Occasionally we hear it in a few songs: "troll we now the Yuletide carol". Christmas, as we understand it, is a concession to the native faiths of Europe, and was always understood to be so. The Protestants forbade the celebration of Christmas, knowing this. Yule, the Solstice holiday, forms the great bulk of Christmas. This diary hopes to extend the notion of Christmas to those who are not Christians.
Christmas is an odd fit into the Kalends of the Church. The birth of the Christ child couldn’t have happened at this time of year if the shepherds were watching their flocks by night. More than likely, it would have been in the springtime.
Dating the birth of Christ is complicated further by several different accounts: we hear the story of Herod and the Wise Men in Matthew, but it cannot be squared with Luke’s account of the taxation of Cyrenius, which led Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. Herod would have been dead if Cyrenius was governor of Syria. Herod was a right bastard, but he was a remarkable man. His temple was then the largest occupied building in the world. He had flung Caesarea into the sea, created a great seaport with no advantage of a natural cove. Herod executed a great many people, but this business about the Magi has always seemed a bit suspect: the gospel of Matthew squares the man Jesus with his historical Davidic lineage and to give a great slap to the record of Herod the Great, widely hated by the Jews themselves.
Herod gets a bum rap: he built the greatest temple of the age for a parasitic and contemptuous caste of priests who wouldn’t even let him onto the grounds of the temple he had built for them. Herod preserved the Jews from the predations of the Romans, the Nabateans, the Egyptians and the Parthians at great risk to his own person: they rewarded him by calling him a non-Jew, though they did love his son Aristobulus, for his son was sired on a woman of Hasmonean royal stock. Herod did his best to endear himself to his people: murdering the children of an entire group of villages in Galilee, the most troublesome of his provinces seems absurd on its face. After Herod’s death, it comes as no surprise to me to see the Jews find another Messiah in the form of Simon Bar-Kochba, who picked up the sword Jesus of Nazareth did not. The Jews would go down to defeat in a fort Herod had built: Masada. The Romans never had so much trouble as they did in Judea. Arguably, the best thing to happen to Judaism was the destruction of the Temple of Herod: thereafter, Judaism regrouped around the Torah, and the rabbinic tradition begins at roughly the same time as Christianity under Joshua ben Hanaiah. The Avot of Rebbe Nathan relates:
"One time, when Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was walking in Jerusalem with Rebbi Yehoshua, they arrived at where the Temple in Jerusalem now stood in ruins. "Woe to us" cried Rabbi Yehoshua, "for this house where atonement was made for Israel's sins now lies in ruins!" Answered Rabban Yochanan, "We have another, equally important source of atonement, the practice of gemilut hasadim (loving kindness), as it is stated 'I desire loving kindness and not sacrifice'."
In the years following Herod, literally everything had changed. Christianity and Judaism spread in various forms throughout the Roman Empire. The appeal to faith in the form of gemilut hasadim gave rise to a more sophisticated form of belief, and it was all for the good, in my opinion. The Roman gods had nothing to offer the beleaguered and enslaved, these were the gods of the masters, and the masters demanded sacrifice to these gods, and included themselves in the pantheon. Both Jews and Christians would die rather than offer sacrifice to mortal men and their all-too-human gods, and die they did. Suffering and exile will do that to a people. It is no accident both Christianity and Judaism survive into the present day, and even Islam, the unhappy, intolerant and quarrelsome child of both Christianity and Judaism, places great importance on kindness to the poor and strangers.
Both Christianity and Judaism extended themselves into the world at large, Judaism would do so through the absorption of the useful constructs of Greek philosophy, Christianity through syncretism, the absorption of the customs of other faiths. Upon contact with the peoples of northern Europe, more concerned with the motions of the Sun rather than the Moon, which guides people closer to the equator, Christianity genially adapted Yule to its own ends, and the effect quickly back-propagated into the Middle East. Those sects of Christianity which rejected the celebration of Christmas fell out of favor with most everyone, over time, and good riddance to the lot of them. Christ’s first miracle was the turning of water to wine at Cana, the outrage of the feast-giver is recorded, "you have saved the best wine until last!" Don’t tell me religion demands people walk about forever in sackcloth and ashes, I am with Yehoshua ben Hanaiah: gemilut hasadim, the practice of loving kindness is its own form of redemption. Is that not the true spirit of Christmas?
Everyone needs a holiday in mid-Winter, and it is the pagans who gave us Christmas, a lovely gift, most fitting and wonderful. We Christians thank you for it, and if we have wrapped it in the legend of the birth of our Saviour, you must forgive us. It was never a terribly good fit. But your own artifacts come down to us, the holly, the ivy, the mistletoe and the Christmas tree. For Christians and Jews, our own faiths benefited from abstraction away from mere people and places, and found its place in the hearts of men and women of good will. In your own way, you pagans have your rightful place at the table, it is, after all, your table.