Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The Real Meaning of Christmas
This picture belongs to this guy.Yes, it's Christmas time again and all you regular readers know how much I love to screw with Christmas.
Last year I went on a tirade against the materialism of the Yuletide season. This year, just to demonstrate how mentally flexible I am, I'm going to take the opposite approach.
This time of year, you always hear people going on and on about the real meaning of Christmas, which usually involves trying to make us all feel warm and tingly about a Nativity scene.
But let's jump back a bit. In fact, let's jump back about 1,650 years to the establishment of Christmas in ancient Rome.
As is well known, December 25 has nothing to do with the birth of Christ. Zero. There's no Christian significance, symbolic or otherwise, about that date. Rather, it was the date of the popular Roman Saturnalia holiday which involved - whaddayaknow - feasting, merry-making and gift-giving. In fact, winter solstice-season feasting and excess is common in almost every culture on the globe.
But the ancient Christian church, crafty strategic buggers that they were, had a carefully thought out plan to co-opt all the popular cultural institutions of pagan Rome by replacing them with vaguely Christian ones.
You know that special day we observe on February 14? It used to be a Roman fertility festival. Now, when you've got the words "Roman" and "fertility" in the same sentence, you just know that it's got to be really naughty. But there sure isn't much naughty about St. Valentine's Day any more, is there?
Same deal with Christmas. The pope at that time didn't particularly care about the date of Jesus's birth per se - he just wanted to invent an excuse for a holiday big enough to swallow the Saturnalia whole.
So there you have it, the real meaning of Christmas: to put a vaguely Christian veneer on the well established human custom of partying until your eyes bleed in the dead of winter. All this time, we were all participating in the "real" Christmas and we didn't even know it.
If that's not a Christmas miracle, I don't know what is.
Merry Christmas and all the best in 2009, dear readers!
UPDATE: After some good ol' Wikipedia research, I have become quite enamoured with the traditions of the Saturnalia festival. For example, during the week of Saturnalia you were allowed to tell off your boss and get away with it. I actually started reviving the first part of that tradition this week; the New Year will tell if I've managed the second part.
posted by Mentok @ 3:29 p.m.,
4 Comments:
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At 8:52 p.m.,
said...
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ok, so who would win a contest between saturnalia and festivus??
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At 10:56 p.m.,
Mentok said...
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There are two ways to approach this question.
First is a "Superman vs. Hulk" examination of powers. Festivus's main power is strength, as in "feats of". Saturn is noted for strength as well but also has the power to control time. Just like Superman's heat vision, this time-control power would be the ace in the hole in all fights.
Another way to look at it is good karma / bad karma. Saturnalia was supposed to remind humans of a legendary Golden Age when all men were equal and no one suffered or wanted for anything.
As Seneca the Younger described it:
"It is now the month of December, when the greatest part of the city is in a bustle. Loose reins are given to public dissipation; everywhere you may hear the sound of great preparations, as if there were some real difference between the days devoted to Saturn and those for transacting business"... which sounds like quite a lot of fun.
Festivus's, on the other hand, is pretty much rooted in mean-spiritedness, having arisen from Frank Costanza's shopping mall dispute with another customer:
"As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way."
Yet, for all of that, if it came down to a personal choice, I'd go with Festivus. It's whole vibe as the anti-Christmas version of Christmas is just irresistibly appealing. -
At 5:49 p.m.,
said...
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i had a feeling you would go with festivus, on a strictly personal level.
does it scare you that you put so much thought into it? ;-) -
At 10:27 p.m.,
Mentok said...
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Considering that my boys and I still frequently get into knock-down, drag-out "Justice League vs. Avengers" type debates - including yelling, waving of arms, angry Google searches and someone (usually me) crying in the end ....
... no, it doesn't scare me at all that I put so much thought into it ;-)
