Ritual battles - Tales from the Christmas trenches

BY ROBBIE SMYTH

Pagan, puritan, politically correct, religious, Christian, commercialist consumerist... what sort of Christmas are you planning this year? With the festive season already kicked off in offices, schools and homes around the island, ROBBIE SMYTH navigates the competing claims for the true spirit of Christmas.

So move over Santa, making a list and checking it twice just doesn't cut it any more. The test today is can you do it in a hip commercially viable, secular, true Christian spirit of Islamic Rasta Buddhist pagan solstice fellowship.

A MAD WORLD?

It's a crowded planet out there, with an ever increasing weight of Christmas rituals competing for your attention, so much so that for most of us it's all a bit too much.

A 2002 survey by the Samaritans found that 60% of us find the festive season stressful. Another Christmas survey of eight to 16 year olds in 2000 found that only 8% of children linked Christmas with Jesus Christ, while 67% associated it with the red suited bearded Coca-Cola Santa.

Luckily, there were no questions about the Budweiser horses, as I feel the years of their relentless festive advertising campaign might have left more of an imprint on young minds than the nativity story.

In New York, the Public School Education Board has banned Christmas nativity scenes on school property this Christmas. This should come as no surprise to Americans, as the city education board are only following the example set in other states such as Maryland and neighbouring New Jersey. Needless to say, the school board decision has provoked that other favourite US tradition, the lawsuit!

CONFLICT ZONES

So with all this stress fighting over symbols and rituals, why bother celebrate Christmas at all? Well, the new millennium's Christmas fallout is nothing new. In 1583, the celebration of Christmas was banned in Scotland. The early Christian church didn't prioritise the nativity at all. It wasn't until the 4th Century that the birth of Jesus caught the interest of Christians. The truth is that what we call Christmas has always been a ritual battleground between competing interests.

Last year, the Red Cross ran into flak over the banning of nativity scenes from its charity shops on the grounds that it would offend "Muslims and other non-Christians".

However, it is the Internet that hosts many more discordant views on Christmas and how it should be celebrated. What's clear from any search is that the Christians celebrating Christmas are perhaps in a minority. The secular agnostic and at times pagan tradition is actually the thread that pulls Christmas together.

PAGAN CHRISTMAS

If the measure of value was the number of years of observance, then pagans would have a pretty good claim to Christmas. Pagan is a nice catch-all world that Christians developed for those who didn't adopt the monotheism that is at the core of Christian belief. Heathen is the not so polite word.

A visit to secularism.org.uk — don't forget some people take this very seriously — offers long treatises on the pagan history of Christmas. Our Pagan Christmas by R J Condon argues that 25 December was called "Natalis Solis Invicti, the birthday of the unconquered sun". This was a day of celebration and feasting, as it came three days after solstice, when the sun begins to climb once again in the sky.

Then there's the Persian sun-god Mithra, also popular in Rome. On the first moments of the 25th, the Mithraic temples would be lit up, with priests in white robes and lots of incense.

The Pagan Christmas includes the Egyptians, Greeks and onto the northern European Yule holiday and even the Jewish Chanukah, or feast of illuminations.

The Christians, it seems, tried to be "aloof" from all these pagan traditions but over time did what we now call a 'cut and paste job' with some of them.

The modern office party is the 20th Century equivalent Roman festival of Saturnalia, which ran from 17-24 December, during which slaves changed places with their masters.

The web is awash with pagans. There is paganpride.org and my personal favourite, the Military Pagan Network at milpagan.org. This website is all about the rights of pagans and neopagans in the US military — the equality agenda is being seriously stretched here. Another informative site if you're into 'this sort of thing' is revelationwebsite.co.uk, which lays bare the whole Christian conspiracy of appropriation of so many pagan ideas, etc. Funny, in the last 200 years we just termed this colonialism, imperialism and now global capitalism. It must, then, be just a case of the names changing.

THE SCOTTISH EXPERIENCE

So why did the Scots ban Christmas? Depending on which site you visit, the blame generally seems to lie with John Knox and dates range for 1562 to 1583, even though he was dead in 1572. What is certain is that with Cromwell and the Puritans, the rest of Britain took on the Scottish policy and Christmas was banned in 1644, being changed by parliamentary decree to a fast day rather than a "popish holiday".

Charles II restored Christmas in 1660. Unfortunately for America, the Puritans took their anti-Christmas beliefs to America with them. Christmas was banned in Massachusetts in 1659, with the law remaining on the statute books for 22 years, which is strange as the same state was the first one in the US to make Christmas a legal holiday in 1856.

Pennsylvania and New England resisted Christmas celebration too for long periods, even though the Germans who settled in Pennsylvania claimed that they were the first to start using Christmas trees in the US.

It's well documented that Victoria Battenberg's husband, Albert, brought a lot of contemporary Christmas traditions to Britain. Included in this is the Christmas tree and carol singing, but what's more interesting to us is the re-invention and need for Christmas ritual.

THE CHRISTMAS SONG

While carol singing seems to be the preserve of primary school children, it has been replaced by a newer Christmas tradition, the Christmas number 1, which may or may not have a festive theme.

One website that offers a different take on the Christmas song is that dedicated to "Glam Rock Christmas". The site believes that "the glam rock genre was responsible in its few short years for more enduring seasonal classics than most other genres put together". This site only had 691 hits, and I'm responsible for three of them, so I don't how many adherents there really are to the glam rock Christmas tradition.

However, the annual Christmas battle has become a permanent festive fixture, even for those of us who don't watch Top of the Pops any more and think buying Coldplay albums and seeing Eminen's Eight Mile means we are still hip. And no, reading the Guardian/Sunday Times or Irish Times Ticket supplement doesn't mean you still rock. Buying Bo Selecta's Perfect Crimbo single doesn't count either.

NEW RITUALS

The point is that this tradition is a secular one. It is also a relatively new one, as is the British fascination with Elizabeth Windsor' Christmas day speech.

For example, one other Christmas ritual that is new, completely fabricated and not driven by the public is found in the US White House. Somewhere, someone decided that the US president's wife should have responsibility for creating an annual White House Christmas theme.

This year it is a Season of Stories, which seems to be particularly politically correct because when you visit their website you find the greeting "Happy reading adventures and joyful holidays to all".

The general idea that reading stories brings people together is a good one. However, the White House goes the full nine yards. If you doubt me, check out the Christmas statistics section on their website.

Here we have another Christmas tradition in which the US are world leaders, the secular politically correct Christmas. Nowhere is this more resonant that in the chanting "happy holidays". Our "Happy Christmas" is too euro-centric and Christianised to be acceptable in civilized society.

Here, the web comes into its own, with rants of all kind for those of you worried about being PC and wanting to offer only politically correct Christmas greetings.

So now, rather than blandly chant "Merry Christmas", you could alternatively say:

"From us (the wishor) to you (hereinafter called the wishee). Please accept without obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, politically correct, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all."

Maybe you should carry it on a card in your wallet.

ANTIMAS

If you are genuinely worried about observing the niceties of politically correct Christmas etiquette, then you could perhaps being suffering from "antimas", which, according to pseudodictionary.com, is being afraid to say Merry Christmas for fear of excluding someone. You might then need to take a "maspill", which is a yet to be invented "hypothetical drug used to cure someone who is anti-Christmas".

The anti-Christmas community seems to be rooted in anti-commercial-consumerist-global-capitalism-eating-our-children sort of thing and they have a heavy web presence.

You can get anti-Christmas cards, my favourite being found at apoplecticpress.org, which among some very unPC cards you can find "Seasons greetings from Monsanto Claus".

What is interesting about the anti-Christmas lobby is that the vast majority of them are bloggers, with their own e-zines and message boards. The apoplectic website sums it up when it describes its cards as being for "yuletide cynics, unfrenzied consumers and other holiday misfits", which I think accounts for the vast majority of the population.

PERSONAL RITUALS

The most overlooked Christmas rituals are often in our homes. How many of us, who grew up in Christianised euro-centric homes, had their own tradition of when the Christmas decorations and tree were put up, who went to whose house, who watched what TV progammes? I know some devastated families who can't believe that there will be no Only Fools and Horses Christmas special or that the Royle Family is no more.

The good side of all of this is that we can reuse and reinvent whatever rituals we really want. There is clearly no orthodoxy to how Christmas should be celebrated. The circumstances are always changing and if you want to sit out a year from what seems like at times a treadmill, that too is becoming a ritual in itself.

The real problem is that age-old one of imposing your ritual on someone else. So whether you're a neo pagan or conservative Christian neo liberal, a solstice skeptic or just tired of tinsel, it still boils down to whether you were naughty or nice.