Christmas — the greatest hoax ever?
Every year, along with the Xmas tree, and the... , and the... , this article gets dusted down for another foray!
This article was originally published back in 2012. But its still as relevant today as it was 9 years ago — if not even more so.
Well, it’s all over for another year. Retailers and corporations will be shaking and counting their coffers. Was it a good year? How did it affect the economy? These were the issues that preoccupied the media in the run up to Christmas. You could be forgiven for wondering where the phrase ‘goodwill towards men’ came from.
After the event — the media emphasis switched to the mountain of debt waiting to reveal itself once the yuletide mists cleared. It’s a familiar story. One that’s re-run every year like a classic movie. Had you given it a second thought, you might have visited Money Saving Expert. They introduced the NUPP — No Unnecessary Present Pact. The idea is you send someone an email from the site — making it neutral — so that you can avoid receiving an unnecessary present. There’s some great suggestions that offer an alternative form of giving. The related article — Is it time to ban Xmas presents? — explains what it’s all about:
People across Britain are growling and cursing at feeling obliged to waste money buying gifts they can’t afford for people who won’t use them. …While it may seem curmudgeonly to prick this surface-level joy, this year, in the midst of the financial crisis, too many perceive the season of goodwill’s main purpose is a retail festival.
It’s important to think about the people getting the goodies. Generosity could actually be hurting the recipients, not helping.
By giving a gift to someone, or their children, you create an obligation on them to do the same, whether they can afford to do so or not. If that obligation is something they will struggle to fulfil, then you’re actually letting them down.
This illustrates a strange paradox about Christmas. For many people its about the kids and Santa Clause. So why do adults exchange gifts? The article points out that ‘Children aren’t born retail snobs’. We’re all familiar with the scenario where a young child takes a present out of the box and plays with the box, whilst the parents scratch their heads in bemusement:
While my concern isn’t really about parents giving their kids gifts, it’s still worth examining the message that can send out.
Aren’t we teaching them to overly assign happiness to material acquisition, and adding weight to advertisers campaign that it’s all about getting the latest toys.
‘Spending time, physically making things others appreciate, or even just being more considerate is perhaps more in keeping with the real spirit of the winter festivals.
Done right, gifts can create real warmth, but it’s time to realise that, done wrong, it can hurt more than it helps. Perhaps the real gift is to release someone from the obligation of buying you a present?
The point is, Christmas has become the focal point for our consumerist society and the problems that that creates is magnified at Christmas. Here’s a few facts:
If laid end to end, almost 350,000km of wrapping paper is used each year.
Around 500 tonnes of old Christmas tree lights are thrown away each year.
4500 tonnes of foil is used.
13350 tonnes of glass is thrown out in the UK over the festive period.
That’s a lot of waste.
But Christmas has become something of a ritual. Presents without Christmas paper? You can suggest it if you want to grow horns in your head!
But perhaps it’s time to think twice about projecting the phony persona of altruism for just one day in the year. Certainly it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Christmas has become fake and commercialised. Which brings me to the title of this article about Christmas being a hoax. The hijacking of Christmas by commercial interests is only part of the story. You have to delve into the history of the festival in order to fill in the rest of the story.
One useful online article is The real Story of Christmas, which is published on a Jewish based web site. Although Jews have different views on Christian issues, the content of this article appears to be borne out by other sources, The History Channel being another good comparative source.
One of the key elements that emerges is that Christmas is based on a Roman pagan festival called the Saturnalia. This took place between the 17th — 25th December. In order to facilitate the transition from paganism to Christianity many elements from Saturnalia were incorporated. The 25th of December was arbitrarily chosen as the date for Jesus’s birth. The actual birth-date of Jesus is unknown. And in orthodox Eastern Churches, January 6th is the date chosen for celebration. This is also known as Epiphany. This unknown quantity surrounding the birth date of Jesus wasn’t lost on the the Puritans. As a result, they rejected Christmas. Indeed Puritan influence in the US ensured that Christmas wasn’t officially recognised as a holiday until 1870.
Another view is that the birth date of Jesus was calculated from the Annunciation (the virgin Mary’s immaculate conception). This is referred to in the bible and apparently took place on 25th March — 9 months before December 25th.
Other popular events relating to the birth of Jesus aren’t clearly defined, such as where he was born and whether 3 wise men really did visit the birth place. Even the famous nativity scene may not be an accurate rendition of Jesus’ birthplace.
An important icon of modern Christmas celebrations is of course Santa Claus. The name can be traced back to the Dutch Sinterklaas, which means simply Saint Nicholas. Nicholas was the Bishop of Myra, in modern day Turkey, during the 4th century. Among other saintly attributes, he was noted for the care of children, generosity, and the giving of gifts.
By the Renaissance, St. Nicholas was the most popular saint in Europe. Even after the Protestant Reformation, when the veneration of saints began to be discouraged, St. Nicholas maintained a positive reputation, especially in Holland.
Through time — particularly in the US — Santa evolved from a religious icon to the modern version we are used to today. Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…” Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.
The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern picture of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly. Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad children of the world. All Santa was missing was his red outfit.
In 1931, the Coca Cola Corporation contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking Santa. Sundblom modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful, chubby face. The corporation insisted that Santa’s fur-trimmed suit be bright, Coca Cola red. And Santa was born — a blend of Christian crusader, pagan god, and commercial idol.
Some of the other images associated with Santa were borrowed from other sources around the world. Christmas stockings can be traced back to St Nicholas, who put gifts into children’s stockings.
The concept of Santa riding across the sky in a sleigh driven by reindeer and coming down the chimney has its roots in the Germanic pagan god Odin, who was effectively merged with St Nicholas. Most Christmas traditions in Germanic countries derive from celebrations of the pagan winter solstice holiday Yule as a result of the gradual merging of the two holidays. Odin was recorded as leading a great Yule hunting party through the sky. In Iceland, Odin is described as riding an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir that could leap great distances, giving rise to comparisons to Santa Claus’s reindeer. Children would place their boots, filled with carrots, straw, or sugar, near the chimney for Odin’s flying horse, Sleipnir, to eat. Odin would then reward those children for their kindness by replacing Sleipnir’s food with gifts or candy.
So the modern Santa Claus is effectively a fictional character created in the US, which was then adopted by big retailers in order to promote gift giving. This fitted in with the US perception of Christmas as a family based event. The rest as they say is history.
Other familiar images associated with Christmas is the tree. This goes back to Paganism. Trees were worshipped and sometimes brought home and decorated.
The tradition of kissing under the mistletoe stems from Druid rituals, which used mistletoe to poison human sacrificial victims coupled with the sexual licence of Saturnalia.
Of course no discussion of Christmas would be complete without the mention of the ground breaking novel by Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. Its main protagonist, Scrooge, has become the quintessential iconic Christmas cliche. Indeed this could explain many of the current attitudes towards Christmas. Scrooge and his famous utterance ‘bah humbug’ has become embedded in the modern psyche. Anyone displaying an ambivalence towards festivities are labelled Scrooge. Its something we tend to be self conscious of.
But lets cut through the delusion and get behind the real story of A Christmas Carol. The message Dickens wanted to get across was very much a goodwill towards men. The tale endeavoured to show the gulf between the poor and the wealthy. Scrooge was privileged and wealthy and turned his nose up at the poor. But visits from the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future caused a transformation in his attitudes, turning him into an altruistic generous person.
After A Christmas Carol was published, it did generate a change in attitude within society. Christmas was about the wealthy offering something back to the poor, which lay the heart of the festive tradition right from the beginning.
Fast forward to today and it seems we have mistaken Scrooge’s real image. The real Scrooge isn’t your friends or relatives. He’s the guy that sits in corporate board rooms, what the Occupy movement defined as the 1%. Those individuals who siphon wealth from everyone else leaving them with nothing. To put it another way, Scrooge is alive and well in Wall St and the City of London.
Could Christmas destroy the planet? The statistics noted above are certainly quite telling. In America, retailers make 25% of their yearly sales and 60% of their profits between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Figures elsewhere are probably similar. So Christmas attracts about a quarter of consumer activity and all the festive trimmings that go with it. So it would be fair to say that the environmental impacts related to Christmas are substantial. This article seems to bear this out. More recently, the EU has sent out a warning concerning our ‘throw away’ society:
The overuse and waste of valuable natural resources is threatening to produce a fresh economic crisis, the European Union’s environment chief has warned.
Janez Potočnik, the EU commissioner for the environment, linked the current economic crisis gripping the eurozone with potential future crises driven by price spikes in key resources, including energy and raw materials. ”It’s very difficult to imagine [lifting Europe out of recession] without growth, and very difficult to imagine growth without competitiveness, and very difficult to be competitive without resource efficiency.”
Unless consumers and businesses take action to use resources more efficiently — from energy and water to food and waste, and raw materials such as precious metals — then their increasing scarcity, rising prices and today’s wasteful methods of using them will drive up costs yet further and reduce Europe’s standard of living, Potočnik warned.
Canadian subvertising outfit Adbusters got into the act with their ‘buy nothing day/Xmas’ campaign.
So, is Christmas a hoax? Well, given the historical precedents and the ambiguity of its religious foundations along with the fabrication of Santa Claus, probably yes. The greatest hoax ever? The jury’s still out…
Meanwhile you could do no worse than treat yourself to some Python related humour: