by Adam Gopnik
It’s always been my favourite carol — one of them, anyway — and I was pleased to see that it was voted best carol in 2008 by a kind of international jury of such things. The music feels timeless while still rising from a particular time, and folk-like despite having specific and highly celebrated authors. It is not nineteenth-century music, or even Victorian music. It is Christmas music. Christmas music is one place in the highly self-conscious history of modern music where the neat distinction between old and new, medieval and Victorian, contemporary and archaic, is very poorly marked, so we generally don’t know which of our Christmas carols are very old and which are in fact very new, which were touched by the hands of eminent poets and composers and which just happened in an anonymous past. A medieval carol such as “Verbum caro” can be sung side by side with a bit of Pre-Raphaelite Victoriana like “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
Whatever the music’s origin, the carol’s seasonal setting is clear, and essential. It is a song about the remaking of the world, and it also is a song about, well, the bleak mid-winter. Our subject now is what I call recuperative winter: the invention and uses of Christmas — the holiday of Christmas — in modern times. A holiday that is eclectic, banged together, yet remains the central winter ritual, the central mystery, the central rite of our year’s end celebration. It extends its spiritual reign from the true North down to the strange South, where fake icicles, plastic snow, fibreglass evergreens, and false fireplaces all testify to its spell.
That composite quality of Christmas has been part of the holiday since the very beginning. Christmas, December 25, is the winter holiday and always has been, almost certainly long before there was a Christ owed a mass. There has been a mid-December holiday to celebrate the winter solstice by appeasing the sun god and assuring the return of spring since people first noticed the sun’s retreat. For as long as there have been winters, people have had solstice festivals celebrating the low point of warmth and the high point of winter — the shortest day of the year. And that festival is almost always a festival of supplementary light. The light’s going out in the heavens, so we light one here. (The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, though modern Jews have made far more of it to compete with the modern Christmas for their kids’ favour, is in fact an older celebratory feast of lights.)
The one thing we can say for certain about Christmas is that whatever it is we’re celebrating, it’s not the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Or not his birthday, anyway: Jesus is thought by some to have been born in September (for complicated reasons having to do with dating in the Gospel of Mark), and we know that some time during the fourth century the Catholic Church, or possibly the Roman bishop Liberius, decided more or less arbitrarily that December 25 would be the date when the birth of the Christ would be celebrated. (It’s a very complicated story, because until then the standard festival of the birth of Jesus had been January 6 — Twelfth Night, Epiphany, the day of Jesus’ baptism — and it’s made even more complicated because you have a change of calendar in the middle of the story, so that the holiday we celebrate on December 25 was, by the older Julian reckoning, actually . . . January 6.)
Though Hanukkah looms as the Jewish festival of lights somewhere in the background, far more important in the making of modern Christmas is the pre-existence of two Roman solstice festivals, both also celebrated in late December: Saturnalia, the festival of Saturn, which took place every year in mid-December, and a festival on the Kalends (as in calendar), or first day, of January, which came right after. The meaning of Saturnalia is still apparent in the way we use the word today. A saturnalia is a festival of overcharge. It’s an upside-down feast. Originally it was one where slaves literally became masters for a day, children were allowed to boss adults, a lord of misrule was crowned, and all the normal rules of order were not just relaxed but reversed. Saturn is the centrepiece of the holiday, the patriarch of Saturnalia, and he’s no Jupiter. He is Jupiter’s banished father, the same figure as Kronos in Greek mythology — an old man who is so full of robust fertility that he has to be sent away from civilization, and allowed back into the cautious circles of normal life only once a year. He’s a familiar figure — a kind of space-granddad fertility figure — in all of mythology. Tolkien calls his Middle Earth version Tom Bombadil, and you don’t have to be a Jungian to see a direct line between Saturn and the figure of Santa, the white-bearded old man who is welcomed home, though only once a year, to turn the world upside down again.
After Saturnalia comes the Roman Kalends festival of early January, which seems to have been much like Saturnalia but apparently less jumped up and festive, more domestic and serene — a festival of light and greenery and gift-giving. Both were recycled by the early Christians, who absorbed their mythology and also their symbolism: the act of lighting candles, the practice of giving gifts, even the use of holly and ivy. In the anthropologist J. G. Frazer’s late-nineteenth-century classic The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, he finds in these rites even traces of pagan human sacrifice — remaking, re-fertilizing the fields exactly at the moment of maximum winter.
A series of northern festivals also gets fed into the Christian Christmas; Yule, which is a northern European festival, takes place at exactly the same time of year and involves a blazing log, the lighting of bushes, the display of lights in the darkest time of year. Throughout, pagan feasts got turned opportunistically into Christian ritual. (In 245 the Christian polemicist Origen complains about people celebrating birthdays at all, citing pagan kings as the only “sinners” who did so! Not long after, this seemed like a good idea — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and the best way to beat ’em is to join ’em and then beat ’em.) So Christmas from its very beginning has the quality of being a composite feast, understood to be such by the people in authority: one religious feast made up from a palimpsest of older, pagan religious feasts.
All faiths are compound and syncretism is the world’s one true religion — fundamentalist sects tend to be the most unconsciously syncretic of all; insisting that Christmas is either truly pagan or not pagan at all is equally fatuous. But you can understand the persistence of Christmas more deeply if you see that it is, in effect, a profoundly compound festival, marrying not just many different pagan holidays but also the two chief kinds of festivals that exist in the world: the reversal festival and the renewal festival. Our feasts most often celebrate either the world turned upside down, the reversal of our normal expectations, or else the table set for all, the renewal of our regular order. Halloween is the perfect example of a modern reversal feast: the things you are never allowed to do over the course of a year — going door to door ringing strangers’ doorbells, demanding treats, wearing masks — are for one night not only allowed but encouraged. Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July in the United States, is an ideal example of a renewal feast. You are supposed to feel a powerful reborn sense of common purpose. Renewal feasts are meant to reassure everyone that the social basis of the community is secure; reversal feasts are meant to recognize that there are moments when it is healthy to overturn the social order for one escapist night. The point of a renewal feast is to enforce the illusion of community where it doesn’t always exist (as among disparate relatives at a Thanksgiving table); the point of a reversal feast is to bestow the illusion of power where it doesn’t really exist (among children allowed to impersonate fiends at Halloween, or among grown-ups free to get drunk and act like libertine sophisticates on New Year’s Eve). We celebrate continuity and want to renew it; we recognize that continuity has its discontents, and want to reverse it.
The funny thing about Christmas is that its pagan origins all lie in reversal feasts, in Saturnalia and the Kalends festival, and, secularized today, it continues to have some of that character as we do things we do but once a year: buy too many presents, dress up as Santa, love our siblings. Yet it’s also a renewal feast, a feast that restores and reiterates and italicizes and underlines the existing order. While most of its
rites are obviously derived from or, at the minimum, echo the pagan Saturnalia and Kalends — lighting candles, staying up late, giving gifts, all that one-night-only stuff — it also has at its core the imagery of mother and child, the idea of the essential rite of fertile renewal, all that ongoing stuff. That isn’t original to Christianity — the imagery of the Madonna and Child, of Mary and Jesus, has parallels in Egyptian art’s divine mother-and-son pair of Isis and Horus — but Christmas is more strongly marked by this tension between renewal and reversal, between the two basic kinds of human feasts, than any other holiday I know, and that tension gives it shape, character, and resilience throughout its history. Christmas drives us crazy because it asks us to be just the same and yet completely different, and all on one day. No wonder it is the best day of the year — and, for many, the worst.
One of the most striking things about the modern winter feast, our Christmas, is that it is in origin and accent more Protestant and northern than Catholic and southern. That’s partly because the solstice is felt much more intensely in northern countries and climates where winter is real and threatening — where December 21 and December 25 mark a genuine change in the calendar, in the climate, and in the temper of the world — but it’s also in part because the Roman Catholic calendar, like the Orthodox calendar, is extremely expansive. There are something like seventy saint’s days in the Catholic calendar, which is dense with holidays and festivals and observances. Though those of us who have inherited a piece of the Protestant calendar think of it as being marked by many festivals, in fact it isn’t, and therefore each festival that occurs matters. (North Americans like to think of themselves as being a peculiarly festive people, despite the reality that we celebrate relatively few holidays by European standards. Anyone who has lived in France and gone through one three-day weekend after another knows that even though we’re the ones with a cult of summer, with its own songs and lore, we generally have only ten days of vacation.)
No accident, then, that modern Christmas would turn out to be largely northern and Protestant in its evolution and its flavour. The tragic side of Christmas would be almost unbearable if we could take it seriously: the baby doomed to be tortured to death in the most public possible way in order to save us all in potentia in an unknowable future. This tragic side of Christmas is audible in the great Bach Christmas masses, in the arias of the Mother with the Baby at her breast, and is unlike what we expect. And yet, at the same time, Christmas has a natural northern Protestant enemy: the Puritan. Part of the mythology of the modern Christmas involves the idea that the Puritans once banished Christmas and we’re trying to bring it back. Now, there is an element of truth in that. In the seventeenth century it was indeed the case that the Puritan parliament in London did (briefly) banish Christmas. And there is a famous passage from the memoirs of the American Puritan governor William Bradford, in which he talks about trying to banish Christmas in the early Plymouth settlement and being unable to do it. He announced that everyone had to work on Christmas — our sort doesn’t celebrate this popish holiday! — but when they came home at noon, all the Puritan kids went out on the streets celebrating, along with most of their parents. He writes (speaking of himself in the third person): “He went to them and took away their implements and told them that was against his conscience, that they should play and others work. If they made the keeping of it [a] matter of devotion, let them keep [to] their houses; but there should be no gaming or reveling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.”
On the whole, though, the Puritan suppression was sporadic and mostly unsuccessful. The myth that it happened matters more than if it did. The odd thing is that the anti-Christmas moment is exactly when you find the most beautiful and elegant of all Christmas poetry. The seventeenth-century Christmas poetry of Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan, George Herbert and Robert Herrick — Christians of various kinds — finds in the constant dialogue of opposites that mark the Christmas holiday its collision of reversal and renewal, the basic paradox that the theology presents: God, the omniscient, omnipotent creator, is instantiated and embodied as a tiny, mewling baby. That kind of paradox is one that Crashaw in particular makes beautiful much of:
Poor world, said I, what wilt thou do
To entertain this starry stranger?
Is this the best thou canst bestow —
A cold and not too cleanly manger?
Contend, the powers of heaven and earth,
To fit a bed for this huge birth.
Proud world, said I, cease your contest,
And let the mighty babe alone,
The phoenix builds the phoenix’ nest,
Love’s architecture is His own.
The babe, whose birth embraves this morn,
Made His own bed ere He was born.
The metaphysical poets of the British seventeenth century write best about Christmas because no season or event so answers their hunger for the paradoxical and sublime. Tiny babe . . . cosmic event that reshapes all history . . . wee, mewling baby in a poor manger — a manger! — the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of the universe. Though the seventeenth century may be a dim time for Christmas cheer, it is the high time of Christmas art. For once, genuine religious passion and fidelity joins easily with sophisticated taste and scientific elegance.
And the metaphysical poets create the deep grammar of the holiday as a series of antitheses: a renewal feast that’s also a reversal feast, a child-centred holiday that’s really about the cosmos, and a winter feast of light that is also marked by the intimation of darkness: a starry stranger in a cold bed. Against the much larger and longer pagan and classical background, it is this unapologetic wonder at opposites that modern people inherit at Christmas.
But our special concern is not with Christmas through all its history but with Christmas of the modern period — the Romantic period in which northern landscapes of snow and glaciers can find their own true forms, and in which the fur-bedecked traveller to the Pole becomes a kind of ecstatic monk of nature. That is our time. And it is a modern festival, first of all, set apart and secularized — or, if you prefer, restored to its early pagan truths — by the will of a few modern men and women.
Everyone knows, or thinks they know, that it was in the Victorian era in England that our modern winter holiday got made, with its meanings having carried over ever since. It’s the time of what historians now call the first Industrial Revolution, when agricultural labourers were forced into cities and kids were forced down mines and into factories, and the whole created a lowered standard of living for most people — the first time of mass urban poverty.
And with that mass urban poverty came, in the 1830s and ’40s, a series of urgent responses and calls for reform whose political programs still echo today: the liberal reformist response of John Stuart Mill calling for both more personal and economic liberty, the radical response of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels calling for revolution and an end to the oppressive order. And conservative responses, calling, often idiosyncratically, for restoration and renewal of the old order of paternalistic aristocratic rule. In 1843 the Scottish historian and oracle Thomas Carlyle wrote his Past and Present, decrying poverty and calling for a return to Romantic heroic leadership. All of these responses, and a hundred others, crowded in with an urgency that makes the period feel and read more like contemporary South America than contemporary Europe: the social question seemed so grave as to be essentially insoluble. Thinking people sought ways not just to grasp what was happening and reform it, they also sought hard for new ways even to symbolize it. What’s going on? New times demanded new fables.
And new fables most often demand old occasions. Christmas, the old holiday remade, became the central fable in dispute. And the real author of the modern Christmas, as everyone says in popular books and popular recollection, was that great, mixed-up reformer and fable-maker, Charles Dicken
s. Now, it is not true, as is sometimes said, that Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is the entry to a new ideal of Christmas. It is the now forgotten Thomas K. Hervey, whose The Book of Christmas appears in 1837, who deserves to be known as the real father of the modern Christmas, if anyone should be. Hervey writes about all the ways of celebrating the holiday since medieval days, and the myth of the cancellation of Christmas is terribly important to him. Hervey believes there was once a time when we celebrated Christmas as it really ought to be celebrated, and then Christmas got cancelled, so now what we’re doing is trying to renew it, not invent it. Even though this myth of rediscovery has a very fragile and only partial relationship to the historical truth, it’s central to the reintroduction of Christmas as a holiday in the nineteenth century. “There has always been in England another older England . . . you feel the nostalgia for it in Chaucer, and you feel it all through Shakespeare. Camelot is the great English legend,” Orson Welles once perceptively observed. In Victorian times this Camelot is Christmas. The English idea, wholly mythical though it is, of a better lost and festive past annexes a whole season. The Victorians thought of what we call a Victorian Christmas as a medieval-revival Christmas. Not only is the idea of a renewed or revived Christmas already in place in the 1830s, through the quasi-historical work of people such as Hervey, but the joy of a secularized Christmas has long been present in Dickens’s work. It’s there in his very first book, 1836’s Sketches by Boz, where there is a wonderful description of a Christmas dinner, and in The Pickwick Papers, his first novel, there’s the winter pastoral ideal of Dingley Dell, where they celebrate Christmas with ice-skating and eating and general cheer.
But it’s true that Dickens doesn’t give permanent form to his instincts and beliefs about Christmas until he writes A Christmas Carol in 1843. A Christmas Carol is one of the great allegories of the complicated relationship between capitalism and charity — caritas, in the Christian sense of universal love — ever written, but that subject is itself part of the history of its making. In 1843–44 Dickens is writing and publishing as a serial Martin Chuzzlewit, his most ambitious and in some ways his most interesting novel to that date. But it also becomes his first failure. He has already written The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop, all hits, but with this one, the sales — the week-to-week sales of the serial — plummet, whoosh! Using his earlier travels to America as inspiration, he tries to revive Martin Chuzzlewit by giving him American adventures — anti-American adventures, as it happens — and that doesn’t work. So he finds himself up against it in every sense; he has that panicky feeling that young people who find too much success too soon often have: that he is going to fall off the world, that one failure marks the end of all success. He’s the Justin Bieber of the novel and suddenly his hair has fallen out. What’s he going to do? One thing he thinks of is the idea of writing a Christmas story.
