Shannon Rupp looks at the origins of Christmas and how it may have been an attempt to steal people away from paganism.
Between the fourth and sixth centuries, early Christians realized that their faith wasn't achieving what sales folk refer to as "penetration." In short, pagans weren't converting, probably because those nature religions were one big party. Boinking in the fields, dancing naked around bonfires, feasting -- who's going to give that up for fasting and hair shirts?
So, with a communications plan that would have impressed Noam Chomsky, some wily monks started recruiting a flock by giving the big winter festivals Christian significance. They set about replacing those celebrations of the sun -- Winter Solstice, Saturnalia, and the Feast of Mithras (a sun god who was hot in the Roman world) -- with celebrations of the Son. Jesus' birthday, which had been of little concern for the first few hundred years, was suddenly determined to be December 25 -- not coincidentally, the same day as Mithra's feast.
Somehow the priests managed to gloss over those biblical allusions to Jesus being born while shepherds were tending their flocks at night -- a pretty strong hint of a spring birth -- by exercising lots slight of hand with solstice imagery.
Lights, evergreens, and winter-blooming plants were all celebrated by heathens as a way of encouraging the capricious gods to bring light and life to the land, and those symbols lent themselves nicely to church spindoctoring. Although some pagan beliefs seem to have slipped through uncorrupted. When we kiss under mistletoe, we're giving a nod to Celts who thought the winter berries granted a woman fertility.
But as good as they were at co-opting pagan festivals, church leaders couldn't quite sanitize the rowdy nature of winter parties -- mistletoe usually led to more than kissing. By all historical accounts medieval Christmases evolved into a marvel of drinking and carousing that included gambling, dancing, and entertainment by "mummers" -- actors who put on plays mocking religion. Serfs went "wassailing," singing at their master's door, demanding more drink to keep the party going.
In Scotland, Christmas celebrations were shut down in 1583,with the English Puritans banned public festivities in 1642.
However, with the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers needed to sell the goods their factories were spitting out.
Using medieval records as their inspiration, they reinterpreted the rules: instead of wealthy masters giving to impoverished serfs, powerful parents would give to helpless children.
It wasn't long before catalogues started popping up recommending Christmas "notions" for adults. Then the Americans, the world's uber-consumers, gave us Clement Moore's 1822 poem, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, featuring the elf of over-consumption. Instead of the lean and religious St. Nicholas, the patron of thieves and children, the new world St. Nick was a heavy-drinking, hearty-eating smoker with a bag full of mass-produced goods.