My goodness the season is upon us! Here we are with the Winter now officially come. The Buddhist celebration of the season Bodhi Day is well behind us, as is this year’s Hanukkah. Now we’re in the midst of neo-pagan observances, and soon it will be Christmas, which in large part is a continuation of those pagan celebrations.
I love the synthesis of so many holy days into this holiday season, if more than a little chagrined at the commercialization of this time. (If you want to see a picture of what appears to be the logical conclusion of this trending, look to Christmas in Japan, which appears to be spreading to India and elsewhere on the Asian continent – a commercial event completely devoid of spiritual significance…)
But there are deeper currents to notice, if we’re willing…
A quick look at the history can be helpful. While it is commonly thought, and I fear I repeat it myself on occasion, that Christmas is a Christianising of the Roman Saturnalia, that’s probably not true. The dates don’t actually line up closely enough. A more likely candidate, if possibly more distressing to those who want Christmas to actually be Jesus’ birthday is how it was the Roman birth of the Invincible Sun, intriguingly Constantine’s god for much of his life, and some might think, to the end of us life. On a similar note for those who see Mithraic influences a bit stronger than Christian in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, this might seem a fascinating coincidence, at the very least.
But, I would like to suggest, however the date got established, Christmas is really a Christianized version of Yule. And we can thank the Germans for it in the first place, and the Unitarians for bringing it to America. At least in significant part…
Many “traditional” Christmas markings are actually straight from Yule traditions: the tree and other uses of greenery such as hanging mistletoe and holly, the Yule log, the giving and receiving of gifts and the whole idea of this as a season of merriment. (Okay, one finds this in Saturnalia, as well…)
In the middle of the nineteenth century when Germany was the hotbed of Western intellectual inquiry, many American intellectuals (read Unitarians) traveled there to study. And while there they saw how Yule had transformed Christmas into something wonderful, a genuine marker of the turn toward light after the long tumble toward the dark…
Living in Massachusetts where we are buried in a couple of feet of snow, I feel deep in my bones, that longing for the turning to the light. And, while it is mostly a noticing of the calendar, I also find it bubbling in my blood, a sense that that tumble toward the dark has stopped, and something magical has happened.
And hope is born again.
Happy Yule.
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