Text: Luke 2: 1-20
The Exuberant Pluralism of Christmas[1]
After returning from Mexico last month, I shared with you that rituals have come to play an important role in my understanding of the world. I told you about the Day of the Dead ceremony that several of us witnessed in early November, and I stated my conviction that to witness the rituals of another culture is to be afforded a glimpse into a secret corner of the universe, where memory is retrieved, where history is rehearsed, where commitments are forged, or renewed, and where spiritual truth is discovered. Whenever we visit Green Grass, or Haiti, or Palestine, it’s the rituals that I’m most drawn to. I believe it is a precious gift to be invited to share in such traditions, a unique window into the nexus of the human and the divine.
What I’d like to do today is to take some time to unpack our own ritual, this thing we do called Christmas. And I’d like to take a broad, and playful angle on it all. You see, rituals conceal as much as they reveal, which is to say that even as we tell one particular story year after year, other elements dance at the edge of that story, mostly unaccounted for. Let me be more specific: even as we tell the story of Mary and Joseph and the baby every year, our Christmas observances contain hidden alliances and mostly forgotten practices that reveal the pluralism of this holiday, this ritual. I’ll contend this morning that that is one of the unexpected gifts of the season, one that we might take with us into our gatherings with family members and friends. There is a hidden pluralism at the heart of Christmas, and that knowledge stands a chance of making us more generous and open this time of the year. And so my plan today is to take you on a kind of tour of this ritual called Christmas, in hopes of exposing its mystery, its exuberance, and its encompassing generosity of spirit.
Let’s start with the most central element of the story – a virgin birth. It’s a motif found in the book of Isaiah, but Isaiah and Luke were both a part of the wider Mediterranean world, where heroes and leaders within certain stories were said to have both divine and human parentage. Hercules, for example, was fathered by Zeus. So was Helen of Troy. Romulus and Remus, who were said to have founded Rome, traced their lineage to the god Mars. Human causality alone isn’t enough to explain the wisdom or power of such figures, a literary trope that the Gospel writers borrowed for Jesus. So already, the Christmas narrative admits the Greeks and the Romans into the scene. We are, thus, a little bit Greek and a little bit Roman every Christmas season.
But we become Romans in another way as well this time of the year. Nobody knows when Jesus of Nazareth was born. December 25th was never mentioned in the Bible. So why will we celebrate the birth of Christ on that day?
The answer has to do with the Roman festival celebrating the solstice, which took place yesterday, the shortest day of the year. But it was the Emperor Aurelian, in the third century BC, who declared that December 25th would be the day celebrating the birth of the invincible sun, Natalis Solis Invicti. The festival included gift giving, party going, potent drinks, roaring fires, the lighting of candles and the decoration of public spaces with evergreens.
A similar practice was shared by the ancient Celts in the British Isles, along with some Germanic and Scandinavian parts of Northern Europe. They too celebrated the solstice with bonfires and merriment. It was a period called Yule, or Jol, from which we get the words yuletide, and jolly. There too, evergreens, along with holly and ivy, symbols of ongoing life, were used as both decorations and as sacred emblems.
It was in the 4th century, more than 300 years after the time Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth, that December 25th was established as the day for the celebration of Christmas. It happened after the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, making it the official religion of the Roman Empire. So in essence, the celebration of the birth of Christ was simply overlaid on top of all those ancient festivals of darkness and light. And so we become more than a little bit Roman every year at about this time, but more than a little Celtic as well. In some ways, even as we mark the birth of Christ, we retain a much older association, where we venerate the sun as the source of life.
But let’s extend our gaze even further. There is, of course, the question of that other divinity that roams the earth at this time of year, Santa Claus. That too is a story of mixed lineages. Nicholas was a Turkish bishop in the region of Smyrna, born some 250 years after the death of Jesus. He was wealthy, and had a habit of giving gifts of money to people in need. A story circulates that one night, the bishop was trying to throw a bag of gold through a window in order to help someone anonymously. When he found the window closed, the story goes that he climbed onto the roof and dropped the sack down the chimney. Who can say? But a legend grew around Nicholas, which soon merged with another story, this one from the Germanic tribes. In their mythology, a white bearded god named Odin roamed around during the solstice celebration, a god who traveled on a flying horse that happened to have…eight legs. So St. Nicholas merges with the god Odin to become something like the figure we know today.
That wasn’t all, though. The merger of the saint and the god was celebrated in various parts of Europe, including the Netherlands. There, he was called Sinta Klaus, and it was the Dutch who brought him to their settlement in America, New Amsterdam, a little place we now call New York City. By 1809, Santa was riding a wagon over treetops in Washington Irving’s A History of New York. And then in 1822, Santa is given definitive form by another American, Clement Moore, in his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” You know the opening lines: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. It was Moore who gave St. Nick his reindeer.
One last thing about that eccentric divinity. Prior to the 20th century, he always wore green, a vestige of his identity as a pre-Christian fertility god. But that all changed in 1932, when none other than Coca-Cola gave him a makeover. As a part of an advertising campaign, the beverage company hired a Swedish artist named Haddon Sundblom to redesign Santa. It is thanks to the advertising genius of Coke that Santa is now forever garbed in red. And so, enter Madison Avenue into the mélange of our Christmas rituals.
Let’s move on to some of the other elements in this annual ritual – like the Christmas tree. Trees are sacred objects in all of the religious systems of the world. Think of the fruit tree in the Garden of Eden, the World Ash Tree, or the Druid Oak. Think of the Bo tree under which the Buddha sits. Or think about the Ents in The Lord of the Rings, talking trees brutally cut down by the enemies of the sacred forest. Think about Christ, and all the sacrificial gods, said to have died upon a tree. Trees are sacred symbols, and the evergreen is a symbol of life’s persistence even in the hardest of conditions.
The earliest record of winter trees being brought indoors for a midwinter festival comes from Bavaria. Indeed, Martin Luther was said to share in that tradition, even going so far as to decorate his own indoor winter tree with lit candles – a practice that I do not commend to you. But it was the Victorians who launched the craze for Christmas trees. In 1848, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were shown in the Illustrated London News posing in front of a Christmas tree at Windsor Castle. It wasn’t long before everyone had to have a Christmas tree. In 1851, two sled loads of trees were hauled from the Catskills to New York City, becoming the first Christmas trees to be sold in the United States. It is, in essence, a Victorian tradition, adapted from earlier winter rituals celebrating the sacred properties of trees.
The Victorians gave us something else as well. They gave us the tradition of the Christmas ghost story, made so popular by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol. But that’s only the most famous one. Stories, of course, have always been told around fires, and storytelling was a part of all those pre-Christian solstice celebrations. But it was the 19th century that solidified the association of Christmas and ghost stories, a tradition that preceded Dickens, and has lasted long after him. One theory about why that happened has to do with the industrial revolution. The 19th century was a haunted century, especially in England, where industry seemed to have unleashed the very powers of hell. Visitors to Manchester called it The Inferno. When Mrs. Gaskell, a Victorian writer, visited a cotton mill in Manchester, she wrote, “I have seen hell and it’s white.” Similar visions spurred writers as diverse as Charles Dickens and Karl Marx. The new urban poor, the factory slaves and basement dwellers, all appeared spectral and thin, semi-human and half dead. It’s not a coincidence that with the rise of the Christmas ghost story also comes the tradition of giving to charities at Christmas, to ameliorate some of the suffering unleashed by the industrial revolution. To judge by the charitable giving that still continues around this time of year, we’re still haunted by some of those spectral visions. Perhaps rightly so.
And then there’s this: did you know that Christmas didn’t become a federal holiday in the United States until 1870? It was declared so as a way of uniting the fractured states after the trauma of the Civil War. Like Thanksgiving, the hope was that a national holiday would have a binding effect on a still fractured country. And so add a dash of American pragmatism to our litany of influences as well, where a helpful dose of social engineering helped to heal a bitter divide.
And what about music, all the carols and Christmas songs that decorate the season? Well, many of those also come to us courtesy of the Victorians. But in the middle of the 20th century, it was American Jews who gave us our most beloved songs: White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Santa Baby, Winter Wonderland, Let It Snow – these are all Christmas classics given to us by Jewish songwriters. And so as we cook dinner or decorate our trees with Christmas songs playing in the background, we become not only Greek or Roman or Norwegian, but Jewish as well.
By now, some of you might be thinking that perhaps we should simply return to our earliest roots in America, to avoid all this other extraneous stuff that surrounds Christmas. Maybe, some of you are thinking, we should return to the simplicity of our Puritan ancestors, and circumvent all of this excess. Wouldn’t it be nice, for example, to consider how Christmas would have been celebrated in 1666, when this congregation was founded? Alas, I have some hard news to share with you. Nobody around here was celebrating Christmas in 1666. The Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas. In fact, they banned the holiday, a law that lasted from 1659 until it was repealed in 1681. The same was true in England, where Cromwell outlawed the holiday beginning in 1647, a law that lasted in that country until 1660. But even without the ban, the Puritans treated Christmas with suspicion and disdain. Why? Because they sensed, correctly as it turned out, the many other divinities and rituals that were undergirding the holiday, a truth that made them profoundly uneasy. Not only that, Christmas, like Mardi Gras, was an instance of carnival – a celebratory occasion for free-spirits, a demonstration of topsy-turvy misrule that gave it an anti-authoritarian character, as well as elevating an anti-work ethic. They feared the intoxicating aspect of it all, the revelry, the dancing, the play, the masks, the mistaken identities, the pranks – all those so called pagan practices that were, at one time, a part of Christmas celebrations. It’s not that the Puritans were wrong about everything, or that parts of their worldview aren’t worth considering. It’s simply that they wouldn’t have been willing to countenance even the most benign aspects of our Christmas celebrations – the trees or the carols, the punch, gifts, none of it.
And so what are we to make of the pluralism of Christmas? What are we to do with the layers built into the ritual celebrations that we’re all of us about to undertake? Well, why not embrace it all? Most of us already do. But instead of grumbling about how secular the holiday has become, or muttering about how we need to keep Christ in Christmas, why not wholeheartedly embrace the multiple traditions already built into this holiday? And why not use that as an excuse to understand our very identities as already a little more than Christian, which to say, a little Jewish and a little Roman, a little bit Greek and a little bit Celtic, a little Victorian a little bit Madison Avenue? Why not own it all, confessing that everything belongs?
But if we do that, then perhaps we can do something else as well. Perhaps that very spirit of polyphony, of pluralism, of multiple identities and voices, can become a model for our holiday gatherings. Perhaps it can become a model not only around the holidays, but for all days. Many of us will be gathering around tables with parents or children, aunts, uncles, cousins, or family friends, with whom we have profound disagreements over little and big things. The events of this past week have effectively placed a loaded hand grenade at each of our place settings, right alongside our forks and spoons. I would like to believe that the encompassing spirit at the heart of this holiday, where Jesus coexists with an ancient fertility spirit, and where Madison Avenue coexists with the ghosts of Manchester’s working poor, might somehow be an invitation to embrace the plurality around our tables. Maybe it can all serve as a reminder that we need not pull the pin in those grenades, and that it’s possible to speak across those differences with reverence, and respect. Maybe it can all serve as an excuse to remind ourselves not to become triggered by this comment or that behavioral tic, but to remember the celebratory pleasures that can and do hold us together. If we can do it now, we can also do it in other moments of our lives.
Christmas, it turns out, is every bit as layered and complex a cultural practice as any ritual or ceremony you might witness in another part of the world. But all of those layers serve to remind us of an essential truth: of the encompassing generosity at the heart of this celebration. That generosity is found in the familiar story of the Christ child, of course. But it’s also found in the crowded origins of the holiday itself. Voices and perspectives that appear contradictory are shown to belong together. More than just Mary and Joseph, the child and the shepherds, the angels and the wise men, this is a celebration that connects us across tribes and traditions, rooting us upon the earth, and giving us to one another. As that great Victorian, Christina Rossetti put it: “what can I give: give my heart.”
[1] Throughout this sermon, I’m drawing upon an introductory essay written by Jeanette Winterson, written for her volume Christmas Days (New York: Grove Press, 2016). See pages 1-11 for many of the features of Christmas discussed throughout this sermon.
