The Universal History of Christmas - with Richard Rohlin (h-YNxQdbjgI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=h-YNxQdbjgI

You have to celebrate Christmas, right? It’s not just enough to believe that this child born of a virgin was the logos from before the ages. We can say we believe that or we want to. But if we don’t act on that information in some way, and the way that you act on this information, Taylor talks about liturgy and like, let’s say he talks about the feast, the act of celebration as being like a song, right? So the song has a melody, think of like a little melody, has sequential moments, you know, all these different notes and everything. But really, the beginning to the end of that song all happened in the same moment because it’s a unit. So if you don’t sing the song, you have no way of participating in it. In that moment, the moment just passes you by. Right. And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then the moment, this holy moment, right? This moment when heaven and earth, everything comes together into this point, that moment just passes you by. And pretty soon you stop believing at all. This is Jonathan Pajol. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So hello, everyone. I am back here with Richard Roland for another episode of Universal History. As all of you know, Richard and I wrapped up a major course on Beowulf, where Richard took us through very convincingly why Beowulf is a Christian poem. And if you watch it, you’ll see at the end, I myself have like a mouth agape, like he just at the end, there’s no doubt it just like all comes together. It’s very beautiful. So so you can still check that out, by the way, if you’re interested. The the course is going to stay on for sale on the website so you can check that out. But today we are going to talk about Christmas, about the kind of how Christmas came together as a feast in the church, why it’s so important, you know, why we celebrate Christmas the way we do today. And so it’s going to be it’s going to be a great episode. Thanks for coming on, Richard. Glad to be here. This is one of my personal like hobby horses is is defending Christmas. I’m a I’m a I’m a staunch veteran of the Christmas wars. For a little context about this, maybe some people remember. If you were if you were like a fundamentalist Protestant, especially living in the south, like the southern U.S. I like how Americans we say the south as this is the only south. But I guess I guess people do that everywhere. But anyway, but if you’re living in the southern U.S., you might have been familiar, like you might have grown up in like the worship wars wars. So the worship wars was like the big kind of like maybe you had this other places, too. I just didn’t grow up there where I was like, do we do like a praise band or a piano and hymns or like a piano and organ or, you know, there’s kind of debate about this kind of stuff. Like my family was in the trenches of all that stuff when I was a kid. But then as I grew up and eventually, you know, was on pastoral staff for several years, one day, one day, somebody came to me very upset and said, well, somebody’s put up a Christmas tree in the like the foyer of the church. And I was like, well, it’s it’s December. So we do that every year. And it kind of I was I was totally flabbergasted, you could say, like like very caught off guard. Why would this be a problem? And but that kind of that kind of initiated a multi-year, I don’t want to say struggle, but but a period that I sometimes kind of refer to my wife and I refer to as the Christmas wars, which had to do with which had to do with some people. Not all just at that church, but just like in our lives, et cetera, really, really going hard trying to get people to stop celebrating Christmas. And it’s the usual sort of stuff. It’s a it’s a pagan holiday. It’s it’s too Catholic, et cetera, et cetera. And so that is one of the things that caused me to like really dig my heels in and start studying. Actually, that was right before I started working on what eventually became a master’s in essentially medieval literature. Yeah, but it caused me to. Yeah, like that was one of the things that got me to start like really dig my heels in and be like, all right, well, if this is really a Roman Catholic thing, then gosh darn it, I’m going to understand why, you know, you know, as opposed to just say, oh, well, that’s Catholic. So toss that. So it’s a weird it’s a weird thing like studying and sort of fighting for the celebration of Christmas is actually probably why I’m Orthodox in a weird way. That’s like a part of my story that I don’t think I’ve ever shared before publicly. But but, you know, that’s one of the things that got me to, you know, really think about what it means to have tradition and what it means to celebrate. And there’s a part of there was a part of my conversion experience that was certainly intellectual. But the much more important part was as we were converting as a family, especially for my wife, was the was the embodied part of it. And for us actually really deciding we need to take not just Christmas, but like Advent seriously and do these certain things. And then later on, Lent and Easter, like deciding that we needed to to to find some way to make these times kind of special as a family and start participating in this in a more embodied way was a really important turning point for our family. It’s interesting. I just want to say something about what you said. It’s interesting because the this holiday war that we see, it’s it’s a strange place where secular atheist types and fundamentalists hold hands in their arguments. And to be fair, not all fundamentalists, because again, the family that I grew up in super big. Yeah, but like some fundamentalists really particularly strained of fundamentalists. Like, I know a lot of people that were in that camp, like anti-Christmas camp when I was younger, they ended up moving towards Jewish holidays. Ultimately. Yeah, yeah, that’s one of the things we’ll talk about a little bit later. And actually, for people who want to go back to last year’s video, last year we did a video, it was a sequel to the Groundhog Day video where we looked at the the four winter feasts of the four great winter feasts of the church and kind of talked about how those are fulfillments of Hanukkah or the festival of the rededication of the temple and the rededication of the temple of the cosmos. I’m not going to repeat myself on a lot of that stuff today because people can go back and watch that. But so all this to say, this is this is like a it’s a very passionate subject for me. So I’m excited to talk about it today. So we’re going to do this in two parts. I want to talk about a little bit about how we got to have the kind of Christmas celebration that we have today, which is which is understanding that everybody, you know, different families do things a little bit differently. Broadly speaking, there are certain things which if you live in North America and you celebrate Christmas, there are certain things that you’re doing, that you’re doing and you’re doing them every year. Even if you’re not doing them, you know, some of them specifically, they’re all around you. They’re in all of the Christmas movies. They’re in all of the like the you know, you can’t get away from it. The grocery store, the the the home improvement store, the mall, like all these things. Right. You can’t there’s certain things you can’t get away from. So I want to kind of talk about how we got to that Christmas. Yeah. And and then also look at some of the historical attempts to abolish Christmas. And and what and then basically the second half of the video was talking about why that hasn’t worked. Why is sticky is Christmas so sticky that we can’t seem to help ourselves when it comes to celebrating it. So that’s where we’re going to go. All right. So I want to begin with just talking about the essence of the feast. This is, you know, in some respects, the most obvious part. And yet it’s so it’s weird because it’s so obvious. Like we constantly feel like every year. I mean, you know, six of my neighbors right now have have a put, you know, keep Christ and Christmas kind of a thing out in their yard with the nativity scene and stuff. And it’s great. I love it. You know, I really love just all the statues of Jesus and Mary everywhere this time of year. You know, it’s great. And now I really am serious about that. We’ll come to that in a little bit. But I think it is actually kind of this beautiful return to tradition that you see happening, you know, even in the deep south. Yes, it’s a it’s an unconscious return to tradition, you know, in very unsuspecting places. And that has to do with that stickiness that we’re going to talk about. But but I just want to start with like the fundamental essence of the feast, which I think will help us understand why it is as sticky as it is. And that is it’s the it’s the ultimate expression of the pattern of the high becoming low. Right. And and I know this is a pattern you talk about a lot. People who are we’re talking about this the other day, right. People who are like on this channel a lot or in the various discussions around this part of the Internet think about this pattern a lot. But this is the ultimate expression of this pattern. Right. And it what it does is it manifests this pattern, you could say, like more evocatively than almost anything else except for the crucifixion. Yeah. Right. Right. And so I just want to read something real quick. This is from, you know, this is from our festal hymns for the feast in the Orthodox Church. But this actually comes from this is just a setting into verse of a mostly already metrical homily or oration that was given by St. Gregory, the theologian on the on the occasion of the often slash nativity, which, as I’m going to explain in a moment, used to be celebrated on the same day. So this says Christ is born, glorify him. Christ comes from heaven. Go to meet him. Christ is on earth. Be exalted. Sing to the Lord all the earth and praise him and gladness, O people, for he has been glorified to the son, begotten of the father before all ages and incarnate of the virgin without seed in these latter days. To Christ our God, let us cry out. You have raised up our horn. Holy are you, O Lord. Stem and flower of the root of Jesse, you have blossomed from the Virgin, O Christ, from the mountain overshadowed by the forest. That’s an image from the song of Habakkuk, which the church traditionally ascribes to the Virgin Mary. From the mountain overshadowed by the forest you have come, made flesh from her who knew no man. O God, not formed from matter, glory to your power, O Lord. I behold a strange, most glorious mystery. Heaven, the cave, the terrific throne, the Virgin, the manger, a place where Christ lay, the uncontainable God, whom we magnify in song. So this is like the really the key kind of the center of our celebration. And it comes from a much longer oration that St. Gregory gave on this feast. And he talks about a lot of things that are I really encourage people to go and read this. You can find it in his best orations. The excerpt I was just reading there comes from a book called The Winter Pascha, which is just a really great kind of a reader written by Father Thomas Hopko back in the day on the various feasts of the winter season. And in each chapter is like maybe two or three pages and there’s 40 of them. So, yeah, it’s just a really lovely little reader. But he talks about a lot of things. He talks about actually how should we celebrate the feast? Don’t celebrate it like the Pagans, that is with drunkenness. We’re going to talk about drunkenness specifically today because it comes up a lot as it happens in talking about the historical celebrations of Christmas. But not to celebrate it as Pagans, but in a sense, celebrate it soberly as Christians, by which, of course, St. Gregory means go to church, feed the poor. And then, you know, yeah, enjoy yourself as well. But don’t, you know, don’t engage in the kind of revelry the Pagans engage in. And there’s a lot of beautiful themes in this homily, right? The high becoming the lowest thing. I mean, there’s nothing weaker or less less powerful than a Jewish baby in the, you know, in the Roman Empire. Right. You know, this you don’t get any weaker, any poorer, any less significant than that. Right. One of the other major images that we find in the ancient hymns, both in the east and in the west, is the the uncontainable, the idea of something that can’t be contained being contained in the Virgin, in a manger and so on. And then, of course, you know, for us as Christians, the deep significance, which you’ll find many of the Church Fathers talking about, of Christ being laid in a food trough. Yeah. Right. As you know, like this is, I mean, it’s very, very sort of evident Eucharistic imagery, right? Foreshadowing, foreshadowing that. So images like the really images of the of the Ark of the Covenant there and that text you wrote, like between the cherubim and everything. Like, yes, understanding that there’s a relationship between the glory of God descending in the temple and Christ being born out of the Virgin. Yeah. Yeah, this is really important. I mean, like the most common orthodox hymn about the Theotokos is like the more honorable than the Cherubim. Well, to understand why that’s not just a nice thing that we say because we like Mary, right? You really have to look at hymns like this hymn of the feast, right? Where we’re saying, right, the Virgin becomes the Cherubic throne. So like the Cherubim, they carry the throne. Well, she’s the throne. And that’s why she’s more honorable than them, right? Because she’s the throne now. And she becomes the throne in like the most like earthy, literal way possible. Because the baby is sitting in her lap, right? This is one of the earliest images that we have of the Virgin from the catacombs in Rome is this is the Adoration of the Magi, right? And which is the which was originally, by the way, was originally the focus of the Christmas celebration in the West. We’ll talk about we’ll talk about how how Christmas gets kind of split out from theophany and epiphany in just a second. And then, of course, one of the other major themes. And again, I just suggest people go back and watch that video we did last year. One of the major themes here is the idea of the restoration of the temple of the cosmos. And it’s it’s sort of link its ties to the Old Testament feast of the restoration or the festival of lights with nowadays is called Hanukkah. So so that being said, let me talk about the ancient Christian and medieval celebrations of the feast. So originally, Christmas and theophany or Christmas and epiphany, epiphany, the West, theophany and the East, they have different emphases. But they’re the same feast. And I’m just going to probably call it theophany. The rest of our conversation. But I’m really including both. I mean, the the the differentiation of emphasis is very ancient as you know. So they often focus mainly on the baptism of Christ. Epiphany focuses mainly on the Adoration of the Magi. Yeah, there is also like I think that the idea of the early feast was something like the feast of of the revelation of light. That’s right. That’s right. I mean, that’s the earliest that’s the earliest thing. Like it’s the feast of light, right? The festival of light. And of course, when St. Gregory is is is delivering that festival oration, that’s the occasion on which he’s doing it. Yeah. Which is why like there’s all while those images come together, right? The moment when Christ is first recognized in the world. So the Magi, the the the baptism, but then also like the wedding of Cana, for example, would be mentioned in those early feasts. And so like all these moments before Christ reveals themselves fully, the glimmer of light appearing in the incarnation. It’s really like everything culminating up to the baptism. Right. That that whole kind of episode, which is where two of the gospels start. Right. Two of the gospels just began the baptism, which is which is an important detail. So, yeah. So originally, this is all kind of one feast. And actually in Armenian Christianity, it’s still celebrated this way. Right. All on one single feast. What happens beginning in the mid fourth century is that the celebration of Christmas gets to sort of split out from from epiphany, theophany into two feasts, which are 12 days apart. And the reason for this is basically Arianism. So Arianism is the is the sort of the arch heresy as far as Christians are concerned. Right. It’s this teaching that the son was a creature, that he was not. Eternally begotten. It does not necessarily the teaching that Jesus wasn’t God or Jesus wasn’t divine, which is how some people will try to explain it sometimes, because Aries actually did believe Jesus was divine. He just believed he was like a divine created thing, like like like like like like a god. Right. And of course, this creates poly you know, polytheism and various other problems for Christian theology. One of the permutations of Arianism is something called Apollinarianism, which is basically this idea that and there are there are a few different versions of this. Right. But it’s basically the idea that Jesus is just like a normal, good person. And then at some point, most people who believe the set of the baptism, the logos comes in and fills him. Right. Yeah. We got an optionism sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of these things, I mean, there was like adoptionism and the Arianism and the Apollinarianism and a lot. But I mean, a lot of these things intersect so much. It’s not totally important for our purposes today to like go suss out the individual. But it’s most important to say that what became important for the Christians was to say that the incarnate logos was incarnate from the moment of conception, not at not at some later point during the story. So that’s exactly how this becomes, you know, if you go back and look at those those hymns that I just read, right, there’s this talking about how the whole focus is on how Christ that is born in the manger is being adored by the Magi, right, is already God before the ages, worthy of our adoration. Right. And in this context, the gifts of the Magi, which is the big focus of Epiphany in the West, becomes emblematic, becomes the emblematic active worship. Right. This this for the total giving up of ourselves, right, where we have nothing to give to Christ but ourselves. And I’ll just say on this note, there’s a really wonderful series of like prints. I think they were done as originally as like postcards by an art nouveau artist name. I think it’s Ezio Anikini, and I probably got his name wrong, but he was an Italian artist. He did a series of like sort of postcard prints of like the various titles of the Virgin. But one of them for the Mater Christi, the Mother of Christ, he did the he does the adoration of the Magi. And it’s one of my favorite images of the adoration of the Magi, because one of the things they have them doing is taking the the incense. So you got the three gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. Right. Well, so taking the frankincense and burning it in a censer before the Christ child. And I don’t know why I never thought about that before I saw that image. But of course, I mean, if you believe this is this is God before that, what do you do? You what do you do when you come to a god or even like an emperor for that matter? Right. You burn incense. Right. It’s an act of worship and act of veneration. And so it’s anyway, it’s a really beautiful image and very evocative in that sense. Right. So this is the big focus of Christmas. Right. By celebrating it. We’re going to talk at the end of the video today about the importance of celebrating something. Why it’s actually not enough to just think something correct. But you actually have to celebrate it. You have to embody it in some way. Right. Which, by the way, is something that that everybody knows. Even even the sort of like the the the the anti culture knows this. Right. And that’s why you have to have Pride Month. And that’s why you have to have celebrations. It’s not just remove celebrations. You have to replace something that. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So what happens pretty quickly is is that we start preparing for this great feast with a period of preparation. And so in the West, this used to begin back on November the 11th and in the East on November the 15th. Either way, it’s sort of a 40 day fast. In the West, it was called St. Martin’s Lent because it originated in the diocese of Tours in France. So if you came to the Beowulf class, you will know I made a lot of jokes at the expense of the French. But today I have only good things to say about the French. So so that’s good. Yeah. What is Christmas, Jonathan? It is Christmas. That’s right. Yeah. I’m going to have good things to say about Martin Luther as well. So there you go. Yeah. So so if you go back and look at the sixth century councils in the West, starting in France, the Council of Tours and then kind of spreading around there, it establishes Advent and Christmastide as separate seasons. And it seems like this was because people had started to like pre-celebrate a little too much. Right. Which is the thing we do in our culture now. We’re like, well, Christmas is on the 25th and we’ve got to get all the Christmas parties, the work Christmas party and the gym Christmas party. All in before Christmas. You got to get all in before Christmas. Right. Well, this is apparently a very old problem. And so and so what they did is they established they established these fast as a way of making sure we’re preparing properly and then also established Christmastide, the time from Christmas to Epiphany or Theophany as being as being a time of feasting. Right. And so this is kind of how it takes the the general shape that it does. So, for instance, the current Advent season in the West, which doesn’t start on November 11, starts on December the 1st or like the first Sunday around there. That dates back to the late 6th century when monks were required to fast for the first 24 days of December. And it seems like this was because they had been breaking into the Christmas ale a little bit early. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. They had their Advent calendar now that just has chocolate in it, like food, chocolate. I like the ones that have just like a little thing of a different Scotch whiskey in each of the doors. There you go. That’s a good idea. Unfortunately, I can’t participate in these, but I think it’s a neat idea. So but so there’s a basic rule of thumb for understanding why different cultures have different Christmas traditions. And that is the colder your winter is, the bigger deal Christmas is in your culture. Right. And that’s that’s more or less true across the board. There’s some exceptions to it. But put it another way, the colder your winter is, the more Christmas customs and traditions your culture will develop and like the stickier those things will be. Because it’s darker, too. You have that sense of this dark moment when the into which Christ is born. And by the way, I’ve heard some people say something like sometimes, well, the Orthodox are really good at celebrating Pascha. They just don’t celebrate Christmas or something like this. But like, go to Ukraine, go to Russia, go to any of those like Northern European countries where it gets very cold, very dark. Right. Go to even like Serbia and the Balkans. You’ll find all kinds of amazing Christmas carols, Christmas traditions, stuff you never heard of, stuff that’s really similar to stuff you grew up with. So it really has a lot to do with the weather and particularly, like you said, the amount of darkness that you have. And I’ll say a little bit here about the connections between and we said a lot more about this in our last video. So again, go back and watch that people and in the Groundhog Day video as well. But the connections between the connections between like pagan solstice celebrations. And this is the thing to say everybody has a winter festival. Absolutely. If you have a winter, you have a winter festival. That’s right. And I realize I’m talking kind of mainly about the Northern Hemisphere right now. I don’t know what to do about that. But we can. Yeah, it’s sorry people in Australia. Like I don’t know what to say. But or in South Africa, South Africa or yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Right. But basically, like as the as the light recedes, right, you get to the deepest, darkest part of the year and everybody has this deep cultural, sort of deeper than cultural, actually, like this really primitive sense that a festival is needed, that light is needed. Right. Yeah. We have to light a bonfire. We have to light. We have to light the fire. Like it’s just inevitable to think that way. Yeah. We have to find the light. At least we have to like get some hope for the sun to come back. And this seems to be the main reason for people rejecting the idea that Christ might have actually been born on December the 25th. Because it makes so much sense. Because it makes too much sense. Like that’s too perfect. That goes together too well. Right. I would just say like, you know, you know, who made the agricultural cycle? Who made the seasons? Right. And so for me, it’s just this is when light would come into the world. When else would it have happened? Right. When else would it have happened? And so a lot of so all this to say, if somebody says to me, um, such and such Christmas tradition, you know, like the Christmas ham or something like this, that goes back to this old Germanic pagan custom at yule or something like this. Okay. All right. Are you coming over for dinner or what? Like, you know, let’s, you know, um, yeah, that’s that. And really that should not be a problem for us if you understand the way that these things work. Yeah. Right. And so a lot of the traditions that we associate with Christmas had already started developing by the late middle ages. One of my favorites here is caroling. Right. And here I have to say something which may upset some people, but I don’t mean to. All right. And that is that a carol is not the same thing as a hymn. Yeah. Nowadays in like modern English parlance, when somebody says a Christmas carol, they just mean a religious song that you sing at Christmas time, right? Or as a semi-religious song that you sing at Christmas time. It’s just like a Christmas song. That’s what we mean by Christmas carol. But carols are not the same things as hymns. And in fact, carols were not sung in church until about the later half of the 19th century. Really? Yeah. Not sung. And carols were not to be sung in church. They’re not liturgical at all. They’re not liturgical. And you’ve got to sort of think about, so actually sometimes you’ll find medieval bishops writing against the practice of caroling. This is a little funny to think about because I know that some traditions really love their lessons in carol’s service on Christmas Eve, which I think is awesome, quite frankly. And I’m not going to stop. I’m not telling anybody to stop doing that. But it’s quite funny to realize that there are lots of medieval bishops in France and England and other places writing against the practice of caroling. Well, why are they writing against the practice of caroling? Because caroling is a sort of a carnival practice. You’re going around from house to house and you’re usually going with a keg or like a large bowl, a very alcoholic punch. And you come up to the door of the place and you sing and then you offer the people at the house, you offer them a drink in exchange for like a gift of some kind. Oh yeah. This is caroling. Which by the way, sounds like a great time. We tried to do caroling every year just around our neighborhood. But I’ve never been like have a sip from the flask as well, neighbor. Like maybe I need to bring that in. But that would definitely make you more popular if you do that. Yeah. Or less popular depending on which neighbor. Depending on which one. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, my point is that all of that sounds awesome. Okay. But this actually helps explain the kind of the character of Christmas carols. If you go back and look at some really old medieval Christmas carols, especially like medieval English carols, which is what most of us know, sometimes they’re, let’s put it this way, they’re not usually theologically explicit. A lot of times they’ll have be something like I saw three ships on Christmas day or something like this. And there’s a lot of metaphor and the way you think of it is a sort of a lyrical veil over the mystery. Yeah. And why is the mystery veiled in this way? Well, it’s because we’re not in church. And we’re going around town and we’re slightly drunk at this point. And also some of the things that they sang along with Christmas carols in the same setting were- Drinking songs? Yeah. How much trouble am I allowed to get into? You’re getting as much trouble as you can. Okay. So I’ll just say that there is a collection, like a 15th century manuscript that collects a bunch of Christmas carols, including one of my favorite medieval carols, which is called Adam le Ibondin. We’ll talk about that in a second. But it also has like songs about somebody’s male member. The lyrics of which are quite hilarious, actually. And the thing you have to understand is they’re going from house to house and you’re getting songs about like the fall and original sin and baby Jesus in a manger. And then also here’s a funny, you know, body humor. Like a dirty song. Yeah. Here’s a dirty song, right? That’s how carols were used. That’s what caroling is. Those are the only two registers anybody has in the Middle Ages. You’re either like posibilitating the mystery or it’s body humor. And those are the two, like there’s nothing in between. When would they carol? What days? Do you know? Well, so the thing that the church really tried to enforce is caroling doesn’t start till Christmas night. Okay. After mass. Yeah. Christmas night. And then you go around caroling after that. And of course, eventually what happens is that the distinction between Advent and Christmas Tide gets kind of lost. And that’s how we get the situation that we have today. But that doesn’t really happen until the 19th century. Yeah. And then of course, this culminates. Eventually carols become a nostalgia thing, at least the ones that aren’t about body humor. Yeah. Forget about those. Don’t know them. Now they become the ones you hear at the mall. And by the way, there were carols, I’ll just say, there were carols for other holidays, too. Some very famous, very famous like Ash Wednesday carols, Good Friday carols, even one carol for the circumcision of the Lord that I have managed to find. So there were like, historically, there were other carols as well. But Christmas was like the main time you went caroling. And it has to do with this. It has to do with this, the winter of it all, basically. Right. You need a drink. It’s like cold and it’s dark. Yeah. Yeah. So we also get things like the Christmas boar. There’s actually a famous carol about this. The boar is headed Christmas, which I really love. The use of, especially in Western Europe, the use of evergreenery, you know, like garland, holly, evergreens, you know, fir trees, things like this. The use of this to sort of like sparse up the inside of the house, right, with like lights and evergreen, which is if there’s any aesthetic, which is like identifiably Christmas, it would be lots of lights and just evergreen things everywhere. Right. And again, when most of the world is dead, except for these particular plants, that it’s very easy to see why that would be done. And also winter berries, like the idea of a winter berry is really important with Christmas because it has that light or that seed that’s being preserved and you can still identify it even though everything else is dead. Yeah. That’s a beautiful way to say that. And even things like mistletoe, which we know, like as modern people, we know it to be a parasitic fungi, right, but a fungus. But for medieval people, the mistletoe had all of these other connotations, right, you know, but also like it’s a little poisonous. So it’s, yeah. But it’s one of those interesting things. Go look at the way that mistletoe is used in medieval symbolism. That’s a whole video, I think. Oh, really? So you have all this stuff that comes in. Another very important element that should not be overlooked is the feasting of the poor. So this is a really important part of actually any Christian celebration. If you want to be trad and you want to go celebrate holidays in traditional ways, if you’re not buying a meal for somebody else, right, or, you know, get a case of beer for the guy in the corner or something, you know, like if you’re not actually feasting the poor in some way, then you aren’t actually celebrating traditionally. And so the way that it worked in, for instance, in medieval England is that there were certain days of the year, Easter, St. John’s night, which is the summer solstice, and then Christmas, specifically, other days as well, but those three days specifically, when it was expected that the well-to-do members of the village or of the town would put out a feast for all of the poor people, right, and it’s sort of like, come and get as much as you want of all the richest foods, right. And this is a really important part of the celebration as well. And a lot of times when we talk, we think about like the social inversion aspect of some of these holidays, like the boy bishop’s feast or the feast of the ass on January the 14th, right, obviously, they have a connotation of like, misrule and things like this. And those aspects were always, always concerned for religious leaders, especially those of the more sort of uptight variety. But also a part of the whole idea of inversion is that poor people get to eat what the rich people have. And that’s actually a really important dynamic within Christianity and a really important dynamic within the traditional observance of these feasts. Yeah, and that’s still like today, we still have, you know, the kind of Christmas, I don’t know how you say it in English, but you know, like to gather around food for Christmas, like you go to eat for poor people and make boxes for families that struggle and stuff like that’s definitely still even in a secular world, it’s still there. I think every church that I’ve ever gone to as a member, both as a Protestant, now as an Orthodox Christian has done that for Christmas. And even the grocery stores get in on it, you know, it was like, here’s a bunch of conveniently packed bags of food, you can just buy one, and then we’ll donate it to the shelter and things like that. So, you know, the rule about charity, there are two rules about charity, since nobody asked, there are two rules about charity. One is that the closer the proximity, the better, right? The more times my money changes hands, I’m not even talking about like, where is that money actually going? Because this doesn’t actually seem to be a question that we’re supposed to ask as Christians. I mean, be a little discerning about the charities you donate to, but Christ says to give to every man that asks of you, right? So not, but what is he going to do with it later? But anyway, the more times that gift changes hands, right? Basically, the farther away I have to be from my neighbor to give to him, right? Let’s say like the less salvific it is, right? It has a different effect on your soul. If you are personally, you know, giving something to somebody, you’re looking somebody in the eye, you’re seeing them as a human being, right? It’s, that’s a very different thing than I just, I just gave some money to a charity online, and now I’m covered. And I’m not saying don’t give money to charities online, right? Do what you can do, but maybe don’t underestimate the importance of, and this is just the real difference, you could say like between religious charity and something like government welfare, right? Is that there is a sort of a depersonalization that goes on, right? That makes it, you know, never mind what the effect might be on the person who’s on the receiving end, right? But for the person, you know, St. John Chrysostom, lots of famous homilies against, you know, wealth. There are no warnings to the poor in the Bible, you know? And, but one of the things that he, you know, to paraphrase, you know, what are you saving up for? Hell, you know, that kind of an idea. But, yeah, but he talks a lot about this and says, you know, the poor man is there for your salvation, right? You know, so you can’t neglect him, right? So this is a really important part of the celebration of this kind of feast. And it’s also a very important part of understanding the symbolism of Christmas, right? The highest thing becoming the lowest thing, right? That inversion, which is at the heart of charitable giving, works of mercy, but is also at the heart of the parts of the feast that make certain people itchy, right? The inversion, like the social inversions and the revelry and things like this, that, all of that is actually part of that, of the symbolism of the highest thing becoming low. So, and then of course, you know, this inversion can take darker aspects, right? Drunkenness, gambling, etc. That’s always been a problem. And, you know, like people in charge have always tried to sort of complain about people, complain about it. Right. Always got to figure out how to manage it, right? And I just want to reiterate a lot of the things that we’re talking about here, you know, you could go back and look at like Saturnalia as this time of inversion or something like that. A lot of things we’re talking about here can just, right, I think should be rightly understood as integrations of pagan solstice celebrations. And that should be fine, right? If we understand the way that Christianity works, the way that Christ works, the significance of his coming into the world in the deep of winter, this should not actually present us with the difficulty. Yeah. I mean, think about it. Like, it’s weird because also think about in the Middle Ages, the bishop complaining that, you know, people in the town got too drunk instead of mentioning how there were massive orgies, you know, like, right. Yeah. Like this Saturnalia. Everything’s relative. That’s right. Everything’s relative. So you can actually see how Christianity transforms these types of feasts to like, to be able to give some room for a bit of messiness to like point it, but then point it towards a better path, you could say. Yeah. I’m going to talk a lot about Charles Taylor in a second, in his secular age, but he talks about these times of carnival as being like the idea of like, if you have wine and a wine, like wine aging in a wine skin, and you don’t like, unstop it every once in a while, eventually it’s going to explode, right? The gas is just going to build up and it’s going to explode. It’s the same kind of a thing here. Like you do have to have a little bit like, like you shouldn’t get drunk, but then also there are times when people need to get drunk, right? Those are like the two weird, that’s the weird dichotomy that you find even in scripture. Even in scripture, you find this, right? You know, that there are in Leviticus, right? You know, there’s a whole like, and if you can’t go to the Jerusalem for this particular feast, then take the money that you would have spent on the trip and throw a big party for your friends and eat and be merry and get drunk before the Lord, right? You know, and so it’s a weird kind of a thing. And I think that the balance the church has traditionally struck is that you always have people saying, knock it off you guys. And you always have people sort of doing it anyway. That seems to like hit like a good kind of flexibility. And this is really actually, this point is such a great point that you’re making and it’s one that it’s that people don’t understand how traditional societies work because we tend to understand authority as always as absolute authority that has absolute reach. And so when we know that like, you can’t cross a red light, we know that if you cross a red light, then you’ll get a ticket, they’ll even take a picture of your license plate and then you’ll get a ticket by the mail or whatever. And so, but in a traditional world, like you said, it’s actually a dance, right? There’s a dance, like you said, between different factions that create this kind of balance that doesn’t always remain the same. It kind of moves sometimes, well, maybe it’ll be moments where it’s a bit more puritanical, sometimes it will be a little more permissive and then it’ll kind of slide back and forth between that. But that’s the dance between exactly that. The balance is saying, yeah, knock it off, but then doing it to some extent anyways. Yeah. The kind of people you always want to be careful of are the either like the puritans or like the total hedonists, right? That’s right. Either one of those extremes is a really dangerous person. It’s a dangerous person to have in charge of your church. It’s a dangerous person to have in your life. It’s a dangerous kind of a person to be. That’s right. So this is the danger of going and reading a whole bunch of canon law and then looking around at the people in your parish or your priest and saying, nobody’s doing what’s there. What a bunch of terrible hypocrites. None of them are doing what’s there because that’s not really how that works. But the thing that I wanted to point out is that when you talk about hierarchy, the bishops that the church has canonized that we set up as being, this is the kind of person that you should be because they’re like Christ. So you should be like them. If you go and look at the lives of the bishops the church has canonized, one of the things that’s basically universal among them is their care for the poor, right? That they were out setting out a feast out of their personal treasury, not just for the poor on certain feast days of the year, but every single day, right? So they’re the people who best embody the highest thing, you know, in this case the bishop, right? The highest thing becoming the lowest, right? And their ability to kind of do that. And so it’s this sort of interesting, I mean the other big secret that is kind of offensive to modern Christianity is that, I said a minute ago, like there are no warnings to the poor in the scriptures. And if you look at the way that this has been, that this has been the rigidity and the flexibility that we’re just talking about, the way that’s been enforced is it’s the idea that the poor man is the man who needs the party, and maybe he needs to get a little drunk, right? But it’s actually, it’s the well-to-do person, you know, feasting with all his friends. He’s the person who needs to be sober and celebrate more soberly, right? And one of the weird things that happens in, this is what Taylor calls like multiple-speed Christianity, right? And one of the weird things that happens, especially with Puritanism, is this idea that, no, there’s actually only one speed, and we have to hold the poor person to the same standard that we hold the rich man. And that sounds really egalitarian now, but it’s not actually, that’s not actually how traditional societies work. So, okay, so kind of one of the things that I want to point out that is maybe a little different in the medieval celebration of Christmas, both in the East and the West, is the focus, especially on Christmas Eve in specific, the focus on Christmas Eve on the retelling of the story of Adam and Eve. So, if you go to church on Christmas Eve in the Orthodox Church, you’ll hear the reading of the opening narrative of Genesis, the creation of the world in the fall of man, right? That’s the Old Testament readings for Christmas Eve. And this is where the sort of, there is some kind of different origins, and really they’re probably all true to a certain extent, but one of the main origins of the Christmas tree comes from the Paradise tree, which would be set up on Christmas Eve, which is actually the day you’re supposed to put up your Christmas tree, not the day after American Thanksgiving, everybody. We sort of compromise and usually do it on St. Nicholas Day, in my family, which is in a couple of days from when we’re recording this, but anyway, but Christmas Eve, traditional day when the tree goes up, and because the idea is, it’s the tree of paradise, it’s the tree of life, the tree of paradise, and it was part of- There’s a paradise tree tradition, both in East and West, you said? Well, the paradise tree, not so much, but what I’m saying is the focus, that’s really a Western European thing, but I’m just saying the focus on Adam and Eve on Christmas Eve is the thing of both the East and the West, and it’s something that, it’s weird, we kept the paradise tree, right, and actually became totally ubiquitous, and the Western celebration of Christmas, and in the East too, everyone does Christmas trees now. This is great, I’m super pro Christmas tree, so go cut down a fruit tree, put it in your living room, and God will be pleased, like do it, but it’s interesting because the liturgical focus, as far as I know, and I could be wrong about this, but the liturgical focus in the West on Genesis, on Christmas Eve, has kind of been lost, but it was really cool. In the Middle Ages, they would have passion plays about Adam and Eve, and this is the main, let me put it this way, this is the main time of year when somebody in medieval England would have interacted with a Genesis story, not just seen a picture of it, or heard it read, or something like that, but the main time of year that they would have actually interacted with it in an embodied way would have been on Christmas Eve. So they would have plays. Yeah, and a passion play for people to know is like a paralyturgical thing. It’s not something that happens in the church, but it’s the origin, by the way, of like the Easter pageant or the Christmas pageant that maybe you did, I did lots of these growing up as an evangelical, and they’re really cool memories, but that has its basis in the passion play, but the passion play was something that, it’s not something that they did in the church, it’s something that they did in like the village square, and they had them for, obviously the name passion play implies passion tide, but they had them for all the various feast days of the year. In fact, the passion plays for Candlemas, Groundhog Day, we talked about that last year, were really, really cool. They had a woman from the village that they selected to play the Virgin Mary, and she would be carrying a baby, and the whole city would, village would process with her up to the door of the church, and she’d present the baby to the priest, and all this stuff, and so again, these are sort of like paralyturgical ways to participate in the feast. Okay, so, and then also just one thing to mention is that because Christmas is a day to go to church, first and foremost, is all these other things, but the thing that makes it a holy day is the fact that you’re having the mass, that’s the mass in Christmas, right? So it was considered to be a very important day, so there are a lot of famous kings and emperors, including Charlemagne, who were ordained on Christmas Day, right? It was just considered to be like the most appropriate day for this kind of an action. I said ordained, you see coronation, ordination, right? But coronation is, that is a holy order, that’s a sacrament of the church, so. All right, so let me talk a little bit real quick about Christmas in the early modern period. So what’s really interesting is that the Reformation period gives birth to both Christmas as we basically, as we celebrate it now in the Western hemisphere, but also to the general anti-Christmas movement, right? So like both of those things come out of the Reformation. So on the one hand, you have, for instance, Lutheranism. Martin Luther, big fan of Christmas, which I take as a redeeming quality, and he sort of engineered the massive production of Christmas hymns and carols. And you can always tell a Lutheran carol from a medieval Christian, medieval English carol, because the medieval English carols are like really weird and have like a lot of symbolism and things like this, and the Lutheran carols, because they’re written as theologically explicit songs, are like very, like obviously theologically explicit. And so it’s, whereas like the older medieval carols are kind of more riddling in nature. But this is when Christmas trees really become a big thing, probably related to that paradise tree like we talked about, and also just the general very ancient practice in that part of the world of bringing greenery into the house as part of the winter celebration. Are there any of the medieval hymns that are still active now? Yes, there are. I’ve actually kind of put together a playlist of some of them. Of course, all the ones that we, so are you asking about hymns or carols? Because again, that’s a- I was gonna say carols, like Christmas carols. Yeah, yes, there are a few. Probably the oldest one that people know well is Good King Wenceslaus, which is about the practice, by the way, feeding the poor at Christmas, and one of my favorite songs actually. But there’s- Which is weird because it’s not like, it’s like it doesn’t talk about Christmas directly in the way that like Holy Night does, let’s say. Yes, yeah. Well, it’s on the face of Stephen, which people used to know is the second day of Christmas. But yeah, people used to know that better. But it’s a very old carol. As far as other ones that are like still in popular vernacular, I have a bunch of ones that I like a whole lot that are not necessarily well known anymore. Let me think about this. Maybe I’ll try to post some on the Facebook group. I put together a pre-modern advent playlist and just try to find all the carols and hymns that I could find that had been written before a certain date. I’ve got about 30 or 40 things on that list. Maybe I’ll share that with everybody again. But some of them are well known. Some of them are, obviously, all the Orthodox hymns for the feast are all written in the 8th century. So that’s all squarely pre-modern. But those aren’t carols, right? Okay, so Lutheranism produces just a massive number of Christmas hymns and carols. Christmas trees really become a big thing. Actually, Luther was big on Christmas trees, not so much on the creche, right, the nativity scene. So what’s really funny is eventually, this is the thing about Christmas, the stickiness that we’ve been talking about. People don’t get rid of Christmas traditions, they just add new ones. And so some people were like, no, you should do a tree, not a creche. And so everybody’s like, great, we’ll do both. In fact, we’ll do a creche under the Christmas tree. See how you like that. Yeah, makes so much sense symbolically to have. Right, right. It does. The hierarchy of heaven and angels of light, you know, and then at the bottom you have the creche. And you put an angel or a star at the top. Yeah, the same thing. Yeah, I love, this is why I love Christmas so much. And I think it was like my, one of my primary early like symbolic, my early symbolic education really was just paying attention to Christmas customs and things like I was talking about earlier, because everything about Christmas is so deeply symbolically intuitive. It’s just really beautiful. So a lot of the trappings that we think of as kind of defining the American Christmas now were basically brought to North America by the Moravians, by the Pennsylvania Dutch, and by these other groups. And so there were several continental reform churches such as the Dutch Reformed, which did continue to celebrate Christmas. They celebrated as one of the five evangelical feasts, which were Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. And I have never understood, maybe somebody out there wants to enlighten me, Pastor Paul or somebody else, why those are the evangelical feasts and not any of the other things in the Gospels that are also Christian feasts. Like, you know, the name evangelical, usually when we say something is evangelical in a historical sense, we mean it’s mentioned in the Gospels, right? But so is transfiguration, annunciation, etc. So I don’t know why. When are the five feasts? Well, the five evangelical feasts, at least back then for the Dutch Reformed, were, I’m not saying anything about current practice, but were Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. I think it’s because Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. Right, that’s all kind of one cluster. The coherence, you know how many days, you can get it from Scripture pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that might be what it is. I think that’s what it is, because the other dates you can’t get from Scripture when to celebrate the other ones. And this is basically where we get the general idea in American Christianity, and here I’m going to speak very broadly of kind of like the Christmas and Easter rhythm, if you know what I’m talking about. Like this idea by which you have Christmas, and that’s a big deal, and you have Easter, which is usually a really big deal, and then there’s really nothing else of particular spiritual significance between the two, other than of course, you’re just your Sunday observance, your Lord save service, right? And which is how I grew up, right? Where we really get into trouble, though, Christmas wise, is when we get into the Puritans, right? And so here I have to say some things that, well, they’re, I’m just going to read what they said, like it’s not fun. These were not fun people. I don’t know how to say it. Puritans are not fun people. Not fun people. You can quote me on that. But I think they would have said they were not fun people. That’s right. So I think it’s okay. So the Puritanical movement, and by this I mean English Puritans, being a sect of English Christians who thought that the Church of England, the Reformation, had not gone far enough in rejecting what they called popery or papism, right? And so they were really trying to like purify, so you had your Puritans who were like trying to purify the Church of England, and then the separatists who were like, we’re out of here, right? But they’re really the kind of the same movement. And then of course my own ancestors on one side of my family, the Scottish Calvinists, and who also did not like Christmas. Oh really? Yeah, well some of them. So John Knox famously said, supported the banning of Christmas on the grounds that it was superstitious. Various Puritan writers refer to Christmas as being the trappings of popery, the rags of the beast, and so on. The rags of the beast. Yeah. So this is actually a really important thing to think about, I think, because sometimes when people talk about this they’ll say something like, well the Puritans didn’t ban Christmas. Actually they did for a very short period of time. For about 13 years it was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas, like straight up illegal to celebrate Christmas in England. Talk about that in a second, but they’ll say something like, well they were rejecting it, this is what people will say, they’ll say they were rejecting it because of the over celebration and the tendency for people to over celebrate. So the thing that I kind of want to point out here is two things. One is there’s always been people, you know, invading against don’t over celebrate, but it had never been necessary to ban the holiday outright, right? The other thing though is to point out that the the act of celebration for the Puritans, the act of celebration itself was associated with superstition and specifically Roman Catholicism. Yeah. Right. And this even has weird manifestations. One of my areas of study that I did like a whole project on in my graduate degree was actually the American Prohibition Movement and the Temporous Movement, which I’m just really interested in for a lot of reasons. But one of the interesting things that you’ll find if you go back and you read a lot of the early temperance literature, and I have, I’ve actually gone to the the country’s largest temperance archives to like read through a bunch of the early literature. What you’ll find is that there is a lot of frankly anti-Catholic sentiment as a part of the literature of the early temperance movement. Yeah. Because it’s the it’s the German, Italian, Irish immigrants coming over here. They drink. Who drink and that’s causing the problem. Actually it was actually probably the saloons that were causing the problem, not the beer gardens, but that’s a different conversation. We could talk sometime about the symbolism of going from we all get together as a family to have some beer and we’re sitting at a table looking at each other to I’m sitting at a bar facing a bartender. That’s right. Important, important shift that happens there as part of the industrial revolution. But anyway, different conversation for a different day. But the thing I want to I want to really emphasize though is that all of the stuff like the celebration, the drunkenness, but then also like the mass and the liturgy, right? The high things, the low things about the feast day or the puritan, that was all a package and it had to all be rejected. And so this leads to the outright banning starting in 1645 and then again in 1647. They passed an ordinance in England abolishing the feast of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun or Pentecost. Easter too. Abolishing Easter as well, like which people always forget about that. Wow. Always forget about that and that remains in force until the restoration in 1660. In fact there was a really fun kind of a popular song. I wish I remembered to put the lyrics in my notes for this talk. But there was like a kind of a fun popular song celebrating because now we know that Charles has come back, Charles II, because now we know when Christmas is. Yeah. And so there have been like a lot of underground celebrations and things like that going on throughout the time. My goodness, imagine like think about it today if we said, I mean they did it during COVID. Right, right, right. They’re like you can’t celebrate Christmas this year. And it’s like, what? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, this is like this was all a package deal. The Puritans believed that by Persian, the literature and the iconography of the papal religion, they would also be able to usher in an era of moral improvement, right? And that’s the kind of the thing that’s a continuous theme of people who want to get rid of Christmas, is that by doing so we’ll become morally better as a society, right? That Christmas is associated with excess or it’s associated with corruption, like decadence of some sort. Which is funny because like it’s just interesting because that’s the danger of the feast. You know, it’s like, you think people don’t get drunk at weddings, right? Do you think people don’t get drunk at funerals? Do you think people don’t? You know, it’s like when you gather together to celebrate something, it has, there’s a kind of ecstasy there. There’s something going on which is both very positive but also dangerous. And so you kind of have to navigate that line so that it doesn’t fall into, and it also is a revealer. It reveals, you know, the feast can reveal the nature of a group and reveal its quality, you know, because if it gets out of hand, then it also is showing something about the nature of that communion. Yes, that is a really important note. The other thing is that when you try really hard to repress this, right, that it will pop up again, but it’ll pop up in some really dangerously excessive way. That’s right. Right. In the same way that, you know, if you can have Christian liturgy or you can have the occult, like, you know, but there’s a liturgical impulse in human beings that everybody has to participate in something. So there’s so many things about this, like social dancing, for example. Oh, yeah. Great example of that, where it’s like, can you be at a feast where you dance with someone else’s wife? Is that possible? And then can you maintain the order and the right ordering in that kind of that place that could reveal your darkness, let’s say? Yeah. Yeah. Can I tell you a joke? Yeah, go for it. This is a joke that we, as a Baptist growing up, we told about ourselves, so it’s not intended to be cool. So it goes like, how Baptist are you? I’m so Baptist that we don’t play Old Maid in the front of the house, because if somebody drives by at 50 miles an hour, looks through the window, sees us playing cards, they’ll assume we’re playing poker. If we’re playing poker, we’re gambling. If you’re gambling, you’re fornicating. We all know that fornication leads to pre-marital dancing. That’s a very, yeah. Anyway, just, yeah. Oh, this is a joke that we kind of told about ourselves, but I think there’s really something to that. Social dancing is, which is something I was not allowed to do growing up. And then I married my wife who loves dancing. And so she introduced me to it. And it was just like, man, it was always a weird moment. The first time that I danced to music, it was bizarre. And the reason it was bizarre, I discovered two things. One is I really like dancing. But the other is that I suddenly realized what music was for. I grew up, I was a violinist, and I did a lot of Irish fiddle music, like jigs and reels, which are just dancing. But I’d never danced in my life. And so my wife and I, we used to do, we got really into folk dance at a period, and we did a bunch of Scottish country dance. And the first time I danced to a reel, but I was actually doing the reel, suddenly everything about the music clicked into place for me. And it was just this very bizarre moment of realizing that there was a whole half of me that was dead. And it just came to life. And it was just very, it was very strange. So yeah, all this to say, there was this period, a relatively short period, but a pretty infamous period that really scarred English society for a long time, where it was actually against the law to celebrate Christmas. And of course, the real irony in all of this is that the direct descendants of Puritans will now fight vociferously to have a Nativity scene in a public space, to fight for the use of Merry Christmas instead of just Happy Holidays and so on. And because there’s this stickiness about Christmas, you can do whatever you want to, but Christmas will win eventually, it will win. And plenty of other people have tried to get rid of it since the time of the Puritans. We could talk about some of them in a moment, but of course, there’s a modern manifestation of Puritanism that is the political, the PC woke culture, that tries really hard to get rid of Christmas or to change Christmas or to reimagine it in some way. I mean, think about any modern TV show. It’s been a thing in American network television for decades that you have to have a Christmas episode. And so one of the things that you’ll see in more recent TV shows is that whenever the Christmas episode comes around, they have to do more and more to kind of recontextualize what Christmas means, but they can’t get away from doing the episode. And Christmas aesthetics, they are powerful. You cannot get rid of that. It’s weird because even all the efforts of all the marketing companies to reduce it and to remove the Christian part of it and to stylize it and to do that is just feeding it. You cannot get rid of the Christmas visuals, the smell, the music. There’s no way now. Imagine trying to get rid of that. Yeah, it’s impossible. Yeah. So actually, you mentioned the smell. I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget to mention this. So because New England, New England specifically, other parts of the US, we found that we’re settled by different people, many of whom were like had no trouble with Christmas at all. But New England was settled by Puritans and Separatists, right? And one of the really interesting things there is that at some point in the history of New England, it was before the American Revolution, the towns in New England would actually hire mince sniffers. They were called mince sniffers. So the job of a mince sniffer is to walk through the village or walk through the town on Christmas Day and sniff the air and make sure nobody’s cooking Christmas foods on Christmas Day. And you could be really severely punished for celebrating Christmas at that particular time. And at that time, the whole idea of Christmas celebration again, that’s something the German immigrants at the end of the street might be doing, but good Puritan families weren’t participating in that. So to kind of get up to modern times, the early 19th century is really a renaissance for Christmas celebrations in the Anglo sphere. And this is for two reasons. One is the Oxford movement, which is basically this, it was like a movement within the Church of England to kind of return to like a more patristic basis for the tradition. It’s kind of when Anglo Catholicism as such sort of develops into a whole flower, right? And kind of right along the same time, you had a guy named Charles Dickens. And I know they made a movie about him a couple years ago or something called The Man Who Invented Christmas, which I actually did not see, because I hate seeing movies about historical figures that I like or I know a lot about because I’ll just get angry. Especially now. It’s like maybe 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just don’t, I didn’t know what they’re going to do. But so I don’t know if the movie is any good or not, but it’s like, you know, there’s something about the title there, The Man Who Invented Christmas, which is like a little cheeky. But also, it’s not totally wrong. Like I said, Christmas had taken a pretty big hit in the 17th century. And it was being celebrated in England again. But also, it was still like there was just a lot of every year, like kind of like hand wringing around the celebration of Christmas and etc. So but this really, between the Oxford movement and they’re trying to go back and basically revive the medieval practices of these feasts, and then Charles Dickens coming along and writing A Christmas Carol, did a ton to revive traditional celebrations of the holiday, focused especially on the ancient theme of charitable works at this time, which again is a very important part of traditionally celebrating Christmas. And to this day, I mean, you say what you want to say about Americans, but to this day, it remains the time of year that we are the most likely to give to charity. Even people who don’t think about or give anything to the poor the rest of the year, on Christmas, there’s suddenly this like generosity that our hearts will open up, you know, a little bit more than they were open before. Yeah, it’s interesting that Dickens, it’s funny, because now I never thought about that. But I now that it’s called A Christmas Carol, it’s a secular, you know, it’s not directly Christian, it kind of floats around the themes like what you described about the Christmas Carols. That’s exactly why it’s called A Christmas Carol. And it’s so interesting, because there are, of course, references to people going to church, references to Christ, references to like the theme of the day, the little babe in the manger who makes the lame walk, and, you know, etc. Right? That’s all in there. But you’re right, it’s not a liturgical story. It’s not just a retelling of the Nativity narratives from the Gospels or something like that. It’s this sort of thing that’s happening around the church, right? Around the church, and specifically throughout the life of one man. And it kind of creates this really, I think what is so genius about The Christmas Carol, I mean, we should do a whole video just on it, is that it, we’re going to talk in a moment about these ideas of like, sort of knots in time, right? Which is really what a feast day is. And The Christmas Carol takes that idea and runs with it, because it ties Scrooge’s entire life together over the course of one Christmas to the next. Right? Which becomes like a really powerful way of thinking about our own lives, right? You know, where were we on this feast day? What person were we on this feast day? You know? So in the United States, like I said, Christmas was really seen more as more of an ethnic holiday, which meant that you actually had whole communities that just didn’t celebrate Christmas, which is kind of unthinkable now, until about the late 19th century. And it really starts to be celebrated in the late 19th century, thanks to the works of poets, like the guy whose name I’m forgetting right now, who wrote what was originally called A Visit from St. Nicholas, which was The Night Before Christmas, you know, that poem, and then which really basically kicks off the whole idea of gift giving at Christmas in the United States. Yeah, and joins the Feast of St. Nicholas with Christmas. So I was wondering, like, when did that happen? At some point, for us, it’s crushed together in the West. St. Nicholas and Christmas are the same. And then you, like, I had a Romanian priest in our parish for a few years, and he was really annoyed that we gave gifts at Christmas and was, like, really trying to, like, make sure that we give our gifts, you know, on St. Nicholas Day, which was so fun. It didn’t succeed, though. Like, nice try. It’s too, now it’s too deep, like an argument. Yeah, you can’t undo it. And then there was also Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is, I guess, a little infamous now. But anyway, she also wrote a story, I think it’s called A Christmas in New England, which did a lot to kind of popularize the celebration of Christmas. And, like, the whole focus of A Christmas in New England, right, is on this sort of, like, immigrant community within New England that’s celebrating the holiday and that other people kind of get involved and participate in it. And so, yeah, so the late 19th century is really when Christmas takes off in the United States, and this culminates in its declaration as a federal holiday in 1870. And it’s important to note that for Americans, that wasn’t even a holiday. Great Christmas wasn’t even a holiday after the time. And it’s totally unthinkable now, but, like, George Washington didn’t celebrate Christmas. He didn’t just work on Christmas. He attacked the Hessians, who were Germans, on Christmas because they were celebrating. And it was like, that’s like his famous, like, crossing the Delaware attacks the Hessians, one of the most important victories of the American Revolutionary War, worked because the Americans weren’t celebrating on Christmas Day. And the Hessians were, right? So it’s like these various, like, very interesting kind of history there in our early status as a, early time as a nation, and then Christmas kind of developing more and more versus this immigrant thing, and that now it’s totally universal. And so there’s a lot more that we could probably say about the symbolism of the holiday. I kind of run out of time here to talk about the use of, like, Santa Claus as a marketing image, or Coca-Cola specifically. And also, like, I think it’s important. I think this is an argument that people use a lot, is that in some ways, you know, Santa Claus today was made up by Coca-Cola. And I really, I resist that to some extent. I agree. I agree. You know, I think that the character of Father Christmas and St. Nicholas were there in the 19th century. You see the characters, and then they kind of get fused into one character, which is our modern Santa Claus. But, and then the marketing companies kind of jump on that. And, you know, Coca-Cola did simplify the costume, let’s say, in terms of the white band and stuff. And made it, let’s be honest, like a little more palatable to some people, right? Like, Well, less of a bishop. Right, exactly. Some guy with a crozier and a bishop’s miter, like, that’s not gonna play in Poughkeepsie. And like, post, yeah, exactly. Like, post-Puritan America. Yeah. But nonetheless, like, they stumble onto all this. This is why when you talk about how Christmas is so sticky, it’s like, you know, people, I did a video on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which is basically was made up by, like, what was it, one of the big department stores in the United States. And it was given out at Christmas as a gift to people buying at the department store to get people into the store. But they stumbled onto true things, you know, there’s something about how symbolism happens. And I think in the symbolism of Santa Claus, and the way that we think about the sleigh and everything, all of these, these are very powerful images that, that, that even though marketing companies came up with them or brought them up, it doesn’t really matter if we recognize in them, some images that have weight and the fact that they’re remembered means that there’s, there’s some actual weight in those images. Yeah, I’m a huge sucker for Santa Claus movies in general. Miracle on 34th Street is a really, there are two remakes, two, they made it twice. And both versions are quite good, I think. There was an animated film about Santa Claus, like, Santa Claus is like a family dynasty that came out a few years later, called, a few years ago, rather, called Arthur Christmas. And it’s a, it’s a really interesting movie. It is, it does a lot of sort of interesting things, like tries to subvert the Santa Claus symbolism at the outset, and then shows all the problems that that causes. And then by the end, things have to kind of revert back to the traditional pattern. And I haven’t seen it. I should watch that. Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s really, I would love to know your thoughts on it. It’s, it’s, it’s an interesting one. But, but yeah, I think that it’s one of these weird things, because actually, the Soviet Union, of course, tried to also abolish Christmas. And when they did, they just replaced it with a winter holiday. And they had a, they had old man winter, you know, who looks, who’s dressed exactly like Santa Claus, right? And he’s the one that brings you the presents now. You know, and it’s something about this, right? All of the attempts actually to revive or, or create competing winter holidays in the secular world around us today, going back to the French Revolution, my favorite one is the, do you guys, do you have like the three kings cake? Is that something that you do? Yeah, we do that here. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s, that’s not, that’s a, that’s a French thing. It’s, it’s not something that I grew up with, but it’s a French thing. And so you’ll, you’ll, you’ll get a kick out of knowing that during the French Revolution, they renamed the three kings cake to the equality cake, which is, which is amazing because the original story about the three kings is that you have like the highest thing becomes low, and then the high thing comes down and venerates the thing that’s become low. That was, you know, like, and then it’s like, you know, equality cake, it’s all perfectly, it’s all perfectly even. And they don’t put, they don’t put the seed, I bet they don’t put the seed in there. They don’t, I assume not. Because it’s like, hey, someone gets one, especially if he finds the, yeah, have that. It’s just a guillotine. If you find the cake. Yeah. Yeah. Like in Quebec, we like in French in Quebec, we, yeah, Santa Claus, we call him father Christmas. Yeah. Like that’s how it, and that’s a, that’s a, that’s like Papa Noel or something like that. And that’s like, that there’s this whole character that appeared in Western Europe and in France that had the had the hat and was very similar to the way that we understand Santa Claus now. So it’s like all these characters get fused. Yeah, it seems like it’s a thing that that has to happen, you know. Yeah. There’s a lot more we could say about this, but there are a few things that I want to point out that are like really beautiful to me about all of this that we’ve kind of been talking about. And then I’m going to give you what I call my midwit defense of Christmas. All right. So the first thing is just to say that kind of against the general detractors of Christmas, right, that the Christmas is actually not our most over commercialized time of the year. We’re always over commercialized. Christmas is the only time of year that we notice it, right? Because, you know, if you think about like all the kitsch and like the the the one dollar, you know, like the bargain bins and stuff at Target or Walmart or whatever, like those are there all year, you know, but only at Christmas do you notice it and get irritated about it. Yeah. I think it is a really beautiful time where the sort of the, let’s say the soft iconoclasm of American religion gives way to not just like putting up nativity scenes with statues of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, like in your house, in your yard, in the village square, right, but actually defending that practice in the court of public opinion, which is really something to think about. Yeah. And it’s also the time of year, like I mentioned, but by the numbers, we’re the most generous, right? It’s the one day a year that even confirmed heathens will show up to church. So I was a pastor and from a family of pastors, and I get that there’s always something in you that wants to complain when somebody shows up on Christmas Day or an Easter or Pascha and you haven’t seen them in a year. Yeah. You know, it’s like, oh, so now you’re here, right? But like, you could also flip that around, though, and think about the fact that there’s something so potent about this day that even the most confirmed heathen will still show up to light a candle, right? They’ll still show up to a midnight, like they’ll still come to church with their kids, like they take their kids to church the one day a year. There’s something really special, something really potent about this day. So I want to kind of explain that. I’ll give you what I call my midwit apology or defense of Christmas. And I call it a midwit. Some people know I’m a big fan of the format of the midwit meme, right? And so, you know, I’m sure we can put one up here on the screen or something. But, you know, the idea is you have like a really dumb person at one end and a really smart person at the other, and there’s a bell curve in the middle and a bell curve in the middle. That guy’s the midwit. So in this case, the meme is the really simple person who says, celebrate Christmas because it’s Jesus’ birthday, right? And then at the other end, you have the saint who says the same thing, celebrate Christmas because it’s Jesus’ birthday. And for a lot of people, and I’ll go as far as to say probably the majority of the people watching this video, that is enough. That is enough. But for all the people kind of like in the middle there, the sources, yes, the sources people, yes, we need like a little more kind of an explanation and understanding of why we’re doing the things that we’re doing. And again, as I said, to me, this is a really important, this is a really important thing. So I’m going to read some little bits and kind of talk through some bits from Charles Taylor’s work, A Secular Age, which is one of the most important books that I think anybody could read right now. And what’s amazing is that a lot of the ideas that I have really benefited from here on the symbolic world, listening to your videos and conversations over the last several years, I first encountered in Taylor. And then when I saw your videos, I was like, oh, somebody else is talking about that same thing, right? And it was just really, I don’t know, validating a certain way. So he talks about basically this idea that there are three kinds of time. For medieval man, there are three kinds of time. And the first one is the, in one of our previous videos, I refer to this as the difference between Kronos and Kairos as two kinds of time. But Taylor says there’s three, right? So first of all, there’s Kronos, which we could refer to as what Taylor calls homogenous or empty time, right? Which for modernity is the central form of time, right? History as a series of accidents, right? In the philosophical sense, like history as a series of accidents, cause and effect, and just sort of this cause and effect in an endless chain with no particular meaning to it, right? And then the second kind of time is, the second kind of time is what we could call Kairotic time. And so Kairotic time would be time being filled with meaning. So Taylor says that the time of carnival, for instance, is Kairotic. That is the timeline encounters Kairotic knots. So you have this straight line and then suddenly you hit kind of like a knot where everything gets kind of snarled up and bended together. And moments whose nature and placing calls for reversal, followed by others demanding rededication and still others which approach Parousia. So this is his Shrove Tuesday, Lent, Easter, right? So Shrove Tuesday, that’s Mardi Gras, right? Is this a great moment of carnival or reversal, followed by Lent for rededication and Easter, which is like Parousia, the coming, where they’re revealing. So now there are Kairotic knots in the stories we tell about ourselves in our time. Revolutions themselves are understood by their heirs and supporters as such Kairotic moments. So you think about whatever country you live in and the important political moments or like revolutions that you’ve had, in my case, like the American Revolution becomes this huge kind of Kairotic moment where the actual details and timelines about George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and the founding fathers and July the 4th and all that stuff is less important than all of those things kind of being gathered together in that particular moment. It says nationalist historiography is full of such moments, but what has changed is that around which these moments gather. So in the pre-modern era, the organizing field for ordinary time comes from these higher times. So the higher times are basically two sources. So if you think of ordinary times like secular time, I know that the word secular can mean various different things here, but for now we’ll just call it this sort of homogeneous chronological time. There are kind of two sources for that meaning and one is what is eternity, right? Eternity sort of breaking into ordinary time. And then the other is what Taylor calls like the great time, right? This is like, it’s a like mythical time. This is like when all the important stuff happened to make the way the world that it is today, right? So if you’re living in like a pre- like a stone age civilization or something, the great time is like when the gods were on earth walking around on the mortals, right? For the Christian story, the great time is really the gospel, right? The gospels when Christ was here on earth, right? When he’s establishing these things. And there’s this idea that Taylor really develops. The way that you have the horizontal dimension of secular time, but also these vertical dimensions where eternity and the great time kind of break into that secular time. And you could say like the more pronounced that happens, the bigger the knot becomes. Yeah. And this is what makes these relationships, and it’s really a three-way relationship between homogeneous time and our mythical history and then eternity. The more relationships there are, the bigger the knot becomes. And this is actually what gives time meaning. And there’s a famous line in Hamlet, and I’m still waiting for all the symbolic world people to have like the big Hamlet moment. So maybe it’ll happen. Because Hamlet is a tremendously important, one of Shakespeare’s most important plays, it’s a tremendously important work of literature because it’s one of the things that Hamlet is grappling with is the sort of the great disenchantment and the the Passover from the ancient world into the modern, right? It’s not for nothing that Hamlet has just come from university in Germany at the birthplace of the Reformation. He’s just come from university in Germany at the birthplace of modernity, right? He’s coming back and he’s trying to apply these modern understandings to these encounters with the world that are just wild and insane. His father is a ghost and his mother and a big cuckold, like all these things. And Hamlet eventually goes insane, trying to kind of keep it all together, and get stabbed in a duel and everything else as well. But I mean, the point, this is one of the big things that the play is wrestling with. But there’s this line in there where he says, the times are out of joint. The times are out of joint, which has kind of become like a phrase. But this is what it means. It means that he’s not just saying the condition of Danish society at this particular time is lamentable. That’s not what he means. He means that things aren’t fitting together in the proper fashion anymore, as they do in times which are closer to those ordering paradigms of eternity and of the sacred time. And it’s interesting, this comes relatively soon after he’s having a discussion with Marcellus. And Marcellus says that ghosts and goblins don’t dare walk the earth on Christmas Eve on so hallowed and so gracious as the time. By the way, you know, is Hamlet a Christmas story? Well, Die Hard is a Christmas story. Hamlet is definitely a Christmas story. But anyway, so the thing with Christmas is that it’s one of these moments. And the other moment really is the crucifixion, which is something that Taylor also identifies. That the crucifixion and Christmas are these two moments where there’s a complete, like, the relationships that kind of keep all of these things related to each other are like the most complete, right? The symbolism matches up the most, right, you could say. And because of that, these moments become extremely sticky, or the knots become like really, really tangled. And it becomes almost impossible, becomes almost impossible to disentangle those things. And so what people try to do is sort of cut the Gordian knot, and just like cut right through it and say, no more Christmas, right? But Christmas has this tremendous regenerative quality to it. And I think it’s because it’s the moment when it’s the moment when the great time and eternity and chronological time, I mean, it’s really important that Christ was born in Bethlehem. We know more or less the day, we know more or less the year, but it’s really important that God enters history. Because the other option is that you have with the situation that the Greeks had, which would be chronological time, and then eternity, like the world of ideas. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing to kind of bridge the gap between them. So what they end up coming up with is the idea of time as being sort of sempi eternal, which is constantly, constantly progressing, basically time with no beginning or no end, right? Like always change, but never fulfillment, right? But in Christmas, we get this, we get this, this fulfillment of all of these things. And all of the sort of the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of time come together in this work. Yeah, yeah, which is in the story itself. We meant to obviously, we don’t want to go through all the Christmas symbolism, but there it is the tree with the, with the activity set, you know, at the, at the bottom of the manger, whether it is the angels singing down to the shepherds, you know, they’re, they’re just countless, or it is these, these wise men that come from afar, like all of the symbolism of Christmas is about this intersection in the story itself, not even accounting for what it is, what it’s actually doing for us at that moment. And so this is my, just to wrap this up, this is my argument for why you have to celebrate Christmas, right? It’s not just enough to believe that the child born of a virgin was the logos from before the ages, right? We can say we believe that, or we want to, but if we don’t act on that information in some way, and the way that you act on this information, the, the, the Taylor referred, talks about liturgy and like the idea, let’s say he talks about the feast, the act of celebration as being like a song, right? So the song has a melody, like a, think of like a little melody, has sequential moments, you know, all these different notes and everything, but, but really, the beginning to the end of that song all happened at the same moment, because it’s a unit, right? So if you don’t sing the song, then you’re not actually, you have no way of participating in it, in that moment, the moment just passes you by, right? And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then the moment, this holy moment, right? This moment when heaven and earth, everything comes together into this point, right? That moment just passes you by and pretty soon, you stop believing at all, right? You stop really thinking, I mean, there, you know, there’s, there are certain organizations that will do like polls to see like, what’s the state of belief, you know, and like, year after year, if you look at this, what are the questions on there is, is true or false, Jesus Christ is the greatest being ever created by God, right? And so, and that’s one of the questions on the survey and question every well, yeah, it’s, it’s definitely a leading question, right? But the question, yeah, but what happens is that every year, every four years, when they do the survey, that number goes up by 10 or 15%. Yeah, right, where people are just sort of like sliding into Arianism, right? And, you know, there’s a lot that could be said about the state of catechesis and theological education in churches in America’s day, etc, etc. But really, the thing that we need to do is not just put Christ back in Christmas, but put the mass back in Christmas, right? To really keep the feast, to keep the celebration, and you can keep it at every single one of these dimensions, you can go to church and contemplate the mystery, you can wake your neighbors up, you know, at nine o’clock at night and seeing them songs and offer them booze, like, you can do all of this stuff, right? You can participate in all of these dimensions. And if you do, you’ll be more of a human being than you were. But if you do, you will also be able to draw closer to Christ and closer to your neighbor, right? And that actually, without these things, what ends up happening is that time just becomes, does anybody remember COVID, right? With all the celebrations taken away, like, like what happened? What happened during COVID? Exactly. Time just becomes this long kind of like, like, undifferentiated linear, you know, passage, and there’s no memory, right? There’s no memory, there’s no participation. So that’s the midwit explanation. The easy one is it’s Jesus’ birthday. Why wouldn’t you celebrate it? So. All right, Richard, that’s great. Thank you so much. And don’t forget, everybody, by the way, that Richard will be there at the Symbolic World Summit. So if you want to go- I have so many crazy things planned for the Universal History Panel. I mean, I’m really gonna, I’m gonna really like just not restrain myself even a little bit. We’re gonna get to some really fun, weird stuff. So. So I can’t, I definitely can’t wait to everybody. Thanks again, Richard. I wish you a Merry Christmas and- Likewise. See you in the, in the, in the new year. I want to invite you all to the very first Symbolic World Summit. Over three days, we will finally meet in real time and real space, and everyone from this little corner of the internet will be there to explore the theme of reclaiming the cosmic image. Of course, I will be speaking, but there will also be Martin Shaw, who is an amazing mythographer, Father Stephen DeYoung of Lord of Spirit fame. There will be Richard Rowland from the Universal History Series, Vesper Stamper, Nicholas Cotar, and Neil deGray that you’ve all seen on my channel here and there. For entertainment, we have everyone’s favorite apocalyptic band, the one and only Dirt Poor Robins. This event will be the chance of a lifetime to capture and embrace our current moment. So join us from February 29th to March 2nd, 2024 in Tarpen Springs, Florida. Visit thesymbolicworld.com slash summit for more information. I will see you there.