Christmas Every Day

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.

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.

The success of the Puritans in the English Revolution led to the abolition of Christmas, in both its religious form and its guise as an excuse for merriment. This spirit of perpetual Lent was echoed by Thomas Fuller; in a Childermas sermon, he advised his listeners not to be carried away in jollity but to mourn while they are in mirth. A tract of 1656 complained: “Bad joy strips God of all. No evil carries the heart so totally from God as evil joy….A man is very heartily, very totally wicked, every faculty, every sinnew stretch themselves to sin, when sinful in joys.”

To the Christmas-lover this mirthless spirit was the least comprehensible argument of his opponents and the one that stirred most resentment in the hearts of ordinary Englishmen. When Christmas was restored in 1660 with the return of the Stuart dynasty under Charles II, the right to be merry and the comfort of long custom were most celebrated. “Can the Black-moore change his skin, or the Sunne alter his continued course? Yet sooner can these things be done then my mind changed, for to keep old Christmas once again,” asserted Mrs. Custome in Women Will Have Their Will. (Far less delight was shown at the return of church services or the right to Christmas charity than at the restoration of good cheer.) A ballad “The Merry Boys of Christmas” crowed:

Then here’s a Health to Charles our King,
Throughout the world admired;
Let us his great applauses sing
That we so much desired,
And wisht among us for to reign
When Oliver [Cromwell] rul’d here:
But since he’s home returned again,
Come fill some Christmas Beer!
These holidays we’ll briskly drink,
all mirth we will devise,
No treason we will speak or think,
then bring us brave minc’d Pies:
Roast Beef and brave Plum Porridge,
our Loyal hearts to cheer:
Then prithee make no more ado,
but bring us Christmas Beer!

Harper’s magazine on December 26, 1857 published a poem entitled “The Wonders of Santa Claus” which was influential in shaping the 19th century’s view of Santa.

 Here he is a rotund old man, clad in red with white fur trim and long black boots; here are the busy elves in a workshop setting; and, for the first time, an Arctic setting, a castle of ice where he and his helpers can labour undisturbed. He is neither bishop, nor proletarian; betokening his elevated status of polar castellan and employer, his pipe is a long one. Among the wonders of his establishment is its ability to disappear into the frosty mist when a stranger happens by; though it is reported that one clever boy drew close enough to see this moral admonition on the gate: “Nobody can ever enter here/ Who lies a-bed too late.” The poet then advises: “Let all who expect a good stocking full,/ Not spend much time in play;/ Keep book and work all the while in mind/ And be up by the peep of day.” 

The Arctic hideaway was later revealed to be under Iceland’s Mount Hecla, a volcano which provided Santa with central heating and hot running water – cold water came from a stream of “melted-snow water, contrived with a patented congelator, which thawed when you wanted cold water and froze when you didn’t.”

On December 23, 1927 Santa Claus robbed the First National Bank in Cisco, Texas. Dressed as St. Nick, Marshall Ratliff and three undisguised companions looted the bank and took hostages but were greeted by police and heavily-armed townspeople when they emerged from the building. In the shoot-out that followed, two officers and a bandit were mortally wounded and six civilians were hit by bullets. The remaining robbers made off in the getaway car with two children as hostages but discovered that they had neglected to fill up the vehicle with gasoline. The bullet-ridden car and the hostages were soon abandoned as the bandits tried to make their way to safety on foot. A massive manhunt, the largest in the history of West Texas, with searchers on horseback, in cars, and in planes finally cornered the desperadoes in a field; all three were shot but two managed to escape for a time into the woods. The Santa Claus-clad Ratliff was captured, alive despite six bullet wounds. The two wounded crooks were forced to leave behind the stolen money and were both rounded up within a week.

Put on trial, all were found guilty. The killer of the Cisco sheriff was sentenced to death, the second received  99-year sentence, while Ratliff tried to plead insanity but he two received a death sentence. The erstwhile Santa, unfortunately, killed again in a failed escape attempt; he was eventually taken from his jail cell by an angry mob and lynched. A piece of the rope used in the impromptu hanging is on display in the Callahan County Courthouse in Baird, Texas.

In 1962 another thief dressed as Santa held up a bank in Montreal with equally dismal results. Two policemen were killed as they responded to the call. The killer, 34-year-old Georges Marcotte was arrested and found guilty of two counts of murder. He became one of the last criminals to get a death sentence in Canada but his sentence was commuted to a life term He was granted parole in 1981. Justice works differently in Texas and in Quebec.