What are people ‘really’ celebrating at Christmas?
by Ian Paul, Psephizo:
Around this time of year, there comes a recurrent debate about what people are ‘really’ doing when they celebrate Christmas. A while ago, there was a programme on Radio 4 exploring the origins of the tunes of carols. For example, the tune for Good King Wenceslas was originally a spring carol celebrating the fertility of nature. It is also commonly said that at Christmas we are ‘really’ celebrating Saturnalia, a Roman/pagan winter festival during which conventional social decorum was abandoned.
The renewal of light and the coming of the new year was celebrated in the later Roman Empire at the Dies Natalis of Sol Invictus, the “Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun,” on December 25.
I have heard it commented that when we put up a Christmas tree, we are ‘really’ participating in a pagan fertility rite, bringing something living indoors to counteract the death-dealing cold of winter. This idea of what we are ‘really’ doing has been given a positive spin at times, arguing that when people write ‘Xmas’ they are ‘really’ echoing the early Christian use of the Chi-Rho monogram, which stands for the name of Christ—they just don’t realise it.
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