Great Things Series: Christmas

Five and a Half Great Things About Christmas | Maker's Rage Podcast

Join Darren in the Maker's Rage podcast as he explores five fascinating aspects of Christmas and one not-so-great aspect in this seasonal episode. Discover the historical, cultural, and mythological roots of Christmas, from its early Christian origins and pagan influences to the traditions of gift-giving, winter festivities, and the commercialization of the holiday. Dive deep into interesting insights about iconic Christmas elements like Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and the celebrated story 'A Christmas Carol.' Like, subscribe, and enjoy a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

00:00 Introduction to the Maker's Rage Podcast

00:47 The Origins of Christmas

02:40 Winter: The First Great Thing About Christmas

03:56 The Heroic Age of Exploration

04:47 The Evolution of Santa Claus

09:34 Giving and Receiving: The Second Great Thing About Christmas

14:34 A Christmas Carol: The Third Great Thing About Christmas

17:29 Pagan Origins: The Fourth Great Thing About Christmas

22:09 Commercialization: The Not So Great Thing About Christmas

25:53 The True Meaning of Christmas

27:28 Personal Reflections and Conclusion

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Transcript

 Hello, my name's Darren, and welcome to the Maker's Rage podcast,  and a seasonal five and a half great things episode, as I'll be running through five great things and one not so great ting about Christmas. Our Christ's Mass, deriving from a combination of the Greek word Christos, which is a translation of the Hebrew Messiah, both words meaning anointed,  and Mass, from the Latin Misa, the celebration of the Eucharist. 

Its first recorded use in English was as  Christes Messe in 1038.  Of course, it's not called Christmas in other languages. The Germans refer to the period as Weihnachten, meaning holy or consecrated night. In Spanish it's Navidad, in French Noël, and Irish Nulloch.  Each of these ultimately deriving from the Latin natalis meaning birthday. 

In Mandarin, incidentally, it's called Sheng Dan, meaning birth of the sage.  There are both religious and historical reasons why it's celebrated on the 25th of December, despite there being no biblical justification for this. Some early Christians believed that Jesus was conceived on March the 25th, the date of the Annunciation.

Add Nine months, and that's December the 25th. And after Constantine endorsed Christianity in the Roman Empire, December 25th was recorded as the official celebration of Christ's birth in Rome  in 336 A. D.  The main reason it' s celebrated around the time of the Winter Solstice, though,  was to consolidate it with already existing pagan traditions, like the Roman Saturnalia  or the Dies Natales Solis Invicti.

Birthday of the unconquered sun. By not completely upending these existing traditions, it meant the transition to Christianity in the Empire was easier. Plus having a festival around the time of the shortest, darkest day of the year makes the season a little more tolerable. Which brings me to my first great thing about Christmas, and a controversial one,  Winter. 

"Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside. said Thomas De Quincey.  Candles at four o'clock, warm heart h rugs, tea, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor,  whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without. "  Now add a Christmas tree, stockings above the fireplace, holly and ivy, and chestnuts roasting, the evocation is complete. 

Because now we're able to protect ourselves from the worst this season can inflict. A season our ancestors anticipated with dread. Winter is coming, they repeatedly warned in the Game of Thrones,  as if it would come with the apocalypse. Robert Frost believed the world would end in fire, but if it had to perish twice, he said, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction, ice is also great, and would suffice.

A vision like the snowscapes surrounding Mont Blanc, described by Shelley as a desert people by the storms alone, save when the eagle brings some hunters bone.  It took centuries after circumnavigating the globe to finally conquer the poles. The last frontier of the heroic age of exploration was as far as it was possible to be from the equator.

So what else besides a comfy fireplace makes winter so great?  The coldest, darkest days of the year,  when you're more likely to become ill, depressed. Why wouldn't we stick a magical festival in the middle of it, when winter is personified by a jolly, overfed father figure who comes from the North Pole, not a hostile  wasteland, but a winter wonderland. 

The first undisputed expedition to reach the North Pole was that of the airship Norge, which overflew the area in 1926 with 16 men on board, including expedition leader Roald Amundsen. By this time, the image of old Santa Claus, or Saint Nick, with his bushy beard and herd of magical flying reindeer was well established, largely by Clement Clark Moore and Thomas Nast in America. 

Moore, who elaborated on an anonymous illustrated poem, From 1821 called 'Old Santa Claus' s Much Delight',  which he adapted into 'a visit from St. Nicholas', better known as 'the Night Before Christmas.' "He was a right jolly old elf," he says, "with clothes all tarnished with ashes and soot, twinkling eyes, merry dimples, and a beard as white as snow."

By 1881, the illustrator Thomas Nast had perfected his vision of Santa,  even introducing the world to Santa's workshop  as well as the notion that his base of operations could be found in the North Pole. 

It wasn't until as late as 1968 that the first complete land expedition to reach the North Pole was accomplished. Walt Pedersen, Jerry Pritzel and Jean Luc Bombardier used snowmobiles with air support. I guess they didn't have flying reindeer  and they neglected to report back the existence of any workshop there. The bigger prize was the South Pole to be fair. And it was again Roald Amundsen who got there first,  not long before Christmas in 1911, and five weeks before, Robert Falcon Scott, who would perish in his attempt.

It didn't help that he was dragging a bunch of fossils around with him, for his was a scientific expedition first and foremost. Amundsen's goal was simply to reach the pole.  Both attempts were heroic though, recalling previous heroic encounters with the cold. Sir John Franklin's disastrous attempt to find the Northwest Passage aboard the ship Erebus, a word that means the darkness in Greek, and Erebus was the personification of utter darkness in Greek mythology.

Mary Shelley, in her novel Frankenstein, subtitled The New Prometheus, uses a polar expedition as a frame around the main narrative , connecting the reader to Victor's tale, while also providing a parallel between Walton the Explorer's obsessive ambition and Victor's own destructive pursuit of knowledge. And yet we can't help but admire them.

As we do Hannibal crossing the Alps with a herd of elephants. A feat that seems unbelievable. What effrontery to flout at the worst that winter has to offer riding atop an African elephant. And though he ended up losing many of his men and most of his elephants, hannibal did get across and defeated the Romans at the battles of Ticinius and Trebia . A feat so legendary, Napoleon had to emulate it. Before securing a decisive victory at the Battle of Marengo.  Even the greatest conquerers saw winter as a worthy foe. One, that had yet to be fully subjugated. Because in Napoleon's day, Europe was still emerging out of the Little Ice Age. A 400 year period of regional cooling that saw the worst winters in modern history. 

And yet it was during this period that art was even asserting its dominance over it. Hunters in the Snow by Peter Bruegel the Elder, Winter Landscape with Skaters by David Vinkboons, and the River Thames Frost Fair by Thomas Wick, which depicted winter as no longer dreadful but almost appealing, for the cosy hearth is ever near, and inviting. You'll see all these in a video version of this podcast, by the way. 

And around the time Napoleon was crossing the Alpes, henry Rayburn famously painted the dandyish Reverend Robert Walker skating on  Duddingston Loch , careless of the forbidding landscape surrounding him. For in the age of reason, there were few worlds left to conquer, and winter became just a natural consequence of the Earth's tilting away from the Sun each year, and holds no fear for men of learning. Indeed, it was an opportunity to go skating on the Loch.

 So winter, in a sense, has been domesticated. And we derive a kind of pleasure out of listening to the howling winds, the patter of snow or rain, from the comfort of inside.  Some of us even use these sounds as lullabies.  And there are YouTube videos getting millions of views consisting of hours on end  of a crackling fireplace and the sound of winter outside. As Longfellow said, "Chill airs and wintry winds, my ear has grown familiar with your song. I hear it in the opening year. I listen and it cheers me long. " 

 Great thing number two about Christmas. Giving and receiving. "You received gifts from me. They were accepted. But you don't understand how they think about the dead. The smell of winter apples, of hoar frost and of linen. There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor earth. Czeslaw Milosz . 

There's something about Christmas, the time of year, that inspires generosity in people. With many donating to charity or performing random acts of kindness. The cynic in me wonders why most people reserve it for this time of year.

Because, I suppose being kind, charitable, all the time, is difficult. And though some of us are more charitable than others , we don't tend to  bestow our Christmas gifts on strangers. And unlike Santa, none of us has the means to give a gift to everyone on the planet. So we reserve it for those closest to us. 

And Santa isn't really a giver of gifts, but of rewards and punishments. Whether or not a child receives a gift is contingent upon how well they behaved the previous year.  The point of a gift is that it isn't bestowed conditionally, nor with the expectation that you'll get something in return. It can't be bestowed as having a price, for that implies indebtedness,  and a gift is destroyed by being turned into a commodity. 

How ironic it is then that the act of gift giving itself, in being commercialized during Christmas, has been commodified. We feel pressured to bestow gifts at Christmas, because we know we will receive them. And when we receive a gift unexpectedly from someone, we're overcome by a sense of indebtedness, even if the giver bestowed it as a gift in the true sense, without expecting anything in return.  

In his book, titled The Gift, Lewis Hyde proposes that gifts must always be on the move. And he describes how in many folk tales, the person who tries to hold on to a gift usually dies. So if the gift isn't passed along, it will consume the bearer. 

Unless the bearer consumes it first.  And that's another way to describe the motion of a gift. . That it musn't be hoarded away but used up. "The gift is property that perishes, in other words, in the sense that it perishes for the person who gives it away. Quoting Hyde,  In gift exchange the transaction itself consumes the object. Now it's true that something often comes back when a gift is given,  but if this were made an explicit condition of the exchange, it wouldn't be a gift.  There is a little difference, therefore, between a Gifts consumption and its movement. "

"A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis" Hyde continues. "You pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift, there is momentum and the weight shifts from body to body. "  But most Christmas presents aren't intended to move beyond the person we give them to.  It's only the presents we don't like that we keep moving.  If I buy you a jacket for Christmas. I buy it a certain size because it fits you. I'd be insulted if you kept it moving.  But I'd also be insulted if you never wore it. So in using a gift, it is in a sense being consumed or used up. Each wear, each wash makes it less new, less pristine.  

So what about money?  Money keeps moving, circulating from person to person, country to country. Money can be exchanged. The problem is, money is the ultimate commodity,  accepted by general consent as a medium of economic exchange. It is the medium in which prices and values are expressed, and it is the principal measure of wealth.  By contrast, in folktales, the gift is often something seemingly worthless. That only turns into gold once the recipient proves themselves worthy, in some sense.

As in the Russian folktale, referenced by Lewis Hyde,  where a woman walking in the woods finds a baby wood demon, lying naked on the ground and crying bitterly. So she coveres it up with a cloak, and after a time her mother appears , a female wood demon, and awards the woman with a pot full of burning coals, which the old woman doesn't disdain but receives gratefully, upon which the coals turned into bright golden ducats. 

So the intrinsic value of the gift was only revealed when the receiver didn't judge it for its extrinsic value,  or monetary worth. So if Santa happens to leave a lump of coal in your stocking, don't act disappointed. Some, like Bob Cratchit, would have taken it for a gift. 

Speaking of which, great thing number three. A Christmas Carol.  It's full title, A Christmas Carol, in prose, being a ghost story of Christmas.  And who'd have thought a ghost story would become the most popular Christmas tale?  With so many adaptations, and my favourite still being a Muppets Christmas Carol.

 Dickens calls it, A Carol in Prose.  And he designates the chapters staves, a stave or staff being the collection of five lines onto which notes are placed on a musical score.  And indeed the novella comprises five staves.

So a quick summary since we all know the story. Stave one, Scrooge is visited by Marley's ghost who tells him he'll meet three ghosts that night.  Stave 2, he meets the ghost of Christmas past. Stave 3, the ghost of Christmas present. Stave 4, the ghost of Christmas yet to come.  And stave 5, spoiler alert, Scrooge awakens a changed man. You can say it's a morality tale.  An invective against the dehumanizing effect of industry in the Victorian age. A Christian allegory. Although notably Christ is never referenced in a Christmas carol.  Well, except in the title of course,  I don't think a holiday carol works quite as well. 

Dickens was around 30 when he wrote it, and at a white hot pace as well, as it was  both conceived and written in about two weeks, which is less time than it'll take me to do this podcast. And although he wasn't the man who invented Christmas, as the title of a recent movie suggests. He was , as the literary critic John Mullen says,  The man who insisted upon Christmas."

And what is the message of the movie, as we watch it year on year, that it's never too late for redemption and a new beginning. So that it aligns very much with the spirit of the season, the death of the old year, the beginning of the new, and that even the worst of humanity, a cantankerous old miser and loner who hates the world and everyone in it, whose death will be mourned by no one, Indeed, celebrated by some, can experience a metanoia or awakening,  as if being born again with the new sun after the solstice, and be transformed to become quote " as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world, and that he knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us." 

And there it is, at the end of the novel, the great injunction, to all readers, and subsequent generations that still resounds after nearly 200 years. 

great thing number four, pagan origins. It's no accident Christmas celebrations coincide roughly with the winter solstice, or the December solstice. From the word sol, which in Latin means sun, and sistere , To stand still, because it is the point at which the seasonal movement of the sun's path across the sky, as it rises and sets at the horizon, appears to stand still before reversing course, like when you bounce a ball and it stops moving upon reaching its maximum height before falling. After the solstice, periods of daylight grow longer with each day.

This is the reverse of what happens at the summer solstice in June, the so-called longest day of the year. And to further confuse matters, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere,  you get your winter solstice in June, and your summer solstice in December. But it all relates to the tilt of the earth, towards or away from the sun.

It's no wonder that ancient cultures who venerated the sun celebrated the winter solstice. After months where days grow shorter and shorter, finally we reach a point when this pattern reverses as days begin to lengthen. This must surely signify a rebirth of sorts. And so it's no accident that the winter solstice marked the birth or rebirth of solar deities or even fertility gods across cultures going back to early antiquity, such as Horus, son of Isis and the god of the underworld, Osiris,  of whom Macrobius, the Latin grammarian and philosopher and author of Saturnalia, which we'll get to in a second, wrote, "At the winter solstice, the sun would seem to be a little child, like that which the Egyptians bring forth from a shrine on the appointed day. Since the day is then at its shortest and the god is accordingly shown as a tiny infant. " 

And Saturnalia, the Roman festival honoring Saturn, the god of agriculture, also occurred in late December and was connected with the winter sowing season. It actually derives from a Greek festival, Kronia, in honor of Kronos, the precursor of Saturn.

Of course, you can argue everything notable that's Roman had a Greek precursor . Anyway, during Saturnalia, all work and business was suspended, slaves were given temporary freedom to say and do what they liked,  and moral restrictions were generally eased. It resembled Mardi Gras, or Carnival, in many respects.

And since these revelries coincided with the birthday festival of Sol Invictus  on the 25th of December, the church thought it apt to surreptitiously sneak Jesus in place of Saul and keep the party going. In Northern Europe, by contrast, where winter was harsher, an ancient Norse festival called Yule was celebrated in honor of Odin.

Yule involved fire, feasts, and the burning of a Yule log to ward off the winter darkness. And gathering around a firelight shielded the community against the unseen dangers lurking in the cold, dark environs.  Traditions from Yule included bringing evergreen plants indoors and lighting candles. Starting to sound familiar? 

Moreover,  evergreens like holly, ivy and mistletoe were used during winter celebrations as these plants symbolized eternal life, protection and fertility ahead of the growing season . And evergreen trees like fir and pine would be adorned with small tokens, or gifts for the spirits residing within them.

For surely there was something magical about a tree, that did not shed its greenery even in the depths of winter, and which stood like a beacon in the cold desolation, like the true light shining in the darkness, which the darkness does not comprehend, to quote John's Gospel. . And so bringing these trees indoors and decorating them became a ritual of entreating spirits for good fortune and forbearance in winter's depths, which as the gospel quote suggests aligned well with the Christian message. It is said the German reformer Martin Luther was the first to place small candles in a fir tree  inspired by an evening walk beneath the stars. I wonder how many Reformation houses burned down because of this.

Anyway, it was Queen Victoria and her German husband, albert, who popularized the tradition in Great Britain, especially once postcards began circulating globally depicting Victoria and Albert next to a decorated tree at Christmas. 

Speaking of Christmas cards, let me get the not so great thing about Christmas out of the way:  commercialization. 

The Christmas card is emblematic of the commercialization of Christmas.  A way of expending the least possible effort, and money, on something that's ostensibly a gift. But giving a Christmas card is an empty gesture, which is why we feel the need to stuff them with money, or accompany them with an actual gift.

We often buy them in bulk, and send them to strangers, or remote acquaintances, the message inside ready made and requiring only a signature - as if it the sentiment and words were sincerely yours . More expensive, ornate Christmas cards we send to closer relatives. But still, any Christmas card from which nothing falls out is like receiving for a present a beautifully wrapped empty box. 

Louis Prang, 1824 - 1909, in America is considered the father of the Christmas card. After learning about new developments in German lithography in the 1860s , he returned to the US after the Civil War and began making high quality reproductions of major artworks, mainly to promote education in the arts. By Making art more affordable and available, some actually claimed he was detracting from the value of the originals.

An early instance of what Walter Benjamin later cautioned would be a consequence of mass production in the 20th century. The late 19th century was also when Christmas arose as the most profitable time of the year for shops and retailers.  And this was marked in 1867 by Macy's in New York when it experimentally stayed open until midnight on Christmas Eve. This Proved a huge success of course, and the tradition would be adopted by many other retailers. Today, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are more recent and grotesque examples of retailers exploiting our tendency to spend this time of year. 

In the 1870s, Frank Woolworth,  founder of the Woolworth's chain, was the first to encourage giving stores a holiday appearance, and encouraged employees to take advantage of the Christmas rush by hawking products you couldn't give away during any other time of the year. But he also pioneered a custom of giving workers Christmas bonuses, which I suppose redeems him to an extent.

As for the etiquette surrounding gift giving, Harper's Bazaar cautioned in 1879 to not give a person who is socially your equal a richer present than he is able to give you.  Still, between very rich people, their presents should be very rich, or else their riches are set above their friendship and generosity.

Let me briefly return to Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift, mentioned in Great Thing No. 2 on Giving and Receiving. Quote, "It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. A commodity has value  and a gift does not. 

A gift has worth. By worth he means Those things we prize and yet say you can't put a price on it.  It is when the value of gifts take precedence over their worth,  that a sense of indebtedness is incurred in the receiver. And it is this consequence of commercialization , in particular, that besides the winter darkness and cold, makes so many people miserable this time of year.

So now that the not so great thing about Christmas is out of the way, I'll move to the last great thing about Christmas.  Number five. The true meaning of Christmas. A bit of a cliché of course,  but the true meaning of Christmas is pretty much everything I've spoken about so far. The history of the celebration in early Christianity, its pagan origins,  its association with winter, gift giving, charity,  saying Merry Christmas once a year to the old crank next door, and indeed the commercialisation of Christmas all of this comprises the "true meaning". To participate in Christmas all these days, we must yield to its comodification which has become inescapable. 

But once the shopping is done, and the rat race to get everything ready for the big day, I think we all feel Christmas only really begins when we converge on the place we're supposed be with the people we're supposed to be with once Christmas Day arrives. 

Some still start the day by going to Church, well after ripping open the presents of course. There are rituals we obserive that have nothing to do with religion, like in Ireland, going for a swim in the freezing cold ocean has for many families become a tradition. It's origins are unclear, but these swins are often organized for charity, and seem to be a fun way to self-mortify as a counter-balance to the over-indulgence that will follow in the course of the day.

I can safely say, this tradition isn't for me. The true meaning of Christmas for me is dressing my best before going around to my Grandparents house in the tropical heat of Aruba, it's my first white Christmas in Ireland missing my cousins and singing "dashing through the snow" having never seen or felt snow in real life; it's my mother peeling the sprouts while watching It's A Wonderful Life for the umpteenth time, my father dressed as Santa and me recognizing him at six but still playing along so as not to shatter the illusion. It's my mother taking on the role of two parents after the divorce and assuming the role of Santa every year, though never needing to dress the part. 

Thanks for listening. Please remember to like, subscribe. And I hope you all had a Merry Xmas and wish you a happy new year.