Christmas, Past, Present, and Future

You guessed it. The Christmas holiday season wasn’t born here, just reinvented here. Huh?! For all the talk about peace, giving, love, sharing, family, joy and all the other adjectives, for many Americans, December and the Christmas season is considered by some the cruelest month of the year. Christmas the season that mixes family traditions, music, memories, shopping, decorations, bell ringers, charities, even church services/bazaars have turned into money making endeavors. Many argue that we have reduced what should be Holy days into holidays. Let’s face it, Christmas has become hectic, “Black Friday” holiday shoppers have become dangerous. Christmas has become an anxiety-ridden combination of family intimacy and rank consumerism that too often fails satisfy or justify the spirit or the senses, much less, The Holy Spirit. Happy Holidays aren’t often happy. Jolly isn’t always jolly. How and why the Yule-tide came to flow this way is the subject we ask ourselves. Face it, Santa has become a more central figure to Christmas than Christ., and presents have overshadowed the presence of Jesus. Since the beginning, Christmas American-style has been “commercial at its very core.

In the beginning, in fact, there was no Christmas. As history shows, the Puritans of New England suppressed it, even for a time forbidding it by law. They argued that the New Testament gives no date—or season—for the birth of Christ. Still another, Christmas was associated in their minds with ritual pagan rites and papist practices. Even though Puritan rule was quite brief, it had its roots. Colonial Christmas’s was more like a carnival, where rowdies filled the streets with their public displays of gluttony, costumery, drunkenness, molestation, crude activities and obscenities on parade. Some custom was especially disruptive; the “wassailing” was where packs of wild youths and sometimes adult workers would become riotous and lay siege to the homes of the well-off, demanding free food, free drink, monies, valuables, liberties with women and eventually setting fires to buildings and blocks in the city if they did not get what they demanded. Does this sound familiar? Appeals to reason religion, religious leaders and law enforcement were to no avail. Does this sound familiar? People often feel entitled and owed something. And if they don’t get it by working a fair days labor for a fair days salary—they feel like they should just riot and take it. Earlier in history, in Boston, first the Universalists and then the Unitarians opened their church doors on Christmas in their hopes of bringing order to the Yule-tide chaos. But that failed to dampen the raucous public spirit. Today activists, ministers and even high-ranking politicians jump on-board and, maybe without intent, incite more trouble.

Until the first decades of the 19^th century, Christmas was neither a domestic holiday nor a commercial one, but by the end of the century, it would become both. In cities like New York and Philadelphia, the “misrule” of Christmas mobs had become so widespread that it threatened civic life. Even today, rioters, looters, mobs burning cars and buildings, protesters laying down in the subways, in the middle of expressways and on the floors of shopping malls, throwing glass bombs, bricks, shootings—reminiscent of anything? Just as yester year, members of the emerging urban proletariat no longer confined their seasonal revels and discontent for law-and –order and society to their own neighborhoods. Like today, the wealthy hired guards to protect their property. Shopkeepers boarded up their windows and barred their doors from invaders wishing to loot and do damage. Innocent pedestrians, business owners and law-abiding and law enforcing people were and are at risk. Much of the public went indoors and clung to their weapons, many buying some and others just plain frantic with fear hiding in their homes. Ring any bells? And, no, I’m not talking about sidewalk Santa’s. Lacking anything like the sanctioned religious festivals of yesteryear Catholic Europe, Protestant America invented one—a Christmas holiday. Stories were created from traditions of Dutch families gathering in the Netherlands that featured friends and family at home peacefully eating and drinking together, playing games and giving little tokens to one another. But this wasn’t enough—Christmas needed something more substantial—yes, a myth!

 

Hey! Enter Santa Claus and Ole’ St. Nick. In 1822 Clement Clarke Moore wrote in his poem, “A visit From St. Nicholas,” who gave presents and gave an American presence a nonthreatening figure, a night-visitor, a jolly fellow giving children gifts, whom all the classes could welcome. Moore helped create the contemporary Santa. Thanks Clement Moore, you’ve cost me thousands and some millions—but, it’s also made millions even billions for some people and businesses. Christmas is big business. On Moore’s behalf, I must defend his noble cause and intentions though, for the object of his largess were innocent little children.

It wasn’t long, within five years. Moore’s poem became a Christmas staple and newspaper editorials began to speak of Christmas as a “festival sacred to domestic enjoyments.” Merrymaking and public drinking continued-as it does today—the “real Christmas” was gradually identified with rituals that centered on children and took place in the quiet of the homes..We seem to have lost that part. There was also a “loosing of the purse strings” of parents in December. If Christmas was going to be a time for gift-giving, these gifts had to be purchased. By mid-century, Santa Claus was a common figure in stories and advertisements. Enter Christmas cards, Christmas movies, Christmas songs, the list is endless. And here was the greatest transformation—the commercialization of Christmas was behind a most tender parental emotional moment to please little children. Some would say it was a “Miracle on 34^th Street” others would argue “It’s A Wonderful Life”. Some still say “Happy Birthday Jesus.” What say you?