Wow! Christmas Was Such A Different Thing Until Americans Commercialized It— But Not About Jesus

Christmas was an opportunity for drag

I was never a big Christmas fan. I never liked ritual gift-giving for example and hate industrially-manufactured cards. I like the idea of giving gifts to people when I feel like it, not on a prescribed date and if I send someone greetings, they’re my thoughts, not those of a professional card writer. In fact, decades ago, I decided the commercialization of Christmas was so offensive that I would spend Christmas abroad. It became my Christmas tradition. 

The Christmas I liked best as a Christmasy thing was in 1997 when we were in Egypt. We had a fantastic time, starting with the pyramids with the then-governor of the pyramids, Zahi Hawass, a friend of a friend, who shut the whole place down for Roland and I and even took us into one that it otherwise closed to tourists. The country was relatively empty of tourists because there had just been a terrorist attack in Luxor that killed 58 mostly Swiss, Japanese and British tourists at the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut. When Roland and I got to the Cairo Airport it was packed— with people rushing to get out. We had the whole place to ourselves, including a huge cruise ship that took us from Luxor to Aswan with stops in Edfu, Esna, and Kom Ombo. The ship probably held a couple of hundred people but it was just Roland and I on one deck and an elderly British couple returning from Aden on the other deck. We blasted an advance copy of some new Lou Reed songs as we sailed up the river, lounging at the pool and watching villagers on the banks.

When we got back to Cairo, Roland dragged me onto an overnight bus to Jerusalem, where I didn’t want to go. I had never been to Israel and I wanted to keep it that way. But we spent a few days in Jerusalem and it was ok and the rest of our time on the West Bank. On Christmas Eve we went to Bethlehem’s Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity which has the Holy Crypt where Jesus was born. I stuck my head into a silver bowl that marked the spot. I loved that. (I hated the Israeli soldiers all over the square.)

Yesterday, writing for Historic.Ly, Fergus Gabhainn dealt with how Christmas was defiled by the capitalist grinch. “The reality of Christmas in its current form,” he wrote, “is an invention purely in service and worship of United States ‘consumerist’ culture… [T]he memory of what was taken in order to instill this cripplingly draining ritual into society was both made and allowed to fade into total obscurity.  It can be hard to convince anybody familiar with the current holiday customs what once was. Christmas started— at least in Western Europe and England— as Saturnalia, a “celebration of the harvest, of the readiness of the coming year's beer supply, in the honor of the freshly slaughtered animals of which the finest were to be consumed post haste before the need for preservation see to it they would be rendered far less palatable by the salting process.  A year's end salve applied to the abrasions of the standard scarcities and toils of feudal Europe. In fact, more than anything, this celebration was a celebration of the arrival of the time on minimum work. For much of it had already been done diligently, and it was time for the commoner to enjoy what was left of the fruits of that labor that had not yet been paid in tax and tribute and was not yet about to go out to the same ends.

Naturally, these profoundly pagan origins of the celebration were of course not lost on the Puritans who during their time of prominence in England and the ‘new world’ colonies, as observed by the Reverend Increase Mather:

Christmas Holidayes were at first invented and institut in compliance with the Pagan Festivals, of old observed at that very time of the Year. This Stuckius has fully cleared. And Hospinian speaketh judiciously, when he saith, that he doth not believe that they who first of all ob∣served the Feast of Christ's Nativity in the latter end of December, did it as thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian.

“Christian scripture in fact,” wrote Gabhainn, “gives no date to mark the Nativity.  Puritanical belief held that were the Nativity to be celebrated on a particular day, God would have spoon-fed that date to the flock. Who could argue? For those wishing to see the ‘Christmas holiday’ returned to its Christian religious roots will be quite disappointed to find that there are exactly none, and ironically, this in fact may be the 'Scroogiest' of anti-Christmas sentiment, especially within the context of the history of the United States where the near entirety of contemporary Christmas tradition was invented and inorganically injected into society; the Puritan's rejection of Christmas is effectively a universally acknowledged reality of scholarship on the subject, in keeping with the colonial clergy's heavy handed interest in the excision of all things ‘pagan’ from society to the point 17th century New England almanacs had purged common names for days of the week from the text due to their non-Christian and/or pagan origin and nature (Saturday/Saturn's Day, Thursday/Thor's Day).  The date of December 25th would remain unnoticed or attached with a notice courts would be in session as it was but a simple work day like any other.”

The “Christmas” holiday once more resembled what a 21st century US citizen would associate with a weekend in a Vegas Comic Con than a sombre religious holiday or the month long shopping spree engaged in today. Particularly singled out was the more or less forgotten activity of “mumming,” at least in relation to the Christmas holiday. As of the 21st century it's very much known commonly as “cosplay.” 

…This riotous revelry crescendoing to the business end of the long arm of the law was almost a tradition in and of itself, accounted for across hundreds of years…

We must take great pains to emphasize to ourselves the nature of this “Lord of Misrule” concept, its importance to the celebration and ultimately the core of the dissolution of the celebratory time of the people into a reformation of socially enforced plebeian consumption, as well as take pains to examine why mumming— and by extension, caroling— were singled out as such particularly offensive to puritanical sensibilities.

When this holiday belonged to the people, the purpose was to stand on its head the social order that by then had accrued upon each man, woman and child a year of indignities inflicted by the oppression of the so-called “well born” and enforce a time of “misrule” upon their self-styled masters.  The shirking of hegemony can clearly be seen as paramount, as 18th century historian Henry Bourne, educated under Reverend Thomas Atherton, writes in Antiquitates Vulgares:

“There is another Custom observed at this Time, which is called among us Mumming; which is a changing of Clothes between Men and Women; who when dress'd in each others Habits, go from one Neighbour's House to another, and partake of their Christmas-Cheer, and make merry with them in Disguise, by dancing and singing, and such like Merriments.

THIS kind of Custom received a deserved Blow from the Church, [...] where it was decreed […] the Faithful should no longer observe them: That the publick Dancings of Women should cease, as being […] therefore quite averse to the Christian Life. They there∣fore decreed, that no Man should be Cloathed with a Woman's Garment, no Woman with a Man's.

[I]t is the Occasion of much Uncleanness and Debauchery, and […] the Woman shall not wear that which partaineth unto a Man, neither shall a Man put on a Woman's Garment; for all that do so, are Abomination unto the LORD thy GOD.”

The defiance of the patriarchate was clear and defensive measures were taken to strike this down wherever possible.  This of course was not confined to the act of mumming, but extended to caroling in the same overly pious tone:

“Was this performed with that Reverence and Decency, which are due to a Song of this Nature, in Honour of the Nativity, and Glo∣ry to our LORD, it would be very commend∣able; but to sing it, as is generally done, in the midst of Rioting and Chambering (fornication), and Wantoness, is no Honour, but Disgrace; no Glory, but an Affront to that Holy Season, a Scandal to Religion, and a Sin against CHRIST”

To put it mildly, the Christians of the 17th and 18th century were wildly unfriendly to what the masses considered their Christmas celebration. And the closer one looks the more apparent the underlying reason for it is, and here again we plumb the depths of Increase Mather's mind:

“In the Saturnalian Days, Masters did wait upon their Servants…. The Gentiles called Saturns time the Golden Age, because in it there was no servitude, in Commemoration whereof on his Festival, Servants must be Masters.” This practice, like so many others, was simply picked up and transposed to Christmas, where those who were low in station became “Masters of Misrule.”

Yet again, we are indeed reminded that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle, so on and so forth, et cetera.

But this barely scratches the surface. “Caroling,” a leadenly boring institution as it is now was once the frontline of this ritualized social inversion. The costumed antics of the mummers were one thing, “caroling” in the old days was a completely different animal. Stephen Nissenbaum writes:

“At other times of the year it was the poor who owed goods, labor, and deference to the rich. But on this occasion the tables were turned— literally. The poor— most often bands of boys and young men— claimed the right to march to the houses of the well-to-do, enter their halls, and receive gifts of food, drink, and sometimes money as well. And the rich had to let them in— essentially, to hold “open house.” Christmas was a time when peasants, servants, and apprentices exercised the right to demand that their wealthier neighbors and patrons treat them as if they were wealthy and powerful. The Lord of the Manor let the peasants in and feasted them. In return, the peasants offered something of true value in a paternalistic society— their goodwill.”

This was not just a year-end harvest celebration but a most diplomatic effort of the masses to right a most uneven score through pageantry, high spirits, flowing drink and gaming. An olive branch extended to the oppressor by the oppressed that so greatly outnumbered them in exchange for yet another coming year of toil on their behalf for little gratitude.

The purpose here was to leverage an exchange of what was effectively stolen surplus labor in exchange for a season of being treated as a real person instead of the exploiter of real people.  Upon exchange, the party truly started and these early carolers— roving bands of well-liquored toilers— would break out in true revelry, dancing and singing songs with lyrics designed to never quite lose sight of the real spirit of the season, one particularly pointed example:

“We have come to claim our right...

And if you don't open up your door,

We'll lay you flat upon the floor”

…By the early the 19th century, Washington Irving had published A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, a satirical history of New York City. While it did a fair bit to annoy the descendants of the Dutch colonizers, the lasting effect of the writing was for Irving to achieve wide fame and Saint Nicholas as written of in the book as being viewed by the Dutch as patron and guardian, carved into the prow of the vessel that brought them to their to-be colony, to become a household name.

…The final nail into the coffin of this people's holiday would begin to be driven in.

Saint Nicholas's association with giving of gifts and the protection of children would make him a natural mascot for a more “family-friendly” holiday focused on children than the raucous celebration of the adults who worked all year; by 1821, William Gilley (also a New Yorker) published a book containing the poem of anonymous authorship titled The Child's Friend, introducing the world to 'Santeclaus', a magical figure pulled by reindeer on a sleigh filled with rewards for well-behaved children.

Not but two years after that, “A Visiti From Saint Nick— better known as “Twas The Night Before Christmas”— would be published. Clement Clarke Moore, it's author, would borrow heavily from conceptual sketches written by his friend, the original Knickerbocker himself, Washington Irving and offer up a tale of a “magical jolly elf” that arrives not on Christmas but the night before, where it is considered that Moore "deftly shifted the focus away from Christmas Day with its still-problematic religious associations" (widely seen by Protestants still as a result of "Catholic ignorance and deception") resulting in "New Yorkers embraced Moore's child-centered version of Christmas as if they had been doing it all their lives." Despite Moore's day-job as a seminary professor, his poem would be stripped of religious tones, secularizing it on the whole, no doubt further adding to its solidification.

Later, Irving would (with backing from John Jacob Astor, his consummate cash-spigot) found the Saint Nicholas Society of New York City, a fraternal organization for the descendants of the early Dutch colonizers masquerading as a charity that would be used to keep these poems in constant circulation. A mascot was born.

The contemporary Christmas holiday now revolves entirely around this bit of iconography. Solidified in its full form by 1873 when Godey's Lady's Book featured a picture of Santa Claus encircled by elves and toys with the caption “Here we have an idea of the preparations that are made to supply the young folks with toys at Christmas time.”

By now what today would be called “The Disneyfication” of Christmas was complete. An amalgamation of Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas commanding a legion of elves that manufacture toys for the world's children, as opposed to acknowledging the toys as made by laborers, whom the holiday used to be for.  Little left but a means of instilling early in children commodity fetishism on a cultist level, pounced on (most famously at Coca-Cola) by every hack ad man close to the world over.

The key to remember, when confronted with the notion that you do not “hate Christmas,” but you in fact “hate capitalism,” is to always respond “yeah, that's the point.” There is no Christmas and there never really was. It was a “Christian” adjacent branding on a pagan holiday, peasants were only ever “allowed” to celebrate in the first place under Christian Europe as part of a bargain wherein the church would instate this as a “Christian” holiday and allow its celebration per the old customs so long as everyone “went along” with the Christian thing and didn't actively “pagan it up too much,” as it were. It was a righteous annual protection racket run in revelry by the laborers that made society possible, reduced to crass ritualized consumption.

Participation in “Christmas” at this point is little but the act of paying your oppressors a yearly commodity tax, with a smile, for the privilege of being oppressed by them, and nodding along as it is declared “the most wonderful time of the year.” If ever there was a time to invoke the “RETVRN” sentiment, this is it. You are as right to hate Christmas as it is right to rebel.