SOMETHING ABOUT CHRISTMAS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2026, 22 December 1892, Page 23

SOMETHING ABOUT CHRISTMAS.

Specially JFritten for the Witness Chnstitias

Number of 1808.

By R. M.

Christmas, as a pnrely Church festival, ranks below Easter, the Resurrection taking precedence of tbe Nativity ; but as a general festival, half religious and balf secular— a combination of holy day and holiday — it easily takes the first place among the observances of Christendom. Ie is kept in all Christian countries, except Scotland ; and though the Presbyterians have no "Christian Year," nor indeed the English Dlsßenters either, it is probable that both will soon conform to the praotice of the other Churches so far as to honour the 25th December with some kind of religious service. But all English people keep Christmas as a holiday, however they may regard it from the religions or ecclesiastical point of view.

In Scotland New Year's Day haa since the Reformation been as punctiliously observed as Christmas in England, but in the colonies, where the population is mixed, the two sets of holidays are practically one, and commonly known as Che Christmas holidays. The pre-eminence of Christmas as a holiday is indicated by the eajing that it comes but once a year, the paying being a kind of excuse for devoting so much time to feasting and pleasure, for in the old timeß the Christmas holidays lasted much loßger than they do in this busy age. All holy days have a tendency to become holidays even under the rule of the Christian Church, and in the old pagan religion they wero one and the same thing, the- merry making being as esEential a part of the observance as the performance of the sacred. ri^. Sunday itself is in all Catholic conntriee, and in many parts even of Protestant Christendom, more a holiday than a day of worship. In England the Puritan Sunday, or rather Sabbath, has prevailed, though not to tbe same extent as in Scotland, in Bpite of the attempt of King James and bis sycophantish prelates to make a sombination of ritual v<orßbip and out-of-door sports the observance proper to the day. Bat at the present time Sabbath keeping is much lees strict than it was 50 years ago, the tendency being towards what is called the Continental Sunday, the observance of which is practically modelled on th&t of the old pagan holiday.

• It io astonishing how much of paganism survived tbe introduction of Christianity. Cbrktmas itself, like most of the Cburcb festivals indeed, is in a sense a pagan survival. It was lpng calied, as the festival of the Resurrection still is, by a heathen nam a . Same people imagine that these festivals a»e of divine origin. But nothing could be further from the tru'.h. None of them dates bsck to the apostolic times, aud it is needless to say that nona of them can plead the authority or sanction of the Founder of Christianity; for thongh the Communion, or Lord's Supper, is a feast, it i 3 not, technically speaking, a festival. They are all developments, or rather adaptations, some of them of earlier and some of later date. Christmas, for instance, of which nothing is heard till the end of the second century, took the placa, but long after that time, of the Saturnalia. The Christian teachers doubtless found that it was eaßier to substitute than to abolish, and so certain ceremonies in honour of the Nativity or of the Resurrection would be grafted on some festival or other which the common people bad immemorially observed. The true date of the Nativity could not possibly have been the 25th December. As that was the rainy season in Palestine, the shepherds would not bo keeping watch over their flocks by night. The time of the birth of Christ was probably nearer our December than the December of the northern bemiBphere, and as a matter of f*ct the event was sometimes celebrated in May. Bat as the most popular of the heathen festivals were held at ihe winter soletice, there can be little donbt that the celebration of tbe Nativity was shifted to that time by the Weßtsrn Christians. We may mention that tbe Eastern Church eubsequently changed to the same date for tbe sake of conformity. What the Saturnalia were to the southern cations of Europe the great Yule feaet was to the northern, and after tho introduction of Christianity among the latter, Christmas —or rather the festival which we call Christmap, for that word, peculiar to England, did not come into use till after the conversion of the Scandß— was generally called Yule in the north-west of Eurcpe. In Scotland and the north of England it is so called by tbe country people to the present day.

Why Christmas should have taken the place of these festivals it 13 impossible to say. Both Yule and the Saturnalia were beyond doubt meant to celebrate the turn of the year at the winter solstice. The latter part of December may indeed be called midwinter, and as 'a rule the coldest and most boisterous weather is still to come; but the pun in the northern hemisphere then begins, so to speak, bis return

journey, the deadness of the year is past, and a new life is secretly if not yet visibly stirriDg in nature. It v»a* once the fashion to derive the name Yule from a word signifying wheel, as if it expressed the conce t that the sun had wJieeled round and was now coming back to cheer and invigorate the earth. But this, .like most fancy etymologies, is disallowed by the later philologists. The notion may have originated in the fact of a wheel being used in celebrating both the winter and summer solstice. We can only guess at the "meaning of this symbol, which was taken to the top of a hill and rolled down, especially on Midsummer Eve. Sometimes it wap covered with straw, which ,wben kindled made' it look like a ring of fire. The wheel thus set rolling was probably intended to represent the Bun in some way or other. The word Yule however has no connection with wheel ; its origin is, in fact, not certainly known, though it would probably be more correct to connect it with the old Norse " del I ,'' which, originally meaning " ale " (being perhaps idtntical with that word), came to, be used for revelling and carousing. Yule is .moreover used to designato other feasts besides that at the winter sclUice, and, curiously enougb, the fair or festival held on -the Cotswold bills in Gloucestershire iscalled Wbitenntide-afe.

The origin of word 8 , however, is often as obscure as the origin of customs, though there can be no doubt that the great' festivals held towards the end of December amorg the pre-Chris-tian nations of Europe were originally connected in some .way* or other with the petition of the sun in the beavenß; and it may have been ihe intention of the Christian bishops and priests to associate the birth or rising of Him who is called the Sun of Righteousness with the root idea of those particular observances. Moreover, as the old deified king of Italy from whom the Saturnalia were called was represented in the Latin mythology aB the introducer of tbe golden age, if is, just possible that some reference may have also been intended to that fact. "On this day" the Christian teachers may have said to their people, a rabble of semi or more tban semi-heathen— for no nation of Europe, and least of all any southern nation, was ever thoroughly or anything like thoroughly Christianised, Gresce, for instance, and a great part of Italy being at tbe present timo almost as pagan as when the old divinities were worshipped—" on this day," the ■' preachers, of the now religion, which they themselves by this time perhaps only dimly understood, may have said, "was bom a better Saturn, who will give thfc world blessings of a diviner kind than were ever fabled of the golden age." A]l this, however, is only conjecture, thongh there must have been some special reason or reasons for making Christmas supersede the midwinter festivals of Yale and the Saturnalia.

The one thing certain is that Christmas did supersede the Saturnalia and the great Yule feast. There are many proofs of this. We love, only to look at the greenery with which we deoorate our churches and shops at that season to be reminded of the close connection between Yule and Christmas. This ouetom bae no particular x meaning for us, beyond expressing in a pleasing, but not specially significant, way the general feeling of gladness peculiar to the festival ofr the Nativity. Actually it is a reminiscence, so to epeak, of the' old Idolatrous" ages when the people irragined they got glimpses of tbeir gods moving about the earth, and endowirg it with fresh energy at the turn of the year. Branches of mistletoe and other green boughs were accordingly dedicated to these peisonifications of the active powers of Nature, in token of the new life that was soon to hurst forth again in plant and tree, and also in tlso heart of man. Bat the strongest proof of the succession wo refer to is to be found in the extravagant fooliug which formed .part of tho Christmas observance for many centuries. Tins »l-owas hfgbly characteristic of the Saturnalia as well as of Yule. The world was for Iho lime turned npekle down. In thoflo old primitive times human nature asserted itself moro spontaneously than it does in what are c*llod civilised nations. The sense of humour, in particular, was as ytt unrestrained by the conventions of society, and the people did not Ecruplo to laugh at such conventions as already existed. After all there is something extremely ridiculous, for instance, in one man being born to wealth and power, while hundreds— bis equals or perhaps his superior in natural endowments—have to do his bidding all their life for a miserable subsistence. Distinctions of rank are. from the essentially human point of view, infinitely absurd. Wfa moderns are bo used to them, and have philosophised so much about their fitness and uses, that we regaid them as a matter of course. There iB occasionally a revolt from the radical side of our nature against hereditary title or privilege, and generally againßt what seems an unequal division of the good things of this life, but for tbe most part we acquiese in such distinctions and differences, thinking them, and -perhaps rightly, to be necessary to the order and stability of society ; for they may at the same time be both necessary and absurd — that is.ir consistent withourideaofthenorrnal condition of mankind. This would seem to have been the aspect in which our heathen ancestors regarded the matter. When the Saturnalia came round, they burst, as it were, into exticgnishable laughter at the thought of one class of men being considered better than another— as though the absurdity of tbe thing had just dawned upon their minds. Business was suspended, the courts and schools were closed, and a universal license was the order of the day. Slaves dressed like freemen and took the place of their masters, by whom they were eerved. It was a kind of rude tribute to that Jack's-as-good-aß-his-maßter feeling of which even the hereditary bondsman is sometimes conscious, and which kings and emperors cannot hide from themselves, even in the momenta of their highest triumph— a prophecy of the liberty, eqnality, and fraternity which the French formulated 100 years ago, but which no nation has jet realised.

So firm a hold of the people had this old cuatom got that'the Ohurch was compelled to, recognise it, and institute a festum tinltorum. or fool's festival, in which tte ordinary relations between the clergy and

laity were reveraed, just as those ol master and servant had been during the pagan festival. This fool's feast lasted from Christmas to Epiphany, but the climax of foo'ery was reached on New Year's Day. The ordinary religious rites were performed with mook solemnity . At first the choristers were the only performers, the clergy, digested of their canonicals, being among the audience, but latterly all the servants of the church, and even laymen, took part in the strange ceremony, which soon degenerated into all kinds of extravagant license. A president, called Pope of Fools, Archbishop of Ddlts, or Abbot of Unreason, having been elected, the performers marched in procession to the church where, dressed in tho priests' vestments turned inside out, they read the service from booke turned upside down, with spectacles of orangepeel, burning an old shoe, or something giving an equally offensive odour, in tho center. They did nof even spare the moßt sacred rite of the Mass, but ate tausagea and puddings off the altar, or played at dice upon it. We have said that the Church wag compelled to recognise the old custom of celebrating misrule, but It is evident enough that a church which couM tolerate bucli a profane travesty of its servic-3 mußt have already relapsed in great measure into paganism. This is the simple truth. The talk about primitive Christianity is mostly delusion. The only primitive Christianity worthy of the name was that taught by the Apostles; even their immediate successors are far below the standard of the average modern preacher ; it is a sudden drop, as it were, from inspiration to something very like puerility. Although tbe Christian Church formally triumphed at the conversion of Constantino the great bulk of the people in the country districts (tor any primitive Christianity there was seems to have been mostly confined to tha towns) remained practically unchanged, observing Christian rites in a pagan spirit. The conclusion of the feast of fools, which, however, could 6carcoly be called a Christian rite, was even mora heathenish tban the mock performance of the service. The church became the scene of tha wildest riot and confusion, the maskers, some of whom were dressed up as dragons, hobby horses, &c, leaping and danoirg like madmen, and singing- obscene songs to an accompaniment of obscene gestures. All tbis was of course pure paganism, but it shows beyond question that Christmas succeeded the Saturnalia. Although tho clergy latterly endeavoured to suppress the scandal it lasted till the Reformation, when almost for the first time since the days of the Apostles we get a genuine glimpse of what is m«ant by primitive Christianity. The Church conquered so far as to displace tho old state religion with its priesthood and itß sacrifices, but it waß itself so deeply tinctured with the superstition which it superseded that most of the pagan customs survived, though under new names, and some of them in slightly altered forms.

The Lord of Misrule in England and the Abbot of Unreason in Scotland cpresided over sports and pastimeß and buffooneries which the people had thus inherited from pre-Christian times. The games and observances had not the remotest connection wich Christmas. Nearly all of tha customs observed at that season were survival?. Tho Reformation dealt these pagan practices and tuperstitions a heavy blow, but many of them exist in our own day, especially in remote districts. Yule brose is still eaten in Sectland as furmety is in Eoglaud, both, of theso practices being no doubt relics of offerings made to heathen divinities. Nor is- tha belief in witchcraft, fortune-telling, omens, an d lucky and unlucky days a thing of the past. Numberless indeed are thefreits, as the Sctoch call tbem, of the people in all parts of the United Kingdom. Sodeeply imbued were tbeir forefathers with the spirit and tendencies of tho ancient idolatrous worship that every attempt of the clergy to Christianise their customs and observances ended in practical failure. The Christmas carola themselves —the very songs in honour of the Nativity — degenerated in some cases into mere Bacchanalian rants oE the foulest description, and i.i others into profane doggerel. Wonderful however is the power of custom. The Erglish Puritans abolished the celebration of the Nativity, but they arranged the Pfialm3 as carols as a small concession to a venerable usage. These once popular songs regaiaed something of the jovialty, if not of the license, of former times after ohe Restoration, and some of the best of them are still Bung in some of our churches on Christmas Eve, more as curiosities than anything else, though perhaps aIBO as a slight homage to old custom. The carols have no poetical merit, and are interesting merely on account of the light which they throw upon the condition of the Church during what are sometimes called the ages of faith. They testify only too faithfully to the unspeakable corruptions, and not Iges pathetically to the dense ignorance, which must have characterised the times prrcodicg the Reformation. Some of them show clearly that the authorß, probably if not certainly ministers of a socalled Catholic and Apostolic Church, actually did not know who Jesus and Mary were.

Bnt most of the customs and pastimes of this season have no reference whatever to the event which i? celebrated. Even the carols were probably of Satnrr.aiian origin, just as the boat's btnd, which ased, if w» may bo say, to grs.ce the Churfluias dinner, and our Christmas cake *ore no doubi originally among tho things olfered 00 heathen altars. Nor were the offerings t« the old gods and goddesses themselves or the obeervancsß connected with, their festi vals always strictly appropriate. As f*i back as we can go by the dim light ol historic legend we shall find that the festivals are made up of survivals, the divinitiw for the time being receiving tribute paid u> their predecessors. There is nothing more composite than some of these old forms 0! worship, or nothing except the languages in which human beings hold commerce with one another. The wierd, snuffy-looking face which represents the combined faces of the members of the present Gladstone Ministry in the last number of tho Review of Reviews is not a patch on them; for just as any tongue spoken even by the rudest of savages is made up out of the debris of heaven only knows how many extinct tongues,

BO was Yule or the Saturnalia, and so is any heathen festival in the India or the Africa of our own time, a mere agglomerate of heterogeneous customs and observances. What connection with Christmas (to take an instance from one of the shires) has the following custom, itself evidently a compound, which was lately, and is perhaps still, observed by Sir George Grey's " Berfs 1 " " On the eve of old Christmas there are 13 fires lighted (the description is from an old newspaper) in the cornfields of many of the farms, 12 of them in a circle, and one, round a pole much higher than the rest, in the centre. These fires are dignified with the names of the Virgin Mary and the 12 Apostles, the lady being in the middle, and while they are burning the labourers retire into some shed or outhouse where they can behold the brightness of the Apoßtolic flame. Into this shed they lead a cow on whose horn a large plumcake has been stuck, and having •gathered round the animal, the oldest labourer takes a pal of cider and addresses the following lines to the cow with great solemnity, after which the verses are chanted In chorus by all present. Here's to thy pretty face and thy white horn, God send thy master a good crop of com ; ■ Both wheat, rye, and barley, and all sorts of And next year, if we live, we'll drink to thee

again. He then dashes the cider in the cow's face, when by a violent toss of her head she throws the plumcake on the ground, and , if it falls forward it is an omeu that the next harvest will be good, bub if baokvVard, tbat'it will be unfavourable. This performance is gone through at the commencement of the rural feast, which is generally prolonged to the following morning." This strange medley of ceremonies is as good an example as could be found of the manner in which old heathen customs jumbled together (probably before the birth of Christ) are accidentally observed at the Christmas season. The fires, christened in a way though they be, burn with a lurid pagan light, like the candles on the so-called altars of onr high-flying Anglicans, and they have probably not the remotest connection, beyond that of a common pagan origin, with the orophetic plumcake on the cow's horn. There are hundreds and hundreds or. these old -world customs Btill existing in all Christian countries. In many cases they are observed without any superstitious feeling, merely as pastimes, though it is not very long since the Scottish peasantry went through the rites peculiar, say, to Hallowe'en In perfect *good faith. Not one in ten thousand of those sons and daughters of the Scottish Church knew what Hallowe'en meant. They had not the least idea that it was the eve of a great festival of the Romish Church. It was to them, staunch Presbyterians though they were, simply and purely a pagan observance.

The Church for long centuries firmly believed that the heathen oracles suddenly ceased the night the^aviour was born. This belief is used with splendid effect by Milton in his grand -Christmas hymn. We. cannot resist quoting a couple of stanzas, I familiar as they must be to most of our reader?, and what a contrast, in their majestic roll, to the literary preciosity and namby pamby which the present generation thinks divine 1— ' The oracles are dumb, \ No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine j Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. The lonely mountains o'er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament ; From haunted spring and dale, Edged with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent ; With nower-imvoven tresses torn, The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. I As a matter of fact the oracles were not ! struck dumb at the birth of Christ, though j the Church would have been justified in say- ' ing that they .received a great shock. It may, of course, be said that they had worn themselves out, that their imposture was at last discovered, and that they thus died a natural death. Nor can it be dispnted that their palmy days had passed long before the' first Christmas carol was sung. There is nevertheless something striking in their rapid decay immediataly after that event. The second century had scarcely dawn ed when Plutarch wrote his shoit treatise, on "The Failure of the Oracles " (J)e Defectu Otaculorum). By that time it seems to have been the common talk, so to speak, that 41 Apollo could no more divine ; " and it is in the same treatise that Plutaich tells the wonderful story on which Mrs Browning founds one of her moat spirited pcems — "The Dead Pan." One of the interlocutors &aya he beard it from Epithersep, father of Aemilianus the orator, a person who was neither a fool nor a knavo. This •Epitherses sailing from Greece to Italy, the ship got becalmed and drove with the tide near to the I3les tf Paxi, when immediately a voice was heard by most of the passengers (who were taking a cup after surper) calling unto one >Tbamns, and that with so loud a flonnd as astonished all the cempmy Thamus, who was an Egyptian sailor, and whose name was scarcely known in the ship, returned no answer to the first calls, but at. the third he replied, " Here, here, I am the man." Then the voice said aloud to him, "When you get to Palodes take care to make it known that the great god Paa is dead," Epitherses told us (continued the relater of the story) that the voice did much amaze all that heard it, and caused much arguing whether it was to be obeyed or slighted. Tbamus, for his part, was resolved, if the wind permitted, to sail by the place without saying a word; but it the wind ceased and there ensued a calm, to speak and cry out as loud as he was able what he was enjoined. Being come to Palodes there was no wind stirring, and the sea was as smooth as glasp, Whereupon Thamus, standing on the deck, uttered with aloud voice bis message, sayiDg, "The great Pan is dead." He had no sooner said this than they heard a dreadful noise, not only of one, but of several, who, to their thinking, groaned and lamented with a kind of astonishment. And there being many persons in the ship, an account of this was soon

spread over Rome, which made Tiberius, the Emperor, send for Thamus, and he seemed to give such heed to what he told him that he earnestly inquired who this Pan was, and t u e learned men about him gave in their judgements that it was the son of Mercury by Penelope. There were some then in the company (when the story was told) who declared they had heard old Aemilianus say as much.

Mrs Browning connects this voice with the agony on the Cross, and says, no doubt by a lapse, that the oracles ceased when Christ died. Supposing, however, the story to be true, as it may have been, the voice must have been heard about the time of the Crucifixion — 'Twas the hour when one in Zion Hung for love's sake on the Cross ; - When his brow was chill with dying, And his soul was faint with loss ; When his priestly blood dropped downward, And his kingly eyes looked throneward— Then Pan was dead. By the love he stood alone in, His sole Godhead rose complete, And the false gods fell down moaning, Each from oif his golden seat ; All the false gods with a cry Rendered up their deityPan, Pan was dead !

But whether this story, which one wishes to be true, was true or not (and it may aEter"all have been, like the endden failure of the oracles, a Christian invention, though we are not aware that any Christian writer mentions it) there is a sense in which it may be said both that the oracles ceased and that Pan died at the advent of Christ. We have indeed seen that paganism, or the worship of Nature, of which the divinity just named may stand as representative (the to pan, or the all), has to a certain extent survived to the present time, even in the Christian Church. It is not so long since the people in some parts of the North of England actually danced and shouted "Yulel Yulel" in church after the Christmas service; a strange mingling of the worship of the true God with the worship of heathen deities, but an actual repetition of what happened more than once in the temple at Jerusalem. People who call themselves Christians also still consult oracles in' the shape of fortunetellers, or futurists as they are now called. But all the same, paganism in all its f orm<* received its deathblow when Christ was born ; it has been dying out ever Bince, and never more rapidly than at the preeenttime. Christianity, as even an old pagan ijke Goethe could recognise (if indeed any man open to the influences of a Christian country can be called a pagan, even although he happens to be an unbeliever, and affects an ethnic morality)— Christianity, we say, is something not only higher and purer than any of the gentile religions, but something different in kind — something, as the great German said, which once introduced can never die out, but which is destined to transform the world. It is thus not without reason that we keep festival at Christmas, though it must be confessed that the mere feasting bulks too largely in our celebration of the divine event. A lady writer recently blamed Dickens for vulgarising Christmas by making good cheer the main element in his ' Christmas stories ; but he merely depicted the English Ohristmas to the life. Englishmen as a rule are too much given to the pleasures of the table, and they onjy follow their natural bent and the traditions of their race when ihey make, so to. speak, a god of their Christmas dinner. Poor Robin, in his Almanack, speaking of the winter quarter more than 200 years ago, says:— »' And, lastly, who but would praise it because of Christmas, when good cheer doth so abound, as if all the world were made of mino'd pies, plumb -puddings, and furmity." But time will no doubt chasten John Bull's catholic and apostolic festivity.

But most of all the old customs so scrupulously observed by our forefathers are dying out— following the fairies, kelpies, and witches. They had latterly lost for the most part their pagan reference, and as they gave a certain picturesqueness to the life of the people, it is not without a feeling of regret that one thinks of their disappearance. As the struggle for existence becomes more intense, it seems almost a pity that we should be deprived of so many innocent diversions. One of the most beautiful and most human of all the survivals from pre-Christian times, however, shows no sign of leaving us. BoxiDg Day is as firmly established as the Church of England, probably a good deal more so, and it is not a little edd to reflect — so inseparably blended are past and present, and such the essential unity ani continuity of the race — that on Monday next we shall all be giving presents to one another, just as we have already received from one another cards wishing a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, not because Christ was born in Bethlehem, but because some heathen detty or other bad his festival at this season of the year long ages before that wondrous B rth.