Christmas Every Day

Having been converted in AD 330, Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian nations in the world and Christmas there is quite unlike anywhere else. It is primarily a religious observance, largely untouched by the commercialization and emphasis on gift-giving that has spread elsewhere, and begins with a 40-day fast. Though the fast is not as strict as that Lenten period that precedes Easter it is still a time for physical and spiritual disciplines which prepare the body and soul for Christmas.

 Ethiopians, following the Coptic calendar, celebrate Christmas on January 7. In churches around the country candle-lit processions take place and people stand (there are no pews in an Ethiopian church) for the mass that may last up to three hours. In the country’s spiritual capital Lalibela, home to ancient churches, thousands come every year in pilgrimage. They spend the night before Christmas in a vigil of prayer, singing and dancing. In the morning a great procession carries the Ark of the Covenant to the top of a nearby hill where the liturgy is celebrated. After the service there is more dancing, feasting and, for the men and boys, a game of genna, a kind of hockey played only on Christmas. This game is said to date from the time of the birth of Jesus when the shepherds who had just heard the good news from the angels waved their staffs in joy.

 Food served at Christmas will include injera, a spongy flat bread on which doro wat, a chicken stew (spicy like every other Ethiopian dish) or other main course, will be spread. A piece of the injera is then broken off to to scoop up the stew. Gift giving is a very small part of Christmas in Ethiopia and is usually directed only toward children who will receive something simple such as new clothes.

One foreign custom that has crept into Ethiopian Christmas celebrations is the Christmas tree. Such is the demand for the trees in the area of the capital Addis Ababa that the government has had to impose conservation measures to save the local juniper trees from extinction.

Two weeks after Christmas is Timket, or Epiphany, (pictured above) which is an even greater festival lasting three days in honour of the baptism of Jesus and St. Michael. More gift-giving takes place and more feasting.

 Because the Christmas season ends in many parts of the world on January 6, Twelfth Night became a time of raucous celebration, associated with masking, mumming, drinking and social inversion. This misrule may have been a carry-over to some extent from the riotousness of the pagan Kalends. In Byzantium for example church councils had to legislate against the dancing and transvestism that went on in early January. During the reign of Michael III (842-67) the emperor and his court went so far as to use the occasion to mock the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Mass itself. Mock coronations and consecrations become common in medieval Europe with clerical hijinks, cross-dressing, noise and laughter the order of the day on Twelfth Night.

To commemorate the visit of the Magi who brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to the infant Jesus, Epiphany became the day for giving gifts, especially to children. In the Spanish-speaking world the eve of the day of Los Tres Rejes Magos is when the three wise men pass through on their way to Bethlehem and leave presents for kids who, in turn, leave out snacks for the kings and their camels. In Spain their Majesties and their attendants can be seen processing through the city streets on January 5 in great splendour. In Italy the night of January 5 sees the visit of the Befana (the name itself is a corrption of Epiphania), an old lady who refused to spare time from her housekeeping to accompnay the Three Kings on their journey. She soon repented of her decision and tried to join the Magi but has never succeeded to this day. She therefore visits each home in search of the Christ Child and leaves presents for the little ones that she finds sleeping there.

The custom of the King’s Cake, Twelfth Night Cake, Dreikonigskuchen, gâteau des rois, etc., can be traced back to the thirteenth century. A bean or a pea or a coin was baked into the cake and the lucky finder was named king or queen of the party and could direct others to do his bidding for the evening. Though the tradition lingers in much of Europe (as well as French America) the custom in England was displaced to December 25 where it became the Christmas cake. In medieval France it was customary to put a piece of the cake aside for the poor or to collect money from the rich for their share of the cake and use the money for a charity.

For much of the 19th century there was no single, universally-recognized version of Santa Claus. Depending on the author or the artist, the magical gift-bringer could be young or old, bearded or not, tiny, half-sized, adult-sized or gigantic. His clothes could be those of a pedlar, a farmer, Robin Hood, a king, or a Chinese mandarin.

Truly one-of-a-kind is the character trying to pass himself off as St Nick in Santa Claus and Jenny Lind, likely a promotional piece for the P.T. Barnum-sponsored tour of America in 1850 by the Swedish Nightingale. For this book Santa Claus has dressed up as George Washington (presumably to associate himself with patriotic impulses) complete with eighteenth-century bicorn hat, pigtail and spurs on his boots, and sits astride a winged broom piloting a soprano through the skies singing: “I’m a jolly old man – I ride the wind; / The lady behind me is Miss Jenny Lind;/ The horse that we ride is a broomstick, you see –/ Oh! This is the horse for Miss Jenny and me.”

So much about this Santa Claus is different from his rivals: he carries no sack and all his toys emerge from his pockets; he is a clean-shaven, full-sized gentleman of late-middle years with nothing Dutch, elfin or fur-clad about him; he goes through the world during the hours of daylight and instead of waiting for Christmas Eve to reward the good behaviour he finds, he disburses his praises and gifts then and there. His behaviour is neither solemn nor jolly but rather downright queer – a word he uses several times to describe himself – and if he were to enter a doctor’s office today, he might not escape without a diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. His mental focus seems very weak; on the least impulse he bounds away over the landscape: “I was happy to see such a good little boy,/ And took from my pocket a beautiful toy:/ I shouted and threw it, I couldn’t keep still,/ And then I was off, over valley and hill.” He won’t stay in one place long enough even to hear Jenny Lind sing; he hies himself to a mountain top “where winds whistle bleak,” and confesses, “I am dancing a jig, I am having a freak.”

The night of January 5, the vigil or eve of Epiphany, is so called because it is the twelfth night from Christmas, if Christmas is counted as the first. (The Twelve Days are not calculated in the same way everywhere. In some places Christmas is counted making Epiphany the thirteenth day. In England it is particularly confusing because January 6 is Twelfth Day but January 5 is Twelfth Night.)

In England, Twelfth Night had long been a period of partying marking the end of the Christmas season. Masquerading was a common activity on Twelfth Night along with dancing, cross-dressing, and gambling. It was a time of social inversion when a mock king was elected to supervise the misrule. 

By the nineteenth century its reputation of riotousness was working against it and Twelfth Night was losing out to Christmas as the date for festivities. Victorian values were making the season more respectable and domestic. The gender-swapping and role reversals were theatricalized and absorbed by the pantomime where they became harmless family fare.

Since January 6, Epiphany, is celebrated as the arrival of the Magi or Three Kings, it is customary in many parts of the world to eat a “king cake”, a treat that comes in all shapes and sizes. Readers who remember the Second Gulf War may recall that American petulance at the French refusal to join in the coalition invading Iraq led to many renaming “French fries” as “Freedom fries.” Those who scorned such linguistic pettifoggery may be surprised to learn that our Gallic cousins were first into this fray. During the French Revolution of the 1790s, bakers were told that “gateaux des rois” were no longer politically correct — king cakes now had to be gateaux de Liberté: freedom cakes.

From an article on the blog of The Golden Glow of Christmas Past:

In 1937, Charles W. Howard established the first Santa Claus School which today is the oldest continuously-run Santa school in the world. At the suggestion of a local journalist, he opened a Santa Claus School in Albion New York, to disseminate his Santa philosophies and methods. He initially held classes in his own home. In the late 1940s, he developed Christmas Park adjacent to his house, an attraction for children throughout western New York, which had space for his school’s classroom and dressing room. New Santas could get practice interacting with children by portraying Santa and his helpers at the park. Department stores across the country sent Santas and executives both to his school.

There have been changes to the School since that article. Under new management the School’s website proclaims:

In 1937, Charles W. Howard a farmer in Albion, New York established a Santa school in direct response to his displeasure with seeing other Santas in frayed suits and cheap beards, and a shockingly inadequate knowledge of reindeer. He decided that he could start a school to make a better Santa. The first class consisted of three men, including a welder from New Jersey, his friend, and a neighbor. Charles eventually had a Christmas-themed park, with several barns, a train and some reindeer. Children for miles around would visit, including Tom Valent, who is originally from a town called Salamanca, about an hour’s drive from Albion.

“As a little girl I sat on Charles Howard’s lap, too,” Holly Valent said. “We were from a small town. Every child wanted to go to Christmas Park.” From 1948 to 1965, Charles Howard was the featured Santa Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, perhaps the most visible Santa in the United States.

The school was taken over by Nate Doan in the 1960s, another famous Santa who in 1968 moved the school to Bay City, Michigan. Tom first attend the CH Santa School in 1975 when expecting his first child.
Today, the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School continues running under the direction of Tom and Holly Valent and is carried on in Midland, Michigan with an eager student body of about 300 joyful and jolly new and returning students each year.

In 1995, Tom and Holly conducted the first World Santa School in Illulisatt, Greenland. The participating countries included: Germany, Ireland, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Spain, Australia, Greenland, South Africa, Switzerland, as well as the United States.  This Santa School has been taught in Australia, Greenland, and England. Tom and Holly have participated in the weeklong St. Nicholas festivities in Zurich, Switzerland, Oslo, Norway and Stockholm Sweden.

About that foreskin. Yesterday’s blog post was about the medieval celebration of the Circumcision of Jesus and curious readers may be asking: whatever happened to that particular prepuce? Thereby hangs a tale.

While the bodies of Christian saints have yielded thousands of relics, the bodies of Christ and the Virgin Mary, both of which were taken into Heaven, are much less productive of remains. The faithful believed that some of the Virgin’s breast milk and hair were preserved for veneration and that drops of the blood of Jesus at his crucifixion had been saved, but the only body part of Christ that was available as a relic was his foreskin.

How it came to be safeguarded is told in a pseudo-gospel called the Arab Infancy Gospel from the fifth or sixth centuries: And when the time of his circumcision was come, namely, the eighth day, on which the law commanded the child to be circumcised, they circumcised him in a cave. And the old Hebrew woman took the foreskin (others say she took the navel-string), and preserved it in an alabaster-box of old oil of spikenard. And she had a son who was a druggist, to whom she said, “Take heed thou sell not this alabaster box of spikenard-ointment, although thou shouldst be offered three hundred pence for it.” Now this is that alabaster-box which Mary the sinner procured, and poured forth the ointment out of it upon the head and feet of our Lord Jesus Christ, and wiped it off with the hairs of her head.

In the year 800 the Frankish emperor Charlemagne gave the relic to Pope Leo III, telling him that he had received it from an angel. It was preserved in Rome until the city was sacked by Germans in 1527 when it was stolen. The Italian village in which it was recovered kept the foreskin in its reliquary until it disappeared either in 1945 or 1983.

But fear not, because as many as 18 other foreskins of Christ were said to be in circulation during the Middle Ages, though none now can be found. The Catholic Church eventually grew weary of celebrating the Feast of the Circumcision and removed it from the church calendar.

January 1, one of the Twelve Days of Christmas, is termed “The Octave of the Nativity” on the Roman Catholic calendar and is also called “Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus”, marked by Catholics and Anglicans. For a long time, however, the date had a different name, as explained here by the late theologian Larry Hurtado:

From about the 6th century or so in the Western churches, 1 January was designated as the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus (eight days after 25 Dec).  Luke 2:21 mentions Jesus’ circumcision and formal naming.  In the medieval period, however, the date was treated as another feast dedicated to Jesus’ mother, Mary.  This is indicative of the growing centrality of Mary-devotion in the medieval period (in practical terms, overshadowing Jesus in popular piety), and it may also reflect a certain lack of concern or even an uneasiness about Jesus’ Jewishness.

The readiness to acknowledge Jesus the Jew has varied, with much of church history appearing to ignore or have little to say about the topic.  This is even evident in church art.  If you go through the many paintings of the infant Jesus (often pictured with the infant John the Baptist), typically a nude Jesus with his genitals showing, it’s interesting to note how many appear to show an uncircumcised Jesus.

So, I think that it’s important in historical terms to have in the church calendar a reminder that Jesus was not some generic human, but a quite specific person:  male and most definitely Jewish.  Perhaps especially in light of the sad history of Christian treatment of Jews, it’s particularly appropriate.  It at least does justice to history.

December 31 is the feast day of St Sylvester, the fourth-century pope during whose reign (314-35) persecution of Christians ceased and Christianity received the favour of the emperor Constantine. In legend Sylvester was supposed to have cured the emperor of leprosy and received western Europe from him through the spurious Donation of Constantine. In German speaking countries “Silvester” is the name given to New Year’s Eve and its festivities

Every December 31 (St Sylvester’s Day) and January 13 (Old St Sylvester’s Eve) men of Urnäsch in eastern Switzerland don fantastic costumes and go, in groups, from door to door. There are three types of dress, depending on the level of grotesqueness: the Wüeschti, or the ugly Chläuse is covered in bark and branches and wears a frightful mask; the Schö-Wüeschti, or less-ugly, is equally piney less frightening; and the Schöne or pretty Chläuse wears a huge bell or a massive headdress depicting a rural scene. At each house they sing three zäuerli, or wordless yodels and are rewarded with a drink, food and money before going on to the next destination. Once part of the widespread phenomenon of Christmas-tide begging visits, the custom is now kept alive partly out of a love for local tradition and partly for the tourist trade that it attracts.

New Year’s Eve in Ireland, Oiche na Coda Moíre, is called the Night of the Big Portion because of the belief that in order to ensure prosperity for the home in the new year a huge meal must be eaten on December 31. In fact, in some areas it was once believed that all the food in the house on New Year’s Eve had to be devoured.

A number of cultures have traditionally practised the custom of going door-to-door during the Christmas season in crude disguises, performing skits or dances in return for hospitality. It is called mummering in Newfoundland, belsnickling in Nova Scotia, julebukking in Norway, and the Knocking Nights in Germany. In Lincoln Country, North Carolina it was called Christmas Boogering.

Though the custom seems to have died out during the Second World War, an elder recalls: “I must tell you about the ‘Christmas boogers.’ The most fun we had was seeing the ‘Christmas boogers.’ Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, most any time you could expect them to come to your house with false faces similar to the masks children wear for Halloween. The ‘boogers’ were the older young people and adults. A man might put his overalls on backwards, some men would dress up like women and maybe put on a dress. They would knock on the door, come in, dance around on the floor a little bit, and try to change their voices. We tried to guess who they were but sometimes we never knew. They didn’t come to get anything, but just to have fun.”

Another oldster remembered: “Well, people didn’t have store bought costumes. They made them, and lots would paint their faces. People in the crowd would do a dance, like the Charleston, and they hit a few steps. These people were next-door neighbors, they went in the community, and when they knocked on the door, you let them in. This was our entertainment, and we’d look forward to the Christmas boogers, as much as we did Christmas. It was during the time from Christmas to New Year’s.”

The most complete reminiscence comes from a man born in 1927: “We never did Halloween boogerin’, cause we didn’t have a way to get to town. We went Christmas boogerin. Course, we weren’t the only ones. We called ourselves the Howard’s Creek Christmas boogers, and there was a group over at Bethphage. We’d either get together at our house or at Lum Heavner’s house. The Heavners had nine children, and my Daddy had six. We had plenty of kids to go round. I remember one year I dressed up like a woman. I got my sister’s dress and put it over my clothes. And for our masks we took a paper sack and cut the eyes out and painted faces on them. We didn’t buy masks or nothing. There were about 12 houses right around the school house there, and when we went out, there was always an adult went with us to see that we didn’t throw no rocks or get into trouble. And we’d go down the road singing “Jingle Bells” or something and we’d get to a house and from the yard we’d start hollering, “You want to see some Christmas boogers?!” And we would holler until they opened the door and let us in. They knew we were coming because they’d helped us get dressed!

“Then we would play this game of trying to guess who we were, because we had pokes on our heads. But they knew exactly who we were. If they guessed who we was, then we had to take our mask off. And they made us sing a little bit for our candy. They’d give us a stick of peppermint candy, or an apple, or a cookie, or a handful of parched peanuts. And we didn’t do all of the houses on one night. We’d do maybe five or six, and then it was starting to get dark, and we had to get home because we had stuff to do. If you were about 10 or 11 years old, you had to milk the cow, slop hogs, stuff like that. Then the next night we’d dress up in the same thing again and go to the other houses.”