A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
January 4, 2004
Copyright 2004, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
Christmas is OVER, finally. Why is this woman still talking about it? Well, technically, Christmas is not over. December 25th is only the first of the twelve days of Christmas, with January 6th, Epiphany, being the last. This, of course, has been eclipsed by the two hundred shopping days before Christmas. By the time we actually get to the real first day of Christmas, we might be feeling a little burned out.
Each year, I pick a couple of themes to take through the year. This go-around, I decided to look at the pagan roots, traditions, and contributions to our spiritual and religious lives. You may remember my sermon on thresholds and the pagan celebration of Samhain around Halloween. Well, our celebration of Christmas with its close association to the Winter Solstice, is full of pagan traditions and beliefs. Carols like "Deck the Halls", "The Holly and the Ivy", "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" have less to do with Jesus’ birth and more to do with pagan traditions. Many of the "Christmas" traditions, such as decking the halls or exchanging gifts or celebrating the twelve days predate Christianity and Christmas by more than 2,000 years.
Traditions and rituals stay, even in abbreviated or metamorphosed forms, because they speak to something we still need. So, as I share some of the history of all that "jazz" of Christmas: the decorations and the feasts and Santa Claus and the yule log—I hope we can discover what it is that still speaks to us through the millennia.
The pagan roots of Christmas are a mix of North and South, or more accurately, North and Near East. The Twelve Days of Christmas have their roots in the Mediterranean world, all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia, and the worship of the chief god Marduk. According to Mesopotamian mythology, Marduk came to power by defeating the monsters of chaos and had, in familiar words, "built out of ‘a world without form and void’ an orderly world, and created humankind" (Count and Count, p. 25). However, Marduk’s rule over the chaos was tenuous, as the empty fields and the winter scarcity of food testified. Each new year, around the winter solstice, Marduk had to go to battle again and each year, he almost lost. His human followers had to help in any way they could. They did so by holding a twelve-day festival, during which time, they re-enacted Marduk’s epic battle with chaos, and his creation of the world. This had a dark side to it: technically, the king, put on the throne by Marduk, must die, so that he could join Marduk in the underworld to battle the monsters of chaos. But the real king didn’t want that, for obvious reasons. So, a convicted criminal was dressed up as the king, and for those twelve days, he reigned supreme. The world was turned upside down. His every wish and whim were granted. However, at the end of the twelve days, he was beheaded and the real king restored to the throne. Also part of this twelve-day festival, for reasons lost to us, were the lighting of bonfires, the visiting of neighbors, and the exchanging of gifts.
The Mesopotamian celebrations were borrowed and adapted by those who traveled up and down two important routes of trade and conquest. The first was westward, through Greece to Rome. The second was northward, through the Balkans and the Danube Valley into Central and Northern Europe.
The Roman festival of Saturnalia reflected many aspects of the Mesopotamian New Year feast. It began around the winter solstice, marking the time of year that was coldest and darkest. From the solstice until the new year, January 1st, the Romans celebrated. There were street parties and dinner parties. Friends exchanged gifts with one another, called Strenae or "lucky fruits". Typical of a society growing in wealth, strenae began as actual fruits, but over time became more lavish in the forms of cakes and tokens. The Romans decked their halls with laurel and greens, and lighted them with candles and lamps to keep away the spirits of darkness. During this time, masters and slaves ate together, and sometimes exchanged places. One slave from each household was chosen by his compatriots as the Lord of the Revel, although, happily, he was not beheaded at the end of the festival.
The traditions of Roman Saturnalia met those of the British Isles and Gaul, and were incorporated into the solstice rituals that celebrated the rebirth of the sun. For twelve days, the Celts would feast, hold sporting contests and pageant plays, and sing and dance. Little bands of singers and musicians would go door to door, performing in exchange for food and drink. Neighbors would call on neighbors, bearing gifts of food and receiving in return. It was also a time to check in on older and poorer neighbors to ensure that they had enough to get through the winter. A King of the Feast or a Lord of Misrule was appointed to lead the feasting and the clowning. As in ancient Mesopotamia and Rome, peasants and lords switched places and everything was upside down and backwards. Like the Romans during Saturnalia, the Celts decorated their homes with evergreens to symbolize the hope for the coming Spring and to provide a place for the forest spirits to come out of the cold. For the Romans, holly was a symbol of good health and prosperity, and they would send it to one another as gifts for the new year. For the Celtic Druids, holly was used as a healing plant and it was believed to protect the home from evil spirits and lightening strikes. Holly and ivy were entwined together as symbols of the integration of the masculine and feminine. This was supposed to bring balance and luck for the new year. All of these traditions continued first in spite of and then assimilated into the new Christian religion that came via Rome. Try as they might, the Church Fathers could not stop their pagan converts from celebrating their twelve days of feasting and misrule. So, they reinterpreted the twelve days and all their traditions to fit the story of Jesus’ birth. Thus did the holly, the ivy, and the partridge in the pear tree come to figure in the nativity, however oddly construed.
An important part of the Celtic pagan rituals during the darkest time of the year was to call back the light. Bonfires were lit and colored candles were placed in the windows. Then there was the Yule Log. It was much more than a piece of wood. Before it was brought in for the twelve-day feast, the family would clean out the whole house from top to bottom. Then a large log or stump, preferably from an oak tree, would be cut into the shape of an old woman, the Cailleach, who according to Celtic myth, swallowed up the light during her winter reign. Then it would be burned over the twelve days of the solstice feast, symbolizing the death of cold and winter and the return of light and the sun. Some of its ashes were saved until spring and mixed with seed corn to ensure fertility.
The tradition of the Yule Log probably came not from the Roman South but the Scandinavian North, since "yule" is descended from a Scandinavian word for "joy." Another Christmas tradition that originated and developed from the Germanic and Scandinavian pagan religion was Saint Nicholas or Santa Claus. Woden, as the Germanic peoples called him, or Odin as the Norse did, was chief of the Northern gods. Winter was a very serious event amongst the Northern Europeans and they were not as sure as their Southern neighbors that spring would indeed return. Going back to the chaos and creation mythology, the Norse believed that the cold, the dark, and the howling winds of winter were the work of ice giants who battled the gods and the humans. Odin was their leader in the battle against this icy chaos that threatened them each winter. Odin would ride out the storms on his white horse. At first a bellicose and loud God, Odin evolved over time to embody wisdom and justice. When not on his horse, Odin walked among humankind dressed as a traveler, checking to see that humans were generous in offering hospitality to weary travelers and protecting travelers from danger.
When Christianity came, worship of Odin and his pantheon slowly died out. But a familiar mythology grew around Saint Nicholas or Santa Claus, who took on many of the duties and characteristics of Odin. Santa Claus was a real person, named Nicholas from the region of Asia Minor. During the time of Constantine, he served as the Archbishop of Myra, a seaport town. He supposedly used his wealth to help the poor, particularly poor women and children. After his death, stories circulated about Nicholas as a saint who rescued sailors at sea from their sinking ships and on his white horse, travelers from robbers and murderers on the road. In "4,000 years of Christmas", Alice and Earl Counts note: "Both Woden and Saint Nicholas are travelers of the road; they wander afoot and on horseback, inspecting the deeds of humankind, making sure that right and order prevail. They do this when the days of the year are shortest, when a new year is on its way, when the fortunes of the future are being cast. Both of them ride the storm: they can subdue it or they can rouse it. They have ended up becoming the same person" (pp. 73-74).
What do these pagan traditions and rituals teach us and why do they still matter? It is not simply knowing why we sing "Deck the Halls" or make wreaths with greens and holly or bake a chocolate yule log for dessert. Here are some of the truths these stories and traditions have offered us through the four thousand years of Christmas. First, the pagan religions recognize that nature moves in a cycle of seasons of birth, life, and death. They also understand that human beings are part of, and not separate or above, these natural cycle. The divine or the sacred are inherent in nature, and it is in the turning of the cycle: from birth to life, from life to death, that we are often most open to the divine or to the sense of ultimate meaning. Paganism recognizes too the reality of chaos: that it is ever present in our world, just beneath the order we try to impose. Chaos is both a source of destruction and creation, and therefore must be handled with care and wisdom. I think most important is the pagan response to the times of darkness and chaos. It would seem natural to want to hunker down with one’s family and hoard food and fuel against the coming cold and darkness. Yet the response is instead one of play, of making light of the chaos and finding ways to celebrate light and life. More important, it is grounded in the most basic and significant human religious expression: hospitality. Instead of hoarding and hunkering down, pagan traditions and stories teach that sharing our bounty, taking care of our neighbors, and making room for the stranger are our best creative responses to the chaos of our world. It is a lesson we still struggle to learn today, one we need badly to heal the tears and rents in our world that threaten to let chaos reign in its darkest forms. Decking the halls is serious fun that nurtures hope and community in the cold and dark. It is good that it lasts twelve days!
Bibliography:
Earl W. Count and Alice Lawson Count. 4,000 Years of Christmas. Berkeley, CA: Seastone, 1997.
Mara Freeman. Kindling the Celtic Spirit. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.