Friday, March 29, AD 2024 1:36am

Christmas Myths; a C&C reprint

Santa meme based on the Green Lantern oath

A collection of Christmas and/or holiday myths. I’m going to justify this description by saying a ‘myth’ a sort of old, sideways conspiracy… please play along! Many of these myths have been spread by well meaning, but misinformed or mistaken people.

Santa

Santa dresses in red, because Coke wanted it that way.

No, Old Saint Nicholas was a bishop, so he wore red. (Sort of, let’s simplify it to just pointing at the icons to establish that’s how he’s often shown, like Mary in blue, and leave it there.) Specifically, he was the Bishop of a place called Myra in the first half of the 300s, on what is now the coast of Turkey. We have far more legends than hard facts about him, and he’s one of the most popular saints around, even if you remove “Santa Claus” of the American stripe from consideration. The English Victorian artists put him in all sorts of colors like green velvet and tapestry patterns, but the red kept coming back. It is very dramatic, no?

Depending on the drawing, it can be very easy to see “Santa (saint) Klaus (Nicholas)” as wearing rather sensible winter gear. The ruffs of white fur are obviously useful to keep warm, the long coat that hangs to his knees and is belted is likewise warm, red mittens (you can grip but get to keep your fingers).

If you want to know where various Santa traditions came from, including various names, then the Saint Nicholas Center is for you!

If you are interested in the “Santa Conspiracy” in terms of ‘Santa is real,’ please go to this excellent article from Catholic.com. She offers a much better clarification. When our eldest was just old enough to be interested in Santa we went with the “he was real, here’s his story” option.   So far, it’s worked really well, and is fun.  (Even the ornery kids understand the idea of ruining someone’s game being bad.)

Pagan Parties

Christmas is Saturnalia, or maybe Sol Invictus!

No, it isn’t.

Short version, Saturnalia ended much earlier in the month, and Sol Invictus was invented after Christmas was celebrated.

Longer version: Saturnalia was a roughly three day Fool’s Feast festival with gifts starting about the 17th of December, so it would be over by the 19th. The date of Jesus’ birth makes perfect sense from a Jewish tradition standpoint. Great prophets enter the world on the same day they leave. Take the Feast of the Annunciation. Add nine months. Christmas!

Side note: a lot of stuff that makes no sense to modern English speaking people is perfectly reasonable in Latin, or to first-century Jews, or similar sources that are obvious after you know about it. Take any of a dozen similar middle-of-the-winter “fun” celebrations. Especially before modern times, the midwinter was depressing; there’s less sunlight, it’s not as warm, food may be more limited and with less variety–you want to have fun. It’s really not a wonder that the Romans, who seem to have had a Japanese-like habit of adopting practices that they liked, putting their own spin on it and charging forward, would throw a party on Christmas after the Christians started. (Ignoring the tactical reasons, such as seeing who didn’t show up, because they were at Mass.) There are some things that are just human, too, like wanting to think about green, growing things with bright berries when it’s cold and everything seems dead, so of course you’ll decorate with things like evergreens and holly with its bright-red berries. Which brings us to the next and final aspect.

Pagan Symbols

Most any symbol you can choose for Christmas–from the Christmas Tree to the Holy Child–is supposedly “stolen” from Pagan origins.

There are three objections:

One, if you simplify things down enough, you can make anything fit into a category. See various “there are only ten plots in existence” articles or books for an example. Thus, the Holy Child could be claimed to be ‘just like’ Hercules, because they are both famous heroes with a King of Heaven father and a mortal mother.

Two: it is a standard tactic to ‘baptize’ traditions into the Faith, so that people don’t lose their grounding, but to stretch the metaphor, make the soil more wholesome. Think something like a smoker who always smokes after dinner switching over to chewing gum, or having a mint candy, or becoming a mildly obnoxious vaper. You take something that is bad, or even questionable, and turn it around to good ends.

Three: symbols are things that mean something. You may as well claim that the number ‘1’ had its symbol stolen by ‘l’ because they are written the same, even though their meanings are nothing alike. Say, Christmas gift-giving as a symbol of The Gift that God gave us, in His only begotten Son, so that all who believed in Him might not die, but have eternal life.

Merry Christmas!

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Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Wednesday, December 25, AD 2019 3:05am

Christmas celebrations are a conduit for symbolic transference and transformation for each of us.*** Christmas is Christ’s gift of love to us leading us to transfer our love to others. Ultimately it leads us to becoming like Christ Himself.
Merry Christmas to each and all of you.

***”Transference is implicit in the speech act, which involves an exchange of signs that transforms the speaker and listener. Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference – something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present.”
http://braungardt.trialectics.com/projects/my-papers/transference-in-freud-and-lacan/

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