Ayers: Well you know, it’s interesting to think: how does this fit into the flow of time and from a historical point of view, there is truth to both these points of view. For many centuries, Christmas was very a public, on the streets, in your face kind of thing, but Peter, did that public celebration really have much to do with Christ at all?
Onuf: Well Ed, not a word in the Bible says when Jesus was born. It wasn’t in fact until the 4th Century after His death that church officials finally decided that He was born on December 25th and that’s when Christians should celebrate. But why that date? Well, that date was already a date that people were celebrating. It’s the Winter Solstice, it’s Saturnalia, it’s when slaves and masters reverse positions, it’s a prominent part of pre-Christian cultures all over Europe. The Roman Catholic Church was essentially branding a much older holiday.
Ayers: Appropriating.
Onuf: Yes, trying to co opt all of that celebratory energy and direct it towards it’s own purposes, but here is the thing: this project of the church didn’t really work. There is an historian named Steve Nissenbaum who wrote about all of this is a book called: “The Battle for Christmas.” When I spoke to him recently, he explained that Europeans continued to celebrate Christmas much the same way that they had celebrated that much older wintertime festival even after they arrived in America.
Nissenbaum: It happened that Christmas took place during a season when there was, at least for males in an agricultural society, not a lot of work to be done. It was also a season when there was plenty of fresh food and fresh alcoholic drink. So it’s a season of excess. It’s a season of letting go. It’s a season of overdoing.
Onuf: That sounds a little bit like New Years Eve, doesn’t it?
Nissenbaum: Yeah. I think that what happened is that New Years Eve has essentially become the one place where ritual public misbehavior remains sanctioned. But if you can go back before 1800, it was the entire season, but this misbehavior didn’t just take random forms. It was highly ritualized and the ritual really took the form of what is often called social inversion. That is to say for this one ritual time of year, the high and the low turn the tables on each other. On this one occasion, and it’s an occasion that’s going to be fueled by alcohol, these people in the lower orders feel that they can act as if they’re the bosses and they can go around town entitled to bang on the doors of their betters, perhaps the people that they work for themselves and demand more alcohol, the best food that the Lord of the manner has to offer, even sometimes money. You can think of it as being sort of like Halloween, like a bad Halloween, because if these beggars didn’t get the drink or the food or whatever gift they demanded, they were liable to threaten or even to perform damage.
Onuf: The more you talk about this, the more un-American it sounds to me. After all, as my man Jefferson would have said: “All men are created equal.” You can’t have that kind of celebration or inversion in a world of equals. Can you?
Nissenbaum: Yeah, but one of the interesting things about this social inversion form of Christmas is that it was not demand for equality. It was in fact a reinforcement of the social order because the poor were not trying to eliminate distinctions of status. They were maintaining those distinctions of status, but they were inverting them.
Onuf: That’s historian Steve Nissenbaum, author of the 1997 book: “The Battle for Christmas.” In a few minutes, we’ll hear more from him about how Christmas turned from this bad Halloween into the season of comfort and joy we celebrate today.
Ayers: That’s a really interesting discussion Peter. It reminds me of a question we got on the website from Rhonda Newton, and here is what she wrote: “I have to wonder if my families’ tradition of a low-key Christmas focusing on church and family with gifts, but not as the focus, goes back to our New England Puritan roots leavened with some Quakers, Scotch Irish, and Presbyterians.” So Peter, my question is this: did everything Steve was talking about come to an end with the Puritans or did it take these other religions to kind of take some of the air out of Christmas?
Onuf: Well Ed, that’s a great question. The Puritans approach to Christmas was not low key it was no key. In fact, they actually banned it, made it illegal.
Balogh: They really were grouches weren’t they?
Onuf: Absolutely. The Puritans were hypersensitive to the idea of sacralizing days because they thought of the whole world as God’s work. Everything is sacred so the distinctions between holidays and everyday were strictly taboo. In fact, one of the whole reasons that the Puritans came to New England was to get away from the Saints Days that proliferated in the English calendar and that is every day of the year seemed to be a Saints Day so that they didn’t work at all. Remember Puritans work ethic.
Ayers: So they wanted to sacralize everything by desacralizing just a few days.