The True Meaning of Yuletide - by Uncle Wednesday
A very good friend of mine said last week: “I don’t do Christmas. I lock myself away, take the ‘phone off the hook and hide until it’s all over.” She is not the only one among my friends who take this attitude; there are at least two others, also loners but by no means ‘sad loners’, just highly independent people.
I pondered on why someone would wish to distance themselves from what, to me, can be a wonderful and magical time of year. I still believe in Father Christmas (although I refer to him as Yulefather these days); I continue to hope – against the odds – for a fall of snow; and, despite the fact that this is the first time in many years that I will be on my own for most of the festive season, I have to have the tree with its baubles and lights standing in the corner of the room.
So why don’t some people like this holiday? I was once in a profession that involved meeting a wide variety of people. Oh, to hell with it: I’ll admit it – I was a chiropodist, and a damn good one too. In the half-hour that I would devote to tending a patient’s toenails, corns, callouses, verrucae and so on, we would get the chance to chat. (In a roundabout way, I heard their opinion of me: “Mad as a hatter, but a damn good chiropodist.”)
Around this time of year, when daylight endures for a mere 8 hours or so and the Yule festival is approaching, I frequently heard the plaint: “Oh, I will be glad when it is all over! Such an effort – all the shopping, all the cooking and putting up with relatives that you would prefer not to see.” This already gives three dimensions for preferring to avoid the holiday. A fourth was added when I ventured into the centre of a major city in England on the afternoon of 23 December (on that occasion the last working day before Christmas), seeking to buy some last-minute presents. The city centre was full of roaming bands of drunken youths and the police were out in force and never in groups of less than three. I could not get on the bus out of town fast enough.
Believe it or not, it can get worse. On top of all the materialism, the forced gluttony, the strained contact with relatives, the fearful avoidance of random violence and (I forgot this bit) the slavish watching of absolutely dire TV programmes as we sit, farting and belching after the ‘Christmas dinner’, there comes the political correctness. Oh, sorry, forgot to capitalise it: Political Correctness. I received a chain email from a cousin today. It showed an image of a ‘Christmas’ tree (ok, I use the term as the most familiar) and went on to state: “Take a look: This is not a ‘Holiday Tree’; it is not a ‘Hanukah tree’ or a ‘Kwanza bush’. It is a CHRISTmas tree and we celebrate the birth of JESUS CHRIST!”
The irony is that I have never known my cousin to be any great Christian; he passed on the email simply because he, like many other people, is annoyed at the hijacking of the ‘traditional Christmas’ by other elements, usually politically-correct activists rather than the Jews, black people, Moslems, Hindus or other minorities on whose behalf the PC rent-a-mob claim to be offended. As an adherent of the Asatru faith, I could also have got on my high horse and written a terse reply concerning the true origins of our winter festival. I did not because I understood his motivation, misguided though it was.
Let’s get some wider perspective on the whole issue of Yuletide, Christmas or whatever name you choose to give it. In Europe it has its origins in many festivals, most of them heathen. Our Mid-winter festival has been hijacked, banned, reshaped and corrupted enormously over the course of the past 1,500 years. It has been hijacked as early as the 6th Century by Christian missionaries who knew when they were on to a good thing and melded the old folk-festivals into the new religion. There is no evidence that Jesus was born at the winter solstice; they merely substituted the birth of the ‘son’ for the re-birth of the sun. In the furore of the Protestant revolution in England, the midwinter revels were banned for a decade and they have never properly recovered since. In the 19th Century, the icons and images were fundamentally reshaped in the light of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ and Prince Albert’s input with the (now ubiquitous) ‘Christmas tree’. Since then, the festival has been corrupted to become almost purely a commercial occasion. Every medium of communication, be it radio, TV or internet, calls upon us to spend to the utmost to satisfy the material desires of ourselves and our kith and kin.
So why celebrate it all now? I can give a few reasons. We can celebrate the fact that the sun has reached and passed its nadir and that the days will extend again for the next 6 months. We can have a time for revels and joyous activity to counteract the depressive feeling of the darkest time of the year. It is a time for relaxation and a (little) bit of gluttony when there is not much to do on the farm and the harvest is long gathered, and it is, furthermore, a time to put aside old feuds and grievances for at least 12 days in the ‘peace of Frodhi-Frey’.
To go back to my chiropody patients, as I tended to their feet, my response was: “So why do you do it?” To which they would reply with resignation: “Well, you’ve got to, haven’t you?”
My response was: “No. Break out of it. You don’t have to do this. Why torture yourself in the time of year that should bring nothing but magic and joy?”
There is nothing that prevents us making this a wonderful season. If relatives expect you, by dint of habit, to visit them (or, conversely, expect you to invite them) then exploit every reason to break that routine. Find or invent a reason. Eat what is a special, delicious meal for you; never mind the turkey, spouts and roast potatoes, eat Indian or Mexican if that is what suits you better. As for the materialism and high spending of the Yuletide period, I can only offer the example of a similar but related festival.
In the Netherlands, they celebrate the Feast of Sinterklaas on 5 December. When I lived in that country, there was little commerciality attached to the festival and I shared a student house with 4 others (apart from my fiancée). As none of us had much money to spend, the rules for our ‘Sinterklaas’ celebration were that we were, firstly, to buy a present for each of the other five. Secondly, the said present should cost no more than 5 guilders (a ridiculously small amount, so we had to search very hard); thirdly, we had to pack the present in an inventive manner and, finally, write a doggerel poem that said something about the person, the present and the reason for giving it. As an example, I had to make a present for a vegan member of the household; I packed it in the form of a cow and gave a scurrilous poem on the evils of failing to eat meat. There were many such ironical examples and we all had a good time, interspersed with adequate measures of Heineken. The whole event lasted all evening, we got merrily drunk, it displayed our inventiveness and it cost, in financial terms, very little.
I believe we need to break out of the current paradigm and inventively seek to re-establish the magic of Yuletide. It breaks my heart that I have, on the one hand, friends who say: “I don’t do Christmas” and, on the other hand, acquaintances who say: “I hate it but feel obliged to do it.” Let us re-adopt Yuletide as it ought to be – a time when we relax, enjoy, welcome old friends and look forward to a new season of growth and fertility.
A very good friend of mine said last week: “I don’t do Christmas. I lock myself away, take the ‘phone off the hook and hide until it’s all over.” She is not the only one among my friends who take this attitude; there are at least two others, also loners but by no means ‘sad loners’, just highly independent people.
I pondered on why someone would wish to distance themselves from what, to me, can be a wonderful and magical time of year. I still believe in Father Christmas (although I refer to him as Yulefather these days); I continue to hope – against the odds – for a fall of snow; and, despite the fact that this is the first time in many years that I will be on my own for most of the festive season, I have to have the tree with its baubles and lights standing in the corner of the room.
So why don’t some people like this holiday? I was once in a profession that involved meeting a wide variety of people. Oh, to hell with it: I’ll admit it – I was a chiropodist, and a damn good one too. In the half-hour that I would devote to tending a patient’s toenails, corns, callouses, verrucae and so on, we would get the chance to chat. (In a roundabout way, I heard their opinion of me: “Mad as a hatter, but a damn good chiropodist.”)
Around this time of year, when daylight endures for a mere 8 hours or so and the Yule festival is approaching, I frequently heard the plaint: “Oh, I will be glad when it is all over! Such an effort – all the shopping, all the cooking and putting up with relatives that you would prefer not to see.” This already gives three dimensions for preferring to avoid the holiday. A fourth was added when I ventured into the centre of a major city in England on the afternoon of 23 December (on that occasion the last working day before Christmas), seeking to buy some last-minute presents. The city centre was full of roaming bands of drunken youths and the police were out in force and never in groups of less than three. I could not get on the bus out of town fast enough.
Believe it or not, it can get worse. On top of all the materialism, the forced gluttony, the strained contact with relatives, the fearful avoidance of random violence and (I forgot this bit) the slavish watching of absolutely dire TV programmes as we sit, farting and belching after the ‘Christmas dinner’, there comes the political correctness. Oh, sorry, forgot to capitalise it: Political Correctness. I received a chain email from a cousin today. It showed an image of a ‘Christmas’ tree (ok, I use the term as the most familiar) and went on to state: “Take a look: This is not a ‘Holiday Tree’; it is not a ‘Hanukah tree’ or a ‘Kwanza bush’. It is a CHRISTmas tree and we celebrate the birth of JESUS CHRIST!”
The irony is that I have never known my cousin to be any great Christian; he passed on the email simply because he, like many other people, is annoyed at the hijacking of the ‘traditional Christmas’ by other elements, usually politically-correct activists rather than the Jews, black people, Moslems, Hindus or other minorities on whose behalf the PC rent-a-mob claim to be offended. As an adherent of the Asatru faith, I could also have got on my high horse and written a terse reply concerning the true origins of our winter festival. I did not because I understood his motivation, misguided though it was.
Let’s get some wider perspective on the whole issue of Yuletide, Christmas or whatever name you choose to give it. In Europe it has its origins in many festivals, most of them heathen. Our Mid-winter festival has been hijacked, banned, reshaped and corrupted enormously over the course of the past 1,500 years. It has been hijacked as early as the 6th Century by Christian missionaries who knew when they were on to a good thing and melded the old folk-festivals into the new religion. There is no evidence that Jesus was born at the winter solstice; they merely substituted the birth of the ‘son’ for the re-birth of the sun. In the furore of the Protestant revolution in England, the midwinter revels were banned for a decade and they have never properly recovered since. In the 19th Century, the icons and images were fundamentally reshaped in the light of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ and Prince Albert’s input with the (now ubiquitous) ‘Christmas tree’. Since then, the festival has been corrupted to become almost purely a commercial occasion. Every medium of communication, be it radio, TV or internet, calls upon us to spend to the utmost to satisfy the material desires of ourselves and our kith and kin.
So why celebrate it all now? I can give a few reasons. We can celebrate the fact that the sun has reached and passed its nadir and that the days will extend again for the next 6 months. We can have a time for revels and joyous activity to counteract the depressive feeling of the darkest time of the year. It is a time for relaxation and a (little) bit of gluttony when there is not much to do on the farm and the harvest is long gathered, and it is, furthermore, a time to put aside old feuds and grievances for at least 12 days in the ‘peace of Frodhi-Frey’.
To go back to my chiropody patients, as I tended to their feet, my response was: “So why do you do it?” To which they would reply with resignation: “Well, you’ve got to, haven’t you?”
My response was: “No. Break out of it. You don’t have to do this. Why torture yourself in the time of year that should bring nothing but magic and joy?”
There is nothing that prevents us making this a wonderful season. If relatives expect you, by dint of habit, to visit them (or, conversely, expect you to invite them) then exploit every reason to break that routine. Find or invent a reason. Eat what is a special, delicious meal for you; never mind the turkey, spouts and roast potatoes, eat Indian or Mexican if that is what suits you better. As for the materialism and high spending of the Yuletide period, I can only offer the example of a similar but related festival.
In the Netherlands, they celebrate the Feast of Sinterklaas on 5 December. When I lived in that country, there was little commerciality attached to the festival and I shared a student house with 4 others (apart from my fiancée). As none of us had much money to spend, the rules for our ‘Sinterklaas’ celebration were that we were, firstly, to buy a present for each of the other five. Secondly, the said present should cost no more than 5 guilders (a ridiculously small amount, so we had to search very hard); thirdly, we had to pack the present in an inventive manner and, finally, write a doggerel poem that said something about the person, the present and the reason for giving it. As an example, I had to make a present for a vegan member of the household; I packed it in the form of a cow and gave a scurrilous poem on the evils of failing to eat meat. There were many such ironical examples and we all had a good time, interspersed with adequate measures of Heineken. The whole event lasted all evening, we got merrily drunk, it displayed our inventiveness and it cost, in financial terms, very little.
I believe we need to break out of the current paradigm and inventively seek to re-establish the magic of Yuletide. It breaks my heart that I have, on the one hand, friends who say: “I don’t do Christmas” and, on the other hand, acquaintances who say: “I hate it but feel obliged to do it.” Let us re-adopt Yuletide as it ought to be – a time when we relax, enjoy, welcome old friends and look forward to a new season of growth and fertility.
Wassail!
Uncle Wednesday
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