Christmas

Status
Not open for further replies.


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news-review/unwrapping-the-myths-of-christmas-dpc027cgn?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=newsletter_101&utm_medium=email&utm_content=101_December 17, 2017&CMP=TNLEmail_118918_2668605_101

Unwrapping the myths of Christmas.

The British, and in particular the English, think their mince pies and plum puddings, their trees, their ghost stories and Charles Dickens readings, their domesticity and child-centred festivities, to be the very essence of the holiday. In America, birthplace 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 its customs only by imitation.

And yet even while we consider “our” Christmas customs to be the true ones, in reality we don’t adhere to “our” customs, but to an amalgam of traditions drawn primarily from the Anglo-American world and German-speaking lands.

These were then shaken up, mixed together with a couple of centuries of newspapers, magazines and books, not to mention 100 years of radio, film and television, to end up not with one culture’s Christmas but with something entirely new: a holiday that is recognised across the globe but comes from nowhere in particular.

Here is the story of some of those traditions. You may not know them as well as you think.

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS (337-352)

A seasonal sheep mystery.

The earliest evidence we have for a celebration of Christ’s birth is when Julius I, Bishop of Rome (337–352), decreed that Christ’s nativity was to be observed on December 25. Why then? According to biblical scholars’ calculations, based on the gospels and other church writings, April 17, May 29 and September 15 are all more likely dates for the birth of Jesus.

If Mary gave birth in December, why were the sheep still in the fields in the winter months when they should have been taken in to the villages for warmth? The choice of December 25 seems instead to have been tied to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

THE BIBLE AND THE BULL (380)
December 25 was already a significant date for another form of worship. The most widely practised religion in the Roman empire was known as Mithraism, after the god Mithras, who reputedly slayed a sacred bull, probably in a spring fertility ceremony.

The birth of Mithras was also marked at the winter solstice, when he is said to have emerged from his birthplace in a cave, witnessed by two shepherds.

In 380 Christianity became the established religion in Rome. Christmas — and some of the stories surrounding it — may owe its key date to a merging of Christian and pagan traditions.

PAGAN PARTY TIME (730)
The Venerable Bede claimed in about 730 that ancient Britons referred to December and January as Yule, probably derived from a Norse word, “jul”, which originally meant festivities. The word Christmas, or rather Cristesmæsse — Christ’s mass — replaced Yule in the British Isles some time after the 9th century.

The use of Christmas gradually became standard, and Yule returned only in the 19th century, with the rekindling of the love for ancient traditions.

THE NATIVITY PLAY (c1000)
By the 11th century in France, a star was hung over church altars for an Epiphany play that was incorporated into the mass, and the story of the Magi, of Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents was acted out. In the 12th century, English churches also staged these plays.

Another form of theatre originated with Francis of Assisi, who in 1223 produced a replica of a stable, with a manger, an ox and an ass (although his animals were real, not yet models).

FESTIVE STUFFING (1213)
By the reign of King John, courtly Christmas feasts had become mind-bogglingly elaborate. On Christmas Day 1213 the king’s household and guests consumed 27 hogsheads of wine, 400 head of pork, 3,000 fowl, 15,000 herring, 10,000 eels, 100lb of almonds, 2lb of spices and 66lb of pepper.

Edward III later tried to curb excess, passing laws restricting the meals on seven of the holiday’s 12 days to two courses, with a limit of two kinds of meat per course.

AN EARLY CHRISTMAS TREE (1531)
One 16th-century historian claimed that in previous centuries every parish had a great pole serving as a maypole in the summer, decorated with holly and ivy in the winter. This was not a Christmas tree as we know it but it might be considered a precursor. An association between trees and Christmas was emerging, especially in Germany, and by 1531 there was a new fashion, with Strasbourg markets selling trees for people to erect indoors, although these were apparently not yet decorated.

The first decorated indoor tree we know of appeared in 1605, again in Strasbourg. Adorned with paper roses, apples, wafers, gilded sweets and sugar ornaments, it was what, a few years later, would be given a new name — a Weihnachtsbaum, or Christmas tree.

A NASTY POPISH INVENTION (1561)

A nativity play, royal feasting, and carol singers
In the 16th century a growing number of ardent English Protestants began to condemn the secular holiday.

In Scotland in 1561 the newly reformed kirk declared all of Christmas a nasty popish invention and banned the holidays entirely.

By the turn of the century in Scotland, carol singing, playing football, making music and dancing were all banned as profane.

MARK OF THE ANTICHRIST (1640s)
The English Civil War was unkind to Christmas. The reformers saw Christmas, of which there was no mention in the Bible, as a mark of the antichrist. In 1643 Oliver Cromwell’s parliament sat on December 25 to make sure everyone understood this was to be a working day like any other.

By 1645 it was decreed that: “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy days, having no Warrant in the Word of God, are not to be continued.”

The English ban did not survive long after Cromwell’s death, but apart from 1660-90 the Scottish kirk’s ban continued until 1958, when Christmas became an official holiday in Scotland for the first time in a quarter of a millennium.

GETTING HIGLY PIGLY (1675)
Christmas quickly regained its popularity, although many continued to fear that the holiday seduced the population “to Drunkenness, Gluttony, & unlawful Gaming, Wantonness, Uncleanness, Lasciviousness, Cursing, Swearing” and, ultimately, “all to idleness”.

The playwright William Davenant, sometimes said to have been Shakespeare’s godson, had a character claim in one of his plays that more children were “begot i’ the Christmas Holydaies” than at any other time of the year, “when the Spirit of Mince-Pie Raignes in the blood”. One 1675 carol booklet looked forward to Christmas “so we’l be higly pigly one with another”.

GIFT-GIVING (1728)
The earliest Christmas presents were upward gifts of obligation — to a sovereign from the nobles; to a landowner from the tenants. By the end of the 18th century a downward tradition was emerging — from employers to their workers (in the form of bonuses or tips) and most importantly, for the first time, from parents to children.

One of the first advertisements in Britain to promote a Christmas gift was printed in 1728: a necklace for a baby. By 1743 an anthology of stories, jokes and other light fare was advertised with the subtitle “A Christmas-box for gay Gallants and good Companions”. The most common Christmas gift for children became books, with toys not far behind.

CHRISTMAS DRINKS (1767)
In 1767 a group of London bakers placed advertisements stating that they would not be giving traditional Christmas tips to their customers’ servants on the grounds that, if the “lower ranks . . . wallow[ed] in wealth during the Holydays”, as they put it, they would spend it all on alcohol. To celebrate Christmas, said one newspaper, was to celebrate “Rioting and Drunkenness”.

This was probably not far from reality. Joseph Banks, the naturalist on Captain Cook’s first voyage, recorded that the Endeavour’s crew kept Christmas “in the old fashioned way”: “all hands were as Drunk as our forefathers used to be upon the like occasion”.

SANTA CLAUS (1770s)
In one popular version of the legend, Dutch emigrants sailed for New Amsterdam, later to become New York, taking with them the story of St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors and children. The Dutch version of the saint’s name, Sint Nicolaas, was rendered by the city’s English-speaking population as Sinterklaas, then corrupted in the late 18th century to Santa Claus.

Another version refers to a poem in the New York Spectator in 1810 about the “good holy man” St Nicholas “whom we Sancte Claus name”. But it might be another immigrant group that was responsible for the link between St Nicholas and Santa. Switzerland, too, had seen a mass migration to the New World: as many as 25,000 Swiss headed for North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New York in the 18th century alone.

Many Swiss came from their country’s German-speaking regions, a fact of potential interest to Santa Claus historians when we remember that two of the Swiss-German, or Schweizerdeutsch, dialect names for St Nicholas were Samichlaus and Santi-Chlaus, both of which sound far closer to Santa Claus than Sint Nicolaas does. So Santa may have been Swiss before he became American.

DECKING THE HALLS (1809)
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited Germany in 1798 and in 1809 wrote an essay describing the local Christmas tradition of decorating homes with boughs from trees. It was reprinted by The Times in 1834 and, 14 years later, a table-top tree appeared in an engraving of Queen Victoria and Albert celebrating Christmas at Windsor Castle.

That single image cemented the Christmas tree in the popular British consciousness, so much so that by 1861, the year of Albert’s death, it was firmly believed that this German prince had transplanted the custom to England with him when he married.

GALLOPING COMMERCIALISATION (1820s)
By the end of the 19th century Santa was, according to one American magazine, “our biggest captain of industry”. As early as the 1820s, St Nicholas was being used to sell jewellery in one New York newspaper advertisement.

As the image of Santa spread, shops began to share a fairly homogeneous image: a fat bearded older man carrying a sack, travelling in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.

The development of department stores in many big cities — New York, London, Berlin — produced a new Christmas tradition, that of going to see the Christmas windows. In England the word “Christmas” had come to mean decorative greenery; by the 1890s in America, it meant to go shopping for presents.

THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS (1843)

A Dickensian Christmas
It is in the works of Charles Dickens that Christmas first meets the modern world. His 1843 novel A Christmas Carol permitted a new way of thinking about the holiday. No longer did it have to be the Christmas of Olde England, where the squire was in his manor house and all was right with the world.

Now it could be a Christmas where working people travelled home by public transport from counting houses and offices, where charity was the remit of the rising middle classes, not of the gentry taking care of their own tenants.

Following Dickens’s lead, Christmas pursuits such as cooking the turkey, playing games, drinking toasts or buying a toy for your child became the quasi-religious observances of the new middle-class domesticity.

VICTORIAN CAVALCADE (1850s)
Early mentions of gift-wrapping are rare. The arrival of the wrapped present in the middle of the 19th century was partly a matter of decorative taste, but also a pragmatic response to the sticky residues left by gas lighting and coal fires — hence the great Victorian cavalcade of containerisation: glass jars, cases, covers, bags and more.

Wrapping a gift was a way of protecting it from grease and soot. Advancing technology then introduced a new element. Brilliantly coloured printed papers became more easily available as chromolithography, a method of colour printing, became less expensive. Wrapping not only made cheap gifts appear more lavish; the process became easier in the 1930s with the arrival of Sellotape.

SEEING THE LIGHT (1891)
Christmas trees lit by candles presented a frightening fire risk. A lit tree was never a safe tree, and many households lit their candles only once, on Christmas Eve, prudently keeping to hand water and a stick with a sponge on the end.

It was America that produced the first commercial string of electric tree lights. In 1891 a tree with electric lights was put up in the children’s ward of a New York hospital. Later a department store brochure assured customers: “The lamps are all lighted at once by the turning of a switch, will burn as long as desired without attention, and can be readily extinguished.”

Its shape may shift, but it always holds our dreams

The image most of us have of Santa today was influenced most profoundly by an advertising campaign by Coca-Cola that ran from 1931 to 1964, and again in the 1980s and 1990s. His red coat had started appearing in the 1830s but it was the Coke ads that spread the quintessential Santa across the globe: a white-bearded man wearing a red jacket trimmed with white fur, belted across a substantial belly, red trousers and black boots and, frequently, a red pointed cap with white fur trim.

Rudolph, too, was a commercial innovation; the red-nosed reindeer, pictured, arrived in our Christmas consciousness in 1939 courtesy of a department store copywriter named Robert May. By this time, the secular Christmas song had also become as important in the American market as carols had been in the 19th century.

By the 21st century Christmas was celebrated by many who shared none of its traditions, who were not even nominally Christian. Magazines, books, film and television have transmitted the formula to places where the meaning of the symbols matters little.

Their reproduction alone — the Santas, the trees, carols, presents — instead signifies acculturation to a generic western world, to modernity. Christmas has assimilated traditions from half a dozen cultures and countries, and therefore appears endlessly flexible.

It is these contrasts and these changes that make Christmas what it is: a holiday that shape-shifts, that transforms itself, to become what we — what our cultures — need it to be at any given time. It allows us an illusion of stability, of long-established communities, a way to believe in an imagined past, when it was safe for children to play in the street, when no one locked their doors and everybody knew their neighbours, all the while unconsciously omitting the less desirable parts of those times.

For while Christmas has transformed itself over the centuries, from a time for the nobility to display their wealth to their dependants, to a time for adults to enjoy what little extra they could gather, to a festival primarily for and about children — from elite to mass, from adult to child, from public to family — while the holiday has altered, it has survived, it has thrived, because, ultimately, Christmas is not what is, or even what has been, but what we hope for.

© Judith Flanders 2017. Adapted from Christmas: A Biography by Judith Flanders published by Picador (£14.99)
 
summerisle said:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news-review/unwrapping-the-myths-of-christmas-dpc027cgn?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=newsletter_101&utm_medium=email&utm_content=101_December 17, 2017&CMP=TNLEmail_118918_2668605_101

Unwrapping the myths of Christmas.

The British, and in particular the English, think their mince pies and plum puddings, their trees, their ghost stories and Charles Dickens readings, their domesticity and child-centred festivities, to be the very essence of the holiday. In America, birthplace 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 its customs only by imitation.

And yet even while we consider “our” Christmas customs to be the true ones, in reality we don’t adhere to “our” customs, but to an amalgam of traditions drawn primarily from the Anglo-American world and German-speaking lands.

These were then shaken up, mixed together with a couple of centuries of newspapers, magazines and books, not to mention 100 years of radio, film and television, to end up not with one culture’s Christmas but with something entirely new: a holiday that is recognised across the globe but comes from nowhere in particular.

Here is the story of some of those traditions. You may not know them as well as you think.

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS (337-352)

A seasonal sheep mystery.

The earliest evidence we have for a celebration of Christ’s birth is when Julius I, Bishop of Rome (337–352), decreed that Christ’s nativity was to be observed on December 25. Why then? According to biblical scholars’ calculations, based on the gospels and other church writings, April 17, May 29 and September 15 are all more likely dates for the birth of Jesus.

If Mary gave birth in December, why were the sheep still in the fields in the winter months when they should have been taken in to the villages for warmth? The choice of December 25 seems instead to have been tied to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

THE BIBLE AND THE BULL (380)
December 25 was already a significant date for another form of worship. The most widely practised religion in the Roman empire was known as Mithraism, after the god Mithras, who reputedly slayed a sacred bull, probably in a spring fertility ceremony.

The birth of Mithras was also marked at the winter solstice, when he is said to have emerged from his birthplace in a cave, witnessed by two shepherds.

In 380 Christianity became the established religion in Rome. Christmas — and some of the stories surrounding it — may owe its key date to a merging of Christian and pagan traditions.

PAGAN PARTY TIME (730)
The Venerable Bede claimed in about 730 that ancient Britons referred to December and January as Yule, probably derived from a Norse word, “jul”, which originally meant festivities. The word Christmas, or rather Cristesmæsse — Christ’s mass — replaced Yule in the British Isles some time after the 9th century.

The use of Christmas gradually became standard, and Yule returned only in the 19th century, with the rekindling of the love for ancient traditions.

THE NATIVITY PLAY (c1000)
By the 11th century in France, a star was hung over church altars for an Epiphany play that was incorporated into the mass, and the story of the Magi, of Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents was acted out. In the 12th century, English churches also staged these plays.

Another form of theatre originated with Francis of Assisi, who in 1223 produced a replica of a stable, with a manger, an ox and an ass (although his animals were real, not yet models).

FESTIVE STUFFING (1213)
By the reign of King John, courtly Christmas feasts had become mind-bogglingly elaborate. On Christmas Day 1213 the king’s household and guests consumed 27 hogsheads of wine, 400 head of pork, 3,000 fowl, 15,000 herring, 10,000 eels, 100lb of almonds, 2lb of spices and 66lb of pepper.

Edward III later tried to curb excess, passing laws restricting the meals on seven of the holiday’s 12 days to two courses, with a limit of two kinds of meat per course.

AN EARLY CHRISTMAS TREE (1531)
One 16th-century historian claimed that in previous centuries every parish had a great pole serving as a maypole in the summer, decorated with holly and ivy in the winter. This was not a Christmas tree as we know it but it might be considered a precursor. An association between trees and Christmas was emerging, especially in Germany, and by 1531 there was a new fashion, with Strasbourg markets selling trees for people to erect indoors, although these were apparently not yet decorated.

The first decorated indoor tree we know of appeared in 1605, again in Strasbourg. Adorned with paper roses, apples, wafers, gilded sweets and sugar ornaments, it was what, a few years later, would be given a new name — a Weihnachtsbaum, or Christmas tree.

A NASTY POPISH INVENTION (1561)

A nativity play, royal feasting, and carol singers
In the 16th century a growing number of ardent English Protestants began to condemn the secular holiday.

In Scotland in 1561 the newly reformed kirk declared all of Christmas a nasty popish invention and banned the holidays entirely.

By the turn of the century in Scotland, carol singing, playing football, making music and dancing were all banned as profane.

MARK OF THE ANTICHRIST (1640s)
The English Civil War was unkind to Christmas. The reformers saw Christmas, of which there was no mention in the Bible, as a mark of the antichrist. In 1643 Oliver Cromwell’s parliament sat on December 25 to make sure everyone understood this was to be a working day like any other.

By 1645 it was decreed that: “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy days, having no Warrant in the Word of God, are not to be continued.”

The English ban did not survive long after Cromwell’s death, but apart from 1660-90 the Scottish kirk’s ban continued until 1958, when Christmas became an official holiday in Scotland for the first time in a quarter of a millennium.

GETTING HIGLY PIGLY (1675)
Christmas quickly regained its popularity, although many continued to fear that the holiday seduced the population “to Drunkenness, Gluttony, & unlawful Gaming, Wantonness, Uncleanness, Lasciviousness, Cursing, Swearing” and, ultimately, “all to idleness”.

The playwright William Davenant, sometimes said to have been Shakespeare’s godson, had a character claim in one of his plays that more children were “begot i’ the Christmas Holydaies” than at any other time of the year, “when the Spirit of Mince-Pie Raignes in the blood”. One 1675 carol booklet looked forward to Christmas “so we’l be higly pigly one with another”.

GIFT-GIVING (1728)
The earliest Christmas presents were upward gifts of obligation — to a sovereign from the nobles; to a landowner from the tenants. By the end of the 18th century a downward tradition was emerging — from employers to their workers (in the form of bonuses or tips) and most importantly, for the first time, from parents to children.

One of the first advertisements in Britain to promote a Christmas gift was printed in 1728: a necklace for a baby. By 1743 an anthology of stories, jokes and other light fare was advertised with the subtitle “A Christmas-box for gay Gallants and good Companions”. The most common Christmas gift for children became books, with toys not far behind.

CHRISTMAS DRINKS (1767)
In 1767 a group of London bakers placed advertisements stating that they would not be giving traditional Christmas tips to their customers’ servants on the grounds that, if the “lower ranks . . . wallow[ed] in wealth during the Holydays”, as they put it, they would spend it all on alcohol. To celebrate Christmas, said one newspaper, was to celebrate “Rioting and Drunkenness”.

This was probably not far from reality. Joseph Banks, the naturalist on Captain Cook’s first voyage, recorded that the Endeavour’s crew kept Christmas “in the old fashioned way”: “all hands were as Drunk as our forefathers used to be upon the like occasion”.

SANTA CLAUS (1770s)
In one popular version of the legend, Dutch emigrants sailed for New Amsterdam, later to become New York, taking with them the story of St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors and children. The Dutch version of the saint’s name, Sint Nicolaas, was rendered by the city’s English-speaking population as Sinterklaas, then corrupted in the late 18th century to Santa Claus.

Another version refers to a poem in the New York Spectator in 1810 about the “good holy man” St Nicholas “whom we Sancte Claus name”. But it might be another immigrant group that was responsible for the link between St Nicholas and Santa. Switzerland, too, had seen a mass migration to the New World: as many as 25,000 Swiss headed for North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New York in the 18th century alone.

Many Swiss came from their country’s German-speaking regions, a fact of potential interest to Santa Claus historians when we remember that two of the Swiss-German, or Schweizerdeutsch, dialect names for St Nicholas were Samichlaus and Santi-Chlaus, both of which sound far closer to Santa Claus than Sint Nicolaas does. So Santa may have been Swiss before he became American.

DECKING THE HALLS (1809)
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited Germany in 1798 and in 1809 wrote an essay describing the local Christmas tradition of decorating homes with boughs from trees. It was reprinted by The Times in 1834 and, 14 years later, a table-top tree appeared in an engraving of Queen Victoria and Albert celebrating Christmas at Windsor Castle.

That single image cemented the Christmas tree in the popular British consciousness, so much so that by 1861, the year of Albert’s death, it was firmly believed that this German prince had transplanted the custom to England with him when he married.

GALLOPING COMMERCIALISATION (1820s)
By the end of the 19th century Santa was, according to one American magazine, “our biggest captain of industry”. As early as the 1820s, St Nicholas was being used to sell jewellery in one New York newspaper advertisement.

As the image of Santa spread, shops began to share a fairly homogeneous image: a fat bearded older man carrying a sack, travelling in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.

The development of department stores in many big cities — New York, London, Berlin — produced a new Christmas tradition, that of going to see the Christmas windows. In England the word “Christmas” had come to mean decorative greenery; by the 1890s in America, it meant to go shopping for presents.

THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS (1843)

A Dickensian Christmas
It is in the works of Charles Dickens that Christmas first meets the modern world. His 1843 novel A Christmas Carol permitted a new way of thinking about the holiday. No longer did it have to be the Christmas of Olde England, where the squire was in his manor house and all was right with the world.

Now it could be a Christmas where working people travelled home by public transport from counting houses and offices, where charity was the remit of the rising middle classes, not of the gentry taking care of their own tenants.

Following Dickens’s lead, Christmas pursuits such as cooking the turkey, playing games, drinking toasts or buying a toy for your child became the quasi-religious observances of the new middle-class domesticity.

VICTORIAN CAVALCADE (1850s)
Early mentions of gift-wrapping are rare. The arrival of the wrapped present in the middle of the 19th century was partly a matter of decorative taste, but also a pragmatic response to the sticky residues left by gas lighting and coal fires — hence the great Victorian cavalcade of containerisation: glass jars, cases, covers, bags and more.

Wrapping a gift was a way of protecting it from grease and soot. Advancing technology then introduced a new element. Brilliantly coloured printed papers became more easily available as chromolithography, a method of colour printing, became less expensive. Wrapping not only made cheap gifts appear more lavish; the process became easier in the 1930s with the arrival of Sellotape.

SEEING THE LIGHT (1891)
Christmas trees lit by candles presented a frightening fire risk. A lit tree was never a safe tree, and many households lit their candles only once, on Christmas Eve, prudently keeping to hand water and a stick with a sponge on the end.

It was America that produced the first commercial string of electric tree lights. In 1891 a tree with electric lights was put up in the children’s ward of a New York hospital. Later a department store brochure assured customers: “The lamps are all lighted at once by the turning of a switch, will burn as long as desired without attention, and can be readily extinguished.”

Its shape may shift, but it always holds our dreams

The image most of us have of Santa today was influenced most profoundly by an advertising campaign by Coca-Cola that ran from 1931 to 1964, and again in the 1980s and 1990s. His red coat had started appearing in the 1830s but it was the Coke ads that spread the quintessential Santa across the globe: a white-bearded man wearing a red jacket trimmed with white fur, belted across a substantial belly, red trousers and black boots and, frequently, a red pointed cap with white fur trim.

Rudolph, too, was a commercial innovation; the red-nosed reindeer, pictured, arrived in our Christmas consciousness in 1939 courtesy of a department store copywriter named Robert May. By this time, the secular Christmas song had also become as important in the American market as carols had been in the 19th century.

By the 21st century Christmas was celebrated by many who shared none of its traditions, who were not even nominally Christian. Magazines, books, film and television have transmitted the formula to places where the meaning of the symbols matters little.

Their reproduction alone — the Santas, the trees, carols, presents — instead signifies acculturation to a generic western world, to modernity. Christmas has assimilated traditions from half a dozen cultures and countries, and therefore appears endlessly flexible.

It is these contrasts and these changes that make Christmas what it is: a holiday that shape-shifts, that transforms itself, to become what we — what our cultures — need it to be at any given time. It allows us an illusion of stability, of long-established communities, a way to believe in an imagined past, when it was safe for children to play in the street, when no one locked their doors and everybody knew their neighbours, all the while unconsciously omitting the less desirable parts of those times.

For while Christmas has transformed itself over the centuries, from a time for the nobility to display their wealth to their dependants, to a time for adults to enjoy what little extra they could gather, to a festival primarily for and about children — from elite to mass, from adult to child, from public to family — while the holiday has altered, it has survived, it has thrived, because, ultimately, Christmas is not what is, or even what has been, but what we hope for.

© Judith Flanders 2017. Adapted from Christmas: A Biography by Judith Flanders published by Picador (£14.99)
Click to expand...

*commence operation cat gif

kitten2.gif
 

Status
Not open for further replies.

Welcome

Join Grand Old Team to get involved in the Everton discussion. Signing up is quick, easy, and completely free.

Register

Shop

Back
Top