Critical Thinking: Dreaming of a White Christmas

Ah, the magic of the season! Festive decorations adorn every store and colorful lights grace houses and public buildings. Holiday music fills the air and the airwaves. Synthetic bells jingle for months in a Pavlovian call to purchase, although most of the people hearing that familiar sound have never traveled in a horse-drawn sleigh. Traditional sounds and sights are everywhere. The newest tradition in the increasingly long Christmas season is ritual complaints from right wing media that Christmas is under attack. This fictional “war on Christmas” is apparently waged by miscreants and liberal elitists who insist on wishing “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” and even question the biblical story of the Nativity. Indignant talking heads extoll the virtues of the traditional Christmas, rejecting any calls for inclusiveness and decrying the increasingly popular “Happy Holidays” greeting as an attack on the traditions of the people who built this country.

It goes without saying that these claims have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with politics. The question I am more interested in is why they resonate with a segment of society. More on that later.

First, a bit of history. Anyone interested in researching the matter can readily ascertain that the modern American Christmas is a rather recent creation, imported from Victorian England. The original New Englander colonists disliked Christmas, which at the time was a rowdy, drunken feast resembling Mardi Gras rather than a family-oriented holiday. The marriage of Queen Victoria to German Prince Albert introduced the German tradition of the Christmas tree into English culture. Victorians completely redesigned Christmas, with help from the illustrious pen of Charles Dickens. Americans imported it, and greatly hypertrophied it not because of its religious connotations but because the gift-giving tradition (a Roman heritage, as we shall see) presented a tremendous commercial opportunity to sell stuff. In fact, today the Christmas season is crucial to the earnings of most companies. I have suggested that the holiday be renamed “Commercialia” after its original Roman name “Saturnalia”, because its primary importance to our society is commercial rather than religious.

In other words, the Christmas we know is much younger than the United States, and the Founding Fathers would not recognize it. It is a late 19^th century combination of German, English and Dutch traditions grafted onto Pagan holidays that greatly antedated Christ.

The most important and oldest holiday in the Christian calendar is actually Easter, the Paschal holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus around the Jewish Passover. But, alas, Easter is not associated with gift giving, and so its importance in modern America has been greatly diminished and it’s not widely celebrated. If Christians want a truly identity-defining holiday, Easter is it. Just as churches were built on the foundations of Roman temples, the Christmas season was grafted by early Christian bishops onto a pre-existing Roman holiday called “Saturnalia”, which preceded the winter solstice, and the new year’s day celebration, also a Roman tradition. Gifts were exchanged during Saturnalia. Between the beginning of Saturnalia and New Year’s Day, December 25^th was celebrated as “Dies Natalis Solis Invicti”, or “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun”. This festivity was imported from Persian Mithraism, itself derived from ancient India some 1400 years before Christ[i]. The most likely origin of the date is that around December 25^th in the Northern emisphere it becomes obvious that days are getting longer, and therefore “the Sun is reborn”. Since “Dies Natalis” means “Day of the Birth”, clever bishops decided to make December 25^th the arbitrary day of the birth of Jesus. To this day, the name of the holiday in Italian, the closest language to Latin, is “Natale”. In Spanish and French, it is “Navidad” and “Noel”. All these are literal translations of the original Latin. The word “Christmas”, or “Mass for Christ”, is an English medieval creation, and it described a rowdy holiday completely different from what we see today. We actually have no evidence that the historical Jesus was born on that date, and accounts from the Gospels are somewhat contradictory (Herod died 4 years before the traditionally accepted date of Jesus’ birth, and the Census of Quirinus took place 6 years after that date).

So, why are present day American conservatives so attached to this composite and ever-changing holiday? The answer may lie in the claim that Christmas is a White holiday, not because of the snow invoked in Irving Berlin’s 1942 hit song, but because of the race of the characters celebrated in it or the people who claim credit for creating it. Fox News talking head Megyn Kelly famously claimed on live TV in 2013 that “Jesus and Santa Claus are what they are. They are White!”[ii]. The obvious subtext is that all the people diluting the Christmas tradition are actually attacking the position of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants as the dominant tribe in this country.

Obviously, the historical Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew. It is exceedingly unlikely that he would have looked anything like the blue-eyed strawberry blonde guy depicted in modern American iconography. And what about Santa? He’s just a fictional character, right? Not exactly, as the popular character is based on a historical figure. His name was Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra, in modern day Turkey. Nicholas lived in the 4^th Century AD, and survived the great persecution of Christians by Emperor Diocletian. It is said that he gave presents to the poor, and one of the stories associated with him describes him saving two young girls from poverty-induced prostitution by secretly coming at night with a bag of gold and leaving it to them as a present[iii]. Since Nicholas lived before the Turkmen, hired as mercenaries by the Arabs, came to modern day Turkey, he would have been of Greek ethnicity. When the Muslim Ottomans conquered the Byzantine Empire in 1452-3, Christian sailors from Italy stole his remains and re-buried them in Italy, where they remain today. “Santa” is buried in the St. Nicholas Cathedral in the city of Bari. Based on his bones and sophisticated 3D imaging, a forensic reconstruction of his face has been produced. This reconstruction, and the ancient icons depicting him, show that he would have been thin, austere-looking and swarthy[iv]. His nose was broken. Apparently he was not at all jolly or obese, and he most certainly was not from the North Pole. The mostly Catholic Dutch retained the tradition of St. Nick the gift-giver, and brought it to America with them. That figure was secularized, because Protestants do not recognize Saints, nicknamed “Santa” in a nod to its historical origins and merged with German mythical characters like “Ru-Klaus” and “Perz-Nickel” that would be invoked to watch over the behavior of children and punish them if they didn’t behave[v]. While Coca-Cola did not invent the now ubiquitous red-clad character, it did a lot to popularize it and standardize him as a holiday fixture, beginning in 1931[vi].

It’s clear that the Christmas we know today is a modern construction, cobbled together from multiple traditions, which celebrates the birth of a Middle Eastern Jew on the date of a much older Roman/Persian/Indian holiday. A Greek bishop is the historical basis for Santa. Given the fact that many African-Americans are devoutly Christian, their slave ancestors having been forced to convert to Christianity by their masters, and that Hispanics are also predominantly Christian, the claim that Christmas is a “White” holiday is downright absurd. Add to this the fact that Jesus is prominently mentioned in the Quran as a messenger of God who was born without sin of a virgin Maryam, and a great prophet who was the precursor of Muhammad, and things get even more culturally complicated.

And yet…a Google search for the words “War on Christmas” returns over 29 million sites, and a cursory examination of the most shared sites reveals a persistent controversy. The reason why the “War on Christmas” meme persists is that it’s designed to push hardwired emotional buttons in human nature that have nothing to do with religion. First, it is a conspiracy theory, created to instill fear (see my post “Lies, Damn Lies and Conspiracy Theories”). Second, it builds on the innate tribalism of human beings (see my post “Why Does Racism Persist”). It clearly pits “us”, i.e., the White good guys who built this country entirely based on Christian values versus “them”, the brown and black usurpers, the jaded liberals etc. In his somewhat dated but brilliant book “On Human Nature”, sociobiology pioneer Edward O. Wilson points out that religious rituals “act to circumscribe a social group and bind its members into unquestioning allegiance”.

Now the picture is starting to become clearer. The “War on Christmas” meme is a symbol of a group (White American Evangelicals) tightly bound together by a set of rituals and perceiving itself as the rightfully dominant tribe in the US. Thus, any reasonable request to acknowledge the fact that other cultures and other holidays deserve equal respect in a multicultural nation based on freedom of religion and the separation of state and church becomes a challenge to tribal dominance. In this context, religious intolerance is simply a phenotypic manifestation of tribalism. In this fashion, Christian traditions perceived as immutable, no matter how recent and hybrid in origin they may be, become identity badges for a group that sees its power slipping away. Resistance to the slightest challenge, real or imaginary, is a predictable consequence.

Of course, all this is in complete contradiction with the fundamental tenet of Christianity, which is universal altruism and benevolence unrestricted to one’s tribe (the parable of the Good Samaritan is an example of that). But as history shows, human nature has a way of morphing noble ideals into pretexts for discrimination, hatred and violence.

To those still dreaming of a White Christmas, I wish peace and enlightenment. Happy holidays.