In Italian, Befana can refer either to Epiphany (January 6), the traditional time for Christmas gift-giving, or to the kindly witch of that name who delivers the presents.
In this 1921 image a kindly rich woman delivers presents to children of the working class who have been orphaned by World War One.
During the Second World War, all sides made propaganda appeals to enemy soldiers to weaken their morale, to encourage desertion, or to promote the idea of voluntary surrender. Here is a particularly duplicitous example printed by the Soviets for distribution across enemy lines to German troops.
Note the use of Christmas images — German prisoners with Santa Claus, gaily decorating a huge Christmas tree. The food is lavishly plentiful and letters from home are read. The reality for Germans captured by the Red Army was much more grim. Of those soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad, 95% died in captivity. Hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers were kept as slave labour in the USSR for 10 years after the war.
As part of their drive against the practice of religion, Soviet leaders did their best to discourage the observance of Christmas but the people’s lingering love of the holiday and the need for social unity in the fight against the Nazi invasion, led the Kremlin create a pseudo-Christmas centred on New Year’s. Thus the Christmas tree became the New Year’s tree, Christmas cards became New Year’s cards, gifts were exchanged on January 1, and St Nicholas was replaced by the secular Des Moroz, or Grandfather Frost. Because the Soviet state had converted to the Gregorian calendar while the Orthodox Church clung to the Julian calendar, the Communist New Year celebrations took place BEFORE Orthodox Christmas. This allowed the state to provide holiday goodies for January 1 but cut off the supplies for Christmas on January 7.
A number of New Year’s cards published during the war show a very militant Grandfather Frost routing the German invaders.
The caption reads: ‘Grandfather Frost Makes a Fearsome Tour To Get The Entire Pack of Fascists To Disappear Forever Soon’
Monday is a gift of socks under life’s Christmas tree. – maggiesfarm.com, 2021
To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. – Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Christmas Sermon”, 1887
I could go on and on about the suffering we’ve endured and the adaptations we’ve made, but to me, our species’ crowning jewel is that on the shortest day of the year, when the sun spends most of its time swallowed, when everything is frozen, when nothing can grow, when the air is so cold our voices stop right in front of our faces we put a string of lights on a universe that is currently doing nothing to earn it. We not only salvage an otherwise desolate time of year, we make it the best time of year. – Dan Harmon, “Drunk High Christmas Greetings!”, 2008
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, then I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. – Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, 1952
For children, Christmas is everything they might be given; for an adult, Christmas is everything we have lost. – Mark Forsyth, A Christmas Cornucopia
A clear signal that social inversion is in effect and that festive misrule and license will be tolerated temporarily is for one sex to assume the dress of another. This has its origins in the Roman feast of Saturnalia held in late December and it continued after the Christianization of Europe. Numerous edicts exist from the Middle Ages in which authorities decry transvestism at Christmas amongst the lower clergy and popular folk customs. In 1445 by the Paris Faculty of Theology complained: “Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels.” The Staffordshire Horn Dance has a cross-dressing cast member called Maid Marian while guisers on the Scottish borders provide comic relief with the figure of Bessie the Besom, a man dressed as an old woman. In Newfoundland mumming both sexes will participate dressed as the other, with young women disguised as sailors and men known as “ownshooks” clad as women. In Nova Scotia the females who went belsnickling dressed as Wise Men were called Kris Kringles.
You might think that the earthly father of Our Lord would get a little more attention but the general attitude toward him is shown by the Nativity icon above — Joseph is old, bewildered and remote from the action.
Joseph appears first in the gospels as the betrothed of Mary. When he learns she is pregnant he is dissuaded from abandoning her by an angelic visit that tells him the child has been conceived by the Holy Spirit. He takes Mary, late in her pregnancy, to Bethlehem to be enumerated and there she gives birth to Jesus. Warned in a vision to flee Herod he takes his wife and child to Egypt and then back to Nazareth. The last glimpse we have of him in the canonical scriptures is on a visit to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve and eluded his anxious parents to stay and talk with learned men in the Temple.
Legend and apocryphal scripture treat Joseph in much more detail. There he is always depicted as an older man, a widower with sons, who won Mary as a bride after supernatural intervention. In Nativity art he appears in depictions of his encounters with the angels, the Journey to Bethlehem, the manger scene and the Flight Into Egypt. In these settings he is often portrayed somewhat apart from Jesus — as a sign that he is not the child’s true father — and often looking bemused or thoughtful at the amazing turn of events.
Joseph is patron of the universal Church, Austria, Belgium, Canada, fathers, carpenters, house hunters and social justice. In the West his feast is on March 19 and in the Eastern churches it is the first Sunday after Christmas. As Joseph the Worker he is also celebrated on May 1. Because the Holy Family were in need of shelter both in Bethlehem and on the Flight to Egypt some homeowners today wishing to sell their house bury a statue of St Joseph upside down in the yard. A detailed discussion of this superstition with helpful tips for placement of the image may be found here: http://saint-josephstatue.com/Where_to_bury_a_St_Joseph_statue.html
1965
A Charlie Brown Christmas debuts.
“All I want is what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share,” says Lucy in this little animated film on the dangers of a materialistic view of Christmas. Though there are some chuckles over Charlie Brown’s direction of the school pageant and his search for a suitable tree, A Charlie Brown Christmas is more of a morality play than a light-hearted romp. CBS apparently had misgivings about the religious content of the show — one of the few explicitly Christian animated films about Christmas — but this Charles Schulz creation won an Emmy for Best Children’s Program and went on to become an enduring holiday favourite.
The overtly religious content which alarmed network executives comes when the question is asked about the real meaning of Christmas and Linus declaims:
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for behold I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapping in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
“…That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
Though the program is a Yuletide classic, its Christian message still vexes the irreligious who continue to complain about school children being taken to see it performed.
In December 2009 the Ramshackle Incendiary Gang Punky Mauri of Santiago, Chile set fire to a Nativity scene and Christmas tree. Their communiqué went into great detail describing the arsonist device and explained their attack thus:
We attacked the crib and the Christmas tree for being symbols of power that has [sic] religion in its alienating and oppressive work.
We repudiate their disgusting festivities, which are pervading everything over [sic] these days, while the domesticated zombies rush en masse to buy the latest mobile phone, designer clothes, a new tv, the car of the year, the latest videogame, etc… anything to quell the desire for opulence, feeling good by having something that others don’t have. This action is in solidarity with all the imprisoned comrades on hunger strike, showing that prison has not bowed their heads and that the struggle continues and is spreading. This is also greetings of courage for all the comrades that have been struck by power, like in the latest raids against social centres and squats of Santiago, showing the State’s desperation at its incapacity to put a stop to the attacks. A salute also to the comrades in Mexico who are accused of actions of the earth liberation front, and the comrade Tamara in Spain, accused of sending a letter-bomb.
For all of you comrades, greetings of strength and conviction, because in the war against power nobody is alone and every blow will be returned.
A more light-hearted approach was voiced by British anarchists in 2018 who imagined that Anarchist theorist Pyotr Kropotkin would disguise himself as St Nicholas and advocate looting commercial establishments.
On the night before Christmas, we’ll all be about
While the people are sleeping, we’ll realise our clout
We’ll expropriate goods from the stores, ‘cos that’s fair
And distribute them widely, to those who need care.
By the year 400 Christianity had become the legal religion of the Roman empire and pagan observances had been banned. But Church leaders were worried that Christian celebration of Christmas might be tainted by lingering pagan affection for old holidays such as the Kalends of January or Saturnalia. Here is an expert of a sermon from Asterius of Amasea on the proper way to spend time and money in late December:
Give to the crippled beggar, and not to the dissolute musician. Give to the widow instead of the harlot; instead of to the woman of the street, to her who is piously secluded. Lavish your gifts upon the holy virgins singing psalms unto God, and hold the shameless psaltery in abhorrence, which by its music catches the licentious before it is seen. Satisfy the orphan, pay the poor man’s debt, and you shall have a glory that is eternal. You empty a multitude of purses for shameful pastime, and ribald laughter, not knowing how many poor men’s tears you are giving, from whom your wealth has been gathered; how many have been imprisoned, how many beaten, how many have come near death by the halter, to furnish what dancers to-day receive.
These warnings continued through the centuries. In North Africa in 404 Saint Augustine preached a three-hour sermon against the revels of the New Year and their connections to paganism. He pleaded with his listeners: “When [the pagans] give gifts; do you give alms. They are called away by songs of license; you, by the discourses of the Scriptures. They run to the theatre; you, to the church. They become intoxicated; do you fast.”23 The bishop of Ravenna, Petrus Chrysologus, complained in the 440s that the leading citizens of that imperial capital paraded during the Kalends through the city’s hippodrome, dressed as Roman planetary gods.
In the 300s, while Christmas was growing in stature, its setting during the traditional pagan festive season would cause trouble that lasted for centuries. Because the Nativity was celebrated during a time traditionally marked by popular festivities such as feasting, gift-giving and decorating homes with greenery those activities would inevitably effect Christians and their new holiday. Gregory Nazianzen, the archbishop of Constantinople, sounded a warning note in a sermon of 380. He praised what he called “the feast of the Theophany” when God appeared to humans in the form of a baby in order for us to “journey toward God.” This was worthy of celebration – but in a godly way, not like a pagan festival. He begged his listeners to avoid imitating their worldly neighbours.
Let us not put wreaths on our front doors, or assemble troupes of dancers, or decorate the streets. Let us not feast the eyes, or mesmerize the sense of hearing, or make effeminate the sense of smell, or prostitute the sense of taste, or gratify the sense of touch. These are ready paths to evil, and entrances of sin … Let us not assess the bouquets of wines, the concoctions of chefs, the great cost of perfumes. Let earth and sea not bring us as gifts the valued dung, for this is how I know to evaluate luxury. Let us not strive to conquer each other in dissoluteness. For to me all that is superfluous and beyond need is dissoluteness, particularly when others are hungry and in want, who are of the same clay and composition as ourselves. But let us leave these things to the Greeks and to Greek pomp and festivals.