ise men trekking across the desert following a star. Shepherds in the fields with flocks by night. An angel, fast as thought and bright as hope, turning eternity into time.
Hurry! A baby will be born.
Believers and unbelievers know this story.
Who doesn’t know this story?
An inn. A stable. A donkey. Mary. Joseph. Gold. Frankincense. Myrrh.
And at the heart of the story, the mother and child.
Until the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the 16th century, the Madonna and Child was the Christian image everybody would see every day; stained glass, statue, oil painting, carving, and the homely shrines people made for themselves.
Imagine it: most people can’t read or write, but their minds are vivid with stories and images; images are more than the illustration to the story – they are the story.
When you and I go into an ancient church in Italy or France or Spain, we cannot read the myriad scenes in the vaulted ceilings, or the frescos, or the hung paintings, but our ancestors could. We stand with our guidebooks looking for clues; they threw back their heads and saw the mystery of the world.
I love the written word – I’m writing it now, reading it now – but in societies that are not literate but are culturally alive the image and the spoken/sung word are everything. It’s a different kind of liveliness of mind.
After the Reformation, Mary, who had been treated like the fourth member of Godhead, was demoted. The Reformation wasn’t good for women; we soon hit the Europe-wide witch burnings, and of course the Pilgrim Fathers who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 were Puritans of the most uncompromising sort – cue the Salem witch trials in the 1690s.
In New England the Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas in 1659 and that law wasn’t repealed until 1681. In England, under Cromwell, Christmas had already been banned since 1647, and remained so until 1660.
Why? Too pagan in its origins, as we’ll see later, too party-time, too pleasurable (why be happy when you could be miserable?) and too dangerous to let Mary back out of the kitchen and into the starring role.
What ordinary people missed most about the break with Catholicism was the cult of Mary.
In Catholic countries in Europe then and now, and in Latin America now, the cult of Mary, the mystery of the Virgin birth, the union of mother and child is still powerful and persuasive. Every time a woman gives birth she is the fleeting tableau of the holiest of happenings. Daily life and devotional life are held together in this image.
And it’s an image with its roots deeper than Christianity.
If we look back into Greek and Roman history we can see that gods and marvellous mortals are usually born of one divine and one human parent. Hercules’s father was Zeus. Zeus also fathered Helen of Troy. She was trouble, but beautiful women with a touch of the god are always trouble.
Romulus and Remus, founders of the city of Rome, claimed that Mars was their father.
Jesus was born in the Roman Empire. The New Testament was written in Greek. The Gospel writers wanted to fix their Messiah in the roll call of superheros with a divine dad.
But why did Mary have to be a virgin?
Jesus was a Jew. Jewish lineage is through the mother, not the father, so the emphasis in Judaism on the purity and sexual abstinence of women is a predictable way of trying to control who’s who.
If Mary is a virgin then the divine parentage of Jesus isn’t in doubt.
All that makes sense, but there’s something else too. Sitting further behind this story is the potency of the Great Goddess herself.
Goddess-worship in the ancient world was uninterested in chastity as a virtue. Even Vestal Virgins were allowed to marry once they left the service of the goddess. Temple prostitution was normal, and the goddess was a symbol of fecundity and procreation – crucially, she never belonged to any man.
So the Mary myth brilliantly manages two magnetically opposed forces: the new religion of Christianity offers a tale of god-into-man divine birth. Mary is special and singled out – like in the hero stories. Her pregnancy is no ordinary domestic arrangement; she has been visited by a god.
At the same time, her purity and submission allow the new religion to break away from the riotous pagan sex cults and fertility rites that the Jews hated.
Right from the start, Christianity had the knack of fusing together
core elements from other religions and cults – ejecting any problematic elements, and then telling the story in a new way. That has been part of its global success story.
And the most spectacular of its success stories is Christmas.
The birth of Jesus is only written about in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and their versions are different. Mark and John don’t discuss the birth story at all. There is no mention of December 25th anywhere in the Bible.
So how did it happen?
The Roman festival of Saturnalia is part of the story. This was a typical midwinter festival celebrating the turning of the sun (the shortest day of the year is December 21st, the winter solstice). The pagan Emperor Aurelian declared December 25th Natalis Solis Invicti – the birth of the invincible sun. The festival included gift-giving, party-going, wearing silly hats, getting drunk, lighting candles and roaring fires as sun symbols and decorating public places with evergreens. This festival was swiftly followed by Kalends – where we get our word calendar. They liked to party in the old days.
In Celtic Britain the winter festival of Samhain began on what is our Halloween – All Hallows’ Eve – a festival of the dead, and, as in Germanic and Scandinavian countries, the Celts celebrated the December solstice with bonfires and merriment. This period of Yule or Jól is where we get our words Yuletide and jolly. Evergreens, the holly and ivy, emblems of ongoing life, were used both as decorations and as sacred installations.
In the Germanic tribes, white-bearded Odin roamed around during Yuletide and had to be appeased with little gifts left out at night.
The Church took the sensible view that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and incorporated all the elements people were reluctant to give up – the singing, the celebrating, the evergreens, the gift-giving and, of course, the time of year – into Christmas.
December 25th is a great day for Christ’s birth because it means that Mary was impregnated by God on March 25th – Lady Day (the Feast of the Annunciation) in the church calendar – and this allowed the Church to celebrate the spring equinox of March 21st without life getting too pagan about it. It also allowed Christ’s conception and crucifixion (Easter) a neat symmetry.
Santa Claus himself is one of the many mixed messages of Christmas.
Nicholas was a Turkish bishop of Smyrna born around 250 years after the death of Christ. He was rich and gave gifts of money to people in need. The best story about him is that one night, trying to throw a bag of gold through a window, he found the window closed and had to shin up onto the roof and drop the sack down the chimney.
Who knows? But as usual a cult grew up around him, notably of sailors, who naturally enough went sailing, and as the cult spread northwards this Turkish bearded gift-giver merged with the bearded god Odin, who had the advantage of travelling on a flying horse – with eight legs.
St Nicholas was Sinta Klaus to the Dutch, and it was the Dutch who brought Sinta Klaus to America.
New Amsterdam, now New York City, was a Dutch settlement. By 1809, in spite of the best efforts of the descendants of all that New England Puritan stock, Santa is riding a wagon over the treetops in Washington Irving’s A History of New York.
In 1822 another American, Clement Moore, nailed the definitive Santa in his poem ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’. Everybody knows those opening lines: ‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house/Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’
This is the moment when St Nick gets his reindeer.
But he was still wearing green – his colour as a pre-Christian fertility god.
Enter Coca-Cola.
In 1931 the Coca-Cola Company commissioned a Swedish artist, Haddon Sundblom, to give Santa a makeover. Red it had to be, and from then on, thanks to the advertising might of Coke, Santa’s robes are red.
The Christmas tree is an ancient symbol of the power of life to survive and thrive through the dead of winter. What did our ancestors think, trudging through the dark, bare forests, when they came across an evergreen?
Famously Queen Victoria and Prince Albert managed the first modern celebrity photoshoot when they posed in front of their Christmas tree at Windsor Castle in 1848.
Actually it was a drawing in the Illustrated London News, but after that everyone had to have a Christmas tree.
Prince Albert was German, and the earliest record of winter trees being brought indoors for the midwinter festival is in the Black Forest in Bavaria.
Martin Luther, the man responsible for the Protestant Reformation, was a German, and the story goes that he decorated his own Christmas tree with candles to mirror the million stars in God’s sky.
Trees themselves are sacred objects. Think of the apple tree in the Garden of Eden, the World Ash Tree, Yggdrasil, worshipped in Norse and Germanic mythology, the Druid Oak. James Cameron’s Avatar features a goddess tree, and in the Tolkien sagas the Ents, the talking, walking trees, are brutally cut down by Saruman and the Orcs, enemies of the sacred forest.
Christ, like other sacrificial gods, dies on a tree.
So the tree is symbolic across centuries and cultures, and the evergreen tree a symbol of life’s persistence.
The Massachusetts Puritans hated all those pagan connections, but they couldn’t stop the moment in 1851 when two sled-loads of trees were hauled from the Catskills to New York City, to become the first retail Christmas trees sold in the United States.
The 19th century is the century when Christmas becomes the Christmas we celebrate now: the Christmas tree, Christmas cards, season of goodwill, gift-giving, robins, feasting, charity to the poor, snow, supernatural agency of some kind – whether ghosts, visions or a mysterious star.
It’s in the 19th century that all the great Christmas carols we love to sing were composed.
It’s the 19th century that invents the Christmas card. Henry Cole worked for the London Post Office and realised that the Penny Post (1840) was a great way of sending simple greetings cards, so in 1843 he got his friend to draw some, and before you could say plum pudding the Christmas-card craze was off.
It was more than thirty years before the Christmas card caught on in America. Blame the Puritans. I do.
Cards, carols and, the most Victorian of all, the Christmas Ghost Story.
Telling stories round the fire is as old as language. And, as fires are lit at night and/or in wintertime, the winter festivals were natural story-telling opportunities.
But the ghost story as a phenomenon is a 19th century phenomenon. One theory is that the spectres and apparitions claimed in so many sightings were a result of low-level carbon-monoxide poisoning from gas lamps (it does cause fuzzy, drowsy hallucinations). Add in the thick fogs and plenty of gin, and it starts to make sense.
But there’s a psychological side to this too. The 19th century was haunted by itself. Its new industrialisation seemed to have unleashed the very powers of hell. Visitors to Manchester called it the Inferno. The English writer Mrs Gaskell wrote of her visit to a cotton mill, ‘I have seen hell and it’s white . . .’
And the new poor, the factory slaves, the basement-dwellers, the toilers in iron, heat, filth and degradation, appeared like spectres, thin, yellow, ragged, semi-human, half-dead.
That this is also the century of organised charity and philanthropy is not a coincidence. And that it is the century of Christmas at its most inspired as well as its most sentimental should not surprise us. Christmas becomes a magic circle, the season of goodwill where those who have benefited most from the mechanised desolation of their fellows can both make amends and soothe their own souls.
That is why Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol begins with Scrooge’s refusal to give money to help the poor: ‘Are there no workhouses?’
Scrooge, the polar opposite (pun – sorry) of Santa Claus, can’t give and won’t give, and finds himself visited by three spirits, plus the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley.
This is a story of hard hearts and second chances. Of the misrule of Christmas, where ordinary laws are turned upside down, of clock-time being out-chimed by significant time (a lifetime happens in a night). And of goose, pudding, fires, candles, fearsome hot cocktails (Smoking Bishop), snow so thick the city sleeps and ‘A Merry Christmas to us all . . . God Bless us every one!’
This is a story so powerful it can survive the Muppets.
In America, Christmas wasn’t declared a federal holiday until 1870 (after the American Civil War as a way of reuniting north and south in a shared tradition).
Yet in spite of the Puritans’ best efforts, and in spite of the fact that Christmas is most certainly not a Jewish celebration, Americans and American Jews have contributed as much to the folklore of Christmas as any star, shepherd, Santa or angel.
It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Meet Me in St Louis, The Polar Express, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Trading Places, Scrooged, Home Alone 2, White Christmas – the movie list is only getting longer . . .
And when you’re singing along to ‘White Christmas’, ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, ‘Santa Baby’, ‘Winter Wonderland’, ‘Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow’, or humming about roasting those chestnuts by an open fire, raise a glass to those Jewish songwriters who saw a good opportunity for a tune and gave us the classics we love.
Christmas was banned by the Puritans in the UK and the USA because it is such a gaudy ragbag of a festival with something borrowed from everywhere – pagans, Romans, Norsemen, Celts, Turks – and because its celebratory free spirit, its gift-giving, topsy-turvy misrule, made it anti-authority and anti-work. It was a holiday – holy day – of the best kind, where devotion has joy in it.
Life should be joyful.
I know Christmas has become a cynical retail hijack but it is up to us all, individually and collectively, to object to that. Christmas is celebrated across the world by people of all religions and none. It is a joining together, a putting aside of differences. In pagan and Roman times it was a celebration of the power of light and the co-operation of nature in human life.
Money wasn’t the point.
In fact, the Christmas story starts with a demand for money:
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (Luke 2:1)
And ends with a gift – ‘unto us a child is born.’
The gift of new life is followed by the gifts of the magi – the gold, frankincense and myrrh.
In the best-loved of all Christmas carols the poet Christina Rossetti poses the question of what we can give that is not about money or power or success or talent:
What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what can I give him: give my heart.
We give ourselves. We give ourselves to others. We give ourselves to ourselves. We give.
Whatever we make of Christmas, it should be ours, not something we buy off the shelf.
For me, feasting with friends is a lovely part of Christmas-tide, so I’ve included some recipes here that have personal stories attached to them. I am hopeless with quantities and cook by eye, texture and taste. If pastry is too dry, add water or egg. If it’s too wet, add flour – that kind of thing.
There was a big fight with my editor over whether the recipes should be in metric or imperial – ‘Even Nigella has gone metric,’ she argued.
I asked Nigella and she said, ‘Have both.’
And where I say things like ‘cabbage’, the query came back: ‘What size cabbage?’
There are so many things to do every day – and wondering what size cabbage isn’t one of them.
These recipes are a little disorderly, the kind of thing we’d make together, and I’d say, ‘Damn, I forgot the mushrooms,’ and then we’d just do without them. So don’t worry too much. Cooking has become a lot like cycling. By which I mean people used to pop out on their bikes – now everyone has to wear Lycra and goggles and beat their own speed and distance record. Cooking at home is not an Olympic sport. Cooking is an everyday ordinary miracle.
I like cooking but I prefer writing.
Stories are where I live – they are physical three-dimensional places to me. When I was a kid and locked in the coal hole for various crimes, I had a choice: count coal – a limited activity. Tell myself a story – an unlimited world of the imagination.
I write for the delight of it. Sitting down at a keyboard to play. Christmas has a special delight – as though the season is cheering you on. It’s a time for tales, presided over by the Lord of Misrule, who must be the guardian spirit of creativity, as he is of the ancient twelve days of Christmas-tide.
And strangely, in a house that was generally unhappy, Christmas was a happy time for me when I was growing up. We don’t lose these associations; the past comes with us, and with luck we reinvent it, which is what I am suggesting we do with Christmas. And everything is a story.
Stories round the fire at Christmas, or told with frosty breath on a wintry walk, have a magic and a mystery that is part of the season.
Writing is an epiphany of its own, in the sense of something unexpected being revealed. Christmas, which seems so familiar, maybe even worn out, is a celebration of the unexpected.
Here are the stories I have written so far. Twelve of them for the twelve days of the season. Here are ghost stories, magical interventions, ordinary encounters that turn out to be not ordinary at all, small miracles, and salutes to the coming of the light.
And joy.
