Is Christmas Just Cultural Appropriation?

Deep Winters Night

Green long ago departed the hardwood leaves now brown-skittering across the threshold in the white wind. Deep Winter’s Night is coming.

Imagine early people. Even those attuned to the cycle, the wise ones who had lived many seasons, quailed as the warm vanished and life itself went dead-white and brittle.

Perhaps, a wise one said – “a festival. Let us celebrate. For the woodbin is full and our clan warmhearted. Let us sing songs of gratitude and praise.”

“So bring in the fir tree and the evergreen; remind us that springtime soon will come again.”*

Ancient light-seekers created stories to explain the cycle. Persephone is visiting Hades. The Winter Katsina imprisoned Blue Corn Maiden. Cailleach stole firewood from Brighde and now warms her body from stone to flesh;  do not fear, in spring Brighde will bring the fire back. Mythology paints a picture of balance; the light loses briefly each winter and triumphs in the spring like the Celtic Cailleach-Brighde and the Hopi Blue Corn Maiden abduction and escape. Sometimes, as in the Persephone/Hades myth, an annual agreement allows love to flourish.

So Many Holidays

The days start getting shorter in late June, but we don’t notice the “dying of the light,” perhaps until the fall. Then the festivals of light begin. Diwali, autumn-celebrated by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs of India, and Newar Buddhists of Nepal, symbolizes spiritual “victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.”

My first girlfriend, Carolyn, was Jewish and took me to the Kol Nidre service at her reform temple on the eve of Yom Kippur. At fifteen, I don’t know that I grasped the significance of the Day of Atonement, but I was entranced by a thousand candles and the thrice-sung prayer by cantor-congregation call and response, a sotto voce to choral-thunder crescendo.

Samhain, the Celtic year-end fire-festival that became Halloween was once celebrated dancing around bonfires naked, now we put candles in spooky-carved pumpkins.

By the winter solstice, festivals of light are ubiquitous. Soyal, the Hopi winter solstice celebration includes purification rights and firelight prayer. Shaba-e-Yalda, a folk tradition in Iran, emerged from an ancient observance of the birth of the sun god, Mithra. It is now celebrated by family dinners of fruits and nuts and staying up all night to watch the sunrise.

Hannukah, the Jewish festival commemorating the return to Jerusalem and the rededication of the Second Temple at the beginning of the Maccabean revolt. One night’s oil lasted for eight days and now one candle is lit each night in the menorah.  There is Jul or Yule in Scandinavia, burning yule logs, now subsumed by St Lucia’s day and those pictures of ice-blond teen-girls with candelabra-crowns of burning white tapers. (That just doesn’t seem like a safe observance choice.)

Then There Is Christmas

Christmas is perhaps the ultimate festival of lights. “A star in the East. . . and a light shown round about them. . . the birth of the Savior and the Light.” We may celebrate in December to align with pre-existing winter solstice celebrations, Saturnalia in ancient Rome, Jul in the Germanic world, and Alban Arthuan in the Celtic world, but Christmas is a festival of light.

Some of us in North America and in many places around the world light up evergreen trees in our living rooms, burn candles at dinner and fire up fireplaces even if only a gas flame.

In the CBS sitcom Ghosts, The Norse Viking ghost Thor  “hates Christmas. You steal Odin’s sacred tree put on all those silly colored lights – that is, how-you-say, cultural appropriation.” It is Trevor, the pants-less Jewish Finance-Bro ghost who talks him down.

“No, Duuuude. I get it, growing up I hated being the only one of my friends without a tree in the living room and they have the best songs. But Christmas is about family; it’s about being with those you love. It’s about a hope for peace. The lights are just a symbol for all that.” (Before you love Trevor too much, in the same episode, he unsuccessfully tries to possess a living guy so he can get laid with the guy’s date.)

So there are many of different faiths who consecrate light at this time of year. Perhaps we are identifying with our early ancestors trying to drive away the dark when the sun is farthest away. Perhaps we are embracing spiritual light when we gather with family at the darkest time of the year. But it is a time when many strive to see the light in each of us and envision a world where we care for the least advantaged and live in peace. And that ain’t a bad thing.

“Light the candles tonight

Let the fire burn bright

Bring balsam and holly and children’s delight

Love is the magic of Deep Winter’s Night”*

                                        Happy Solstice to All, Light, Joy and Peace to the World

*From song “Deep Winter’s Night” by Alan Cay Culler © 2016