’s get rid of a lot of that other Catholic stuff that we don’t agree with. And they don’t think that’s really Christian. And those are people that we call Puritans. And so these Puritans, they would oppose a celebration of Christmas.

People say, why? One reason was they said, we’re trying to get back to the way the early church was and the early Christians didn’t celebrate Christmas.

And by the way, they’re right about that.

Host
As I mentioned, this Puritan rule didn’t last long.

When the monarchy was restored, Christmas was reinstated in England. The colonies, on the other hand, tried to hold out but eventually gave in to pressure from the crown. So we headed into the 1700s with a legal Christmas, but not much in the means of celebration.

I mean, here we are about 100 years from the explosion of Christmas, the beginning of a gigantic holiday, the size and scope of which the world has never seen before and barely anyone is celebrating.

Bruce David Forbes
Even though the Puritan revolution was only successful for a period of time, their discouragement of Christmas kind of had lingering effect. I mean, you had a whole generation that didn’t have much of a Christmas, and it continued on so that it almost became the lost or forgotten holiday.

For about 150 years. Christmas almost goes away.

Host
So where does this all put us in the timeline of creating our Christmas? Well, Bruce has come up with a metaphor that I think is really helpful to understand just that.

Bruce David Forbes
It seems to me that many holidays, not all, but many holidays are in essence three layer cakes. And to explain that quickly, the underlying first layer is a seasonal celebration, for instance, celebrating the coming of spring or fall or whatever.

The second layer is that religions or nations or some other cultural group comes along and adds a layer of meaning on top of the seasonal celebration that already has been practiced

And then thirdly, modern popular culture comes along, and I chuckle when I say this, and does all kinds of things to the previous two layers.

But if you look at many of the holidays we have today, you can see those three layers.

Host
So coming up in part two of the world, the holiday the world needed – Christmas goes pop. Then when the world turns back to Christmas, it takes less than 100 years to invent and recreate the holiday from nothing to become what we celebrate now.

Bruce David Forbes
But I think everything comes back roaring. It was really rowdy.

Judith Flanders
And it was rowdy well into the 19th century.

Host
It involved a lot of connecting the dots, some historic amnesia and a few books that would change the world forever.

Creating Christmas was produced this week by me, Bobby Christian and Oversaturated Inc. Special thanks to Bruce David Forbes and his book Christmas A Candid History and the Matthew Kelly Also, that last voice you heard was historian and author Judith Flanders. You’ll hear more from her in the next episode.

This has been a team effort. Check out the website CreatingChristmasPodcast.com for a full list of the sources I found most helpful in discovering the roots of our Christmas.

In fact, check out that website for all sorts of cool episode extras.

If you like today’s episode, you’ll find a new in every week all the way till Christmas. And if you have time, great reviews on the podcast platform of your choice. I hear for every new review, an angel gets its wings.

I’m Bob Christian. And until next time.

Audio Exit