Christmas and its fading religious content

By John Pickard

There are few things in life more irritating than having to endure crap Christmas music in every single shop you go into in December. It is enough to make your ears bleed and is without doubt the main reason why people are switching in ever greater numbers to buying online.

But still, even for an old curmudgeon like me, there are elements of the Christmas holiday that can be enjoyed, mostly to do with food and drink. There is also the harmless spectacle of parents and grandparents smiling in pride at their little ones pretending to be kings, shepherds or sheep in the primary school nativity play. Even better if your little girl is Mary. She’s usually the one in the middle in a blue frock.

Then there are the pantomimes with characters like Widow Twankey, Baron Hardup, Aladdin and Ebenezer – and that’s only one of them. This is the only drama form in which the ‘principal boy’ is always a woman, and the ‘dame’ is a man, with balloons in strategic places. It is a play written on two levels – it is slapstick for the kids and slap and tickle jokes that the kids don’t get, because they’re only meant for the adults who take them.

This enduring tradition, of what used to be a religious festival, is nothing for atheists to get too annoyed about. After all, we have days of the week, months and planets named after Roman gods, and atheists are quite relaxed about that. We can all be in favour of traditions carrying on in this non-religious way, as a kind of social fossil that betrays its origins.

An excuse to miss work and get into the vodka

When he was writing about the religious traditions of the peasants before the Russian Revolution, Trotsky noted how the religious veneer that seemed to govern the calendar of everyday life was quite superficial. There may have been a lot of saints’ days and other holy days, but for most peasants, Trotsky argued, there was little real religiosity involved: it was a good excuse to get away from work for a day and to get cracking on the vodka.

Just out of interest, it is worth looking at the supposed origins of Christmas from a real historical (as opposed to a fictional) point of view. In fact, as the real evidence shows, the Christmas ‘story’ is just as made-up as the pantomimes that surround it.

The Gospel of Mark is acknowledged by all serious scholars as the first one to be written and it has nothing about the nativity of the baby Jesus…nothing at all. The next two to be written – Luke and Matthew – were written at more or less the same time and were embellishments of the earlier Mark. Mark and Matthew (bear in mind, the authors are not named anywhere in the text…they are assumed, so that they can be ‘attributed’ to disciples) likely copied from each other, although it’s not clear what was copied and by whom.

Anyway, it was Matthew who added the story about the three kings and the slaughter of the innocents – as bad King Herod tried to kill the baby Jesus. That was quite a feat, because taking the year zero (ie 0 AD) as the year of the birth of Jesus, Herod, who was a real historical person, had died three years earlier.

Then it was mostly Luke we can thank for the school nativity plays because he replaced the three kings by three shepherds and added the inn and the manger. The Gospel of John has no nativity story and the one in the Koran is different to Luke and Matthew, but we won’t go into that here.

Christmas hitched a ride on the Saturnalia

None of these accounts, it should be noted, attached any date to the nativity. When the authors made up the stories, a particular date wasn’t considered to be important. But once the Roman Empire ‘adopted’ Christianity as its official state religion, it needed all the trappings and paraphernalia that go with it, and so a date had to be assumed. It was compulsory. We leave the Encyclopedia Britannica to take up the story from there…

“In the 3rd century, the Roman Empire, which at the time had not adopted Christianity, celebrated the rebirth of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus) on December 25th. This holiday not only marked the return of longer days after the winter solstice but also followed the popular Roman festival called the Saturnalia (during which people feasted and exchanged gifts). It was also the birthday of the Indo-European deity Mithra, a god of light and loyalty whose cult was at the time growing popular among Roman soldiers”.

So December 25, the winter solstice, was ‘chosen’ and a rationale for it was later manufactured by religious scholars. Outside of the Roman Empire, the ‘pagans’, like everyone else, marked midwinter – accurate, at least, to within a couple of days – as an important turning point in the annual cycle and almost everywhere it was an excuse for a knees-up.

So everywhere the Romans wanted to push the idea of a Christ-mas, a date to mark the nativity of Jesus, they were pushing at an open door. ‘Christmases’ were thus easily grafted onto local midwinter customs in more or less the whole northern hemisphere.

And so the customs grew, year on year, century upon century. Turkeys? They came later. Santa Clause? Mid-European saint. Red Santa suit? We can thank a Coca-Cola ad for that. Boxing Day? God knows. And all of these new layers of tradition moved relentlessly away from religiosity, towards what it is today, an opportunity for The Man to sell you stuff you don’t really need, in a kind of commercial ‘shock and awe’ blitzkrieg. Still, the mulled wine and mince pies are good.

Anyone interested in reading about the real origins of the three ‘Abramic’ religions, can find my book, Behind the Myths, The Foundations of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, here.