My poor children. Life must be very confusing for them.
They come home from their nativity rehearsals thinking they’ve got Christmas straight in their heads, and then I start banging on about Yule logs, festivals of light and the earth’s orbit.
Our modern culture of Christmas is a mix and match affair that brings together a number of belief systems. The Christian story of a new hope for humanity chimes perfectly with the ethos of the mid-winter festival that it replaced in early Christian Rome: Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, "the birthday of the unconquered sun.", was celebrated in Rome on 25 December, after the night of the winter solstice, to mark the beginning of the lengthening of the days. The candles, gift-giving and merriment had already been appropriated from the Saturnalia festival that originally concluded on 23 December.
Many aspects of Christmas come from Northern Europe, where late convertors to Christianity were encouraged to recast their cultural traditions in a new spiritual light. Yule is thought to derive from the Old Norse word for wheel, again marking the turn of the winter and the inevitable rebirth of the sun. The Finnish Joulupukki is a character who dresses in warm red clothing and goes from house to house bringing gifts for well-behaved children – sound familiar?
Christmas for me is a celebration of light in the darkest time of the year, a chance to express goodwill to others through the giving and receiving of gifts and a space to reflect and commune with my family. But my favourite bit of symbolism is our bringing of the outdoors indoors, with fruit-bearing holly and mistletoe and of course, a decorated and illuminated evergreen tree, to mark the miracle of life and and our place within it.
Winter festivals were always big news for agricultural societies, coming at a time when there was less work to do and long dark nights to fill with drinking and dancing. If there’s anything I regret about the evolution of Christmas, it’s the way we’ve replaced dancing with slobbing out in front of the TV.
Still, there’s always New Year’s Eve ...
