Christmas Every Day

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.”

In 1162 Henry II sought to bring the English Church under strict royal control by appointing to the archbishopric of Canterbury his chancellor and good friend, Thomas Becket. But in raising Becket to the primacy, Henry had misjudged his man. As chancellor, Becket had been a devoted royal servant, but as archbishop of Canterbury he became a fervent defender of ecclesiastical independence and an implacable enemy of the king. Henry and Becket became locked in a furious quarrel over the issue of royal control of the English Church. In 1164 Henry issued a list of pro-royal provisions relating to Church-state relations known as the “Constitutions of Clarendon,” which, among other things, prohibited appeals to Rome without royal license and established a degree of royal control over the Church courts. Henry maintained that the Constitutions of Clarendon represented ancient custom; Becket regarded them as unacceptable infringements of the freedom of the Church. For eight years this struggle continued. The king threatened Becket with arrest; Becket fled to the Continent; both sides appealed to the Pope.

Becket returned to England in 1170 under an uneasy truce but the quarrels went unresolved. On Christmas Day Becket preached a sermon which included this prediction:

I have spoken to you today, dear children of God, of the martyrs of the past, asking you to remember especially our martyr of Canterbury, the blessed Archbishop Elphege [murdered in 1012 by Vikings when he refused to ask to be ransomed] ; because it is fitting, on Christ’s birthday, to remember what is that peace which he brought; and because, dear children, do not think that I shall ever preach to you again; and because it is possible that in a short time you may have yet another martyr, and that one perhaps not the last. I would have you keep in your hearts these words that I say, and think of them at another time.

Four days later, a group of Henry’s knights, acting on what they thought were his wishes, invaded the cathedral and hacked Becket to death as he was saying Mass. This dramatic atrocity made a deep impact on the age. Becket was regarded as a martyr; miracles were alleged to have occurred at his tomb, and he was quickly canonized. For the remainder of the Middle Ages, Canterbury was a major pilgrimage center, and the cult of St. Thomas enjoyed immense popularity. Henry, who had not explicitly ordered the killing but whose anger had prompted it, suffered acute embarrassment. He was obliged to do penance by walking barefoot through the streets of Canterbury and submitting to a 300-lash flogging by the Canterbury monks (who seem to have enjoyed the episode immensely).

December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorates the murder of the male babies of Bethlehem by King Herod. In England the day was known as Childermas (or Dyzemas) and was considered an ill-omened time; few would want, for example, to be married on that date. Not only was no business conducted on that day, but the day of the week on which it fell was deemed unlucky for the rest of the year. In Ireland it was Lá Crostna na Bliana, the “cross day of the year” when no new enterprise was begun. Many sailors would not sail on that day; on the Aran isles no one was buried on Childermas (or the day of the week on which it occurred); and in Cornwall to wash on that day was to doom one of your relatives to death.

Childermas was also a day for ritual beatings. The seventeenth-century writer Gregorie notes the custom of whipping children in the morning of that day so that Herod’s murderousness “might stick the closer; and, in a moderate proportion, to act over the crueltie again in kind.”

One of the most tedious tropes surrounding Christian art is that mocking portrayals of a blond Caucasian Jesus. This is done in ignorance the fact that every culture portrays the Holy Family in the local context. The very first Christian art saw Jesus depicted as a beardless youth resembling a Roman god; the Magi were depicted as contemporary Persians. Yesterday I used a Korean version of the Nativity and today I present other indigenous visions of that scene in Bethlehem.