Judith Flanders - Christmas: A Biography

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For Donna Leon

A history of Christmas might sound like a fairly simple undertaking. From nativity, to church, to family, to commerce a story of high beginnings, a cosy, warm middle and the chill of cold cash at the end. That is how the story is often told. But is it the real story? For a start, every Christmas is different. The traditions of Catholic Spain are different from the traditions of Catholic Portugal and Catholic South America; Protestant Germany is different from Protestant Denmark, much less the differences between Protestant England and Protestant New England.

But religion, as we will see, is only one element ultimately, and surprisingly, a small element in Christmas as we know it. For there is Christmas the way it is celebrated in our own culture; Christmas the way it is celebrated in our own home; and Christmas the way it is celebrated in the mass media, in books and newspapers and magazines, on film and on television. All these Christmases are related to each other, but they are not identical. Because then, of course, there is that wondrous, nostalgically flawless day that is seared in our memories, the day that we can never quite recapture, the perfect Christmas. The poet C. Day Lewis got it right when he wrote, there are not Christmases, there is only Christmas a composite day made up from the haunting impression of many Christmas Days, a work of art painted by memory. That is the key.

Each of us is a storehouse of Christmases, a repository of all the happiness and sometimes sadness of seasons past. Christmas is therefore magical: it enables us to be like Alice in Wonderlands White Queen, who could believe six impossible things before breakfast. We believe dozens of impossible things often dozens of mutually contradictory things about Christmas without even trying. Often without even realizing it.

For the holiday piles legend upon legend. Santa Claus was created in the Netherlands, or maybe his red suit was invented by the Coca-Cola Corporation; Prince Albert was the person to bring German Christmas trees to Britain; in the Middle Ages, the great feudal lords kept seasonal open house and fed anyone who appeared; the Roman Saturnalia was the origin of Christmas Day, or maybe it was the feast of Woden. Except except, of course, that none of these things is true. At Christmas, and about Christmas, what is true, and what we think is true, is hard to separate from what we would simply like to believe is true.

The two most common assumptions about the holiday are, first, that it was religious in origin and second, that the traditions of each speakers own country embody the real Christmas, the ones that others only palely imitate.

That Christmas was once religious, and only in our debased, commercial age has been reduced to its current shabby, market-driven modern form, is such a common idea that it comes as a surprise when the actual make-up of the day is examined. First and foremost, of course, Christmas is the day established by the Christian church to mark the nativity of Christ. Today, therefore, we generally assume that the old Christmas the real Christmas was a deeply solemn religious event that our own secular, capitalist society has sullied.

The second assumption, that Christmas is native to our culture, whichever culture that may be, is equally reflexive. To most people in Britain, in America, in Germany, Christmas is really a British, American, German holiday. Germans consider their Teutonic solstice myths, their trees, advent wreaths, seasonal markets, roast goose and red cabbage to be the authentic customs, the ones that produce a Weihnachtsstimmung, or Christmas feeling, that cannot properly be replicated anywhere else. The British and, in particular, the English, think their mince pies and plum puddings, their trees, their ghost stories and Dickens readings, their domesticity and child-centred festivities, to be the very essence of the holiday. In the USA, birth-place of Santa Claus and of Christmas stockings, of giant outdoor trees, turkeys and eggnog, Christmas is, just as obviously, American, and the rest of the world participates in their customs only by imitation.

And yet, even while we consider our Christmas customs to be the true ones, we most people in the West today who celebrate Christmas in reality dont adhere to our customs, but to an amalgam of traditions drawn primarily from the Anglo-American world and the German-speaking lands. These were then shaken up, mixed together with a couple of centuries of newspapers, magazines and books, not to mention a hundred years of radio, film and television, to end up not with one cultures Christmas, but with something entirely new, a holiday that is recognized across the globe, but comes from nowhere in particular.