A Christmas Tapestry1

Christmas in America has something for virtually everyone—even the Scrooges, and particularly the Bob Cratchits. Ancient customs (Christian and non-Christian) and diverse modern traditions have become so mingled, it is difficult to know what it all means—if anything. Christmas in the marketplace now begins before Thanksgiving and ends sometime after the beginning of the New Year (or whenever you take down your Christmas tree). Merchants capitalize on every trapping of Christmas from Rudolph to the crèche, and music, serenading your shopping, ranges from “Jingle Bells” to “Away in a Manger.” Christmas Marketing is highly successful, and at this time of year we are in a mood to be separated from our money—whether giving gifts or responding to some obscure charity making its appeal after our second trip to the wassail bowl. Commercialism is not all bad, however. In many ways, what is good for the marketplace is good for the country, and what is good for the country generally translates into chickens in our Christmas pots.

            The season has religious roots as well—a lot of different roots, it seems. Naturally we are reminded of the baby born in Bethlehem. But before Christians started celebrating the birth of Jesus in late December (begun in the middle of the fourth century) the Roman empire celebrated Saturnalia, a Roman agricultural festival incorporating many of the same customs we still observe today at Christmas. Saturn was a venerable deity in Italy fabled to have reigned during a period of peace and happiness. The twenty-fifth of December (then reckoned as the winter solstice) was celebrated both as the birth of the Invincible Sun and Mithras, the Persian deity of light. The ancient Jewish Feast of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, which commemorates the rededication of the Jewish Temple and Jewish political Independence also falls in December. Kwanzaa, an African American celebration, based on African harvest traditions, has been celebrated in America since 1966. The customs and symbols of these non-Christian festivals have merged with the Christian and continue to be celebrated in the American winter solstice: lights, candles, gift-giving, feasting, family gatherings, shopping, evergreen trees, garnishes of holly and mistletoe, and black-eyed peas and collard greens. Somehow, it all seems to make sense even to narrowly Christian America. There is something distinctly egalitarian and democratic about our winter solstice. The “huddled masses” brought their winter customs with them, and we later generations have woven them all together (menorah, piñata, wassail bowl, parties, Santa Claus, Christmas trees, midnight masses, Yule logs, and candles) into a textured winter-solstice tapestry.

            I like the diversity—even its commercialism. It all enriches the texture of the tapestry. But it is difficult to know how it all fits together. What does it all mean? We celebrate both the religious and the secular aspects of Christmas. We are nostalgic when Bing Crosby sings “White Christmas,” and enjoy the cycles of parties and receptions with their tinsel, lights, food stuffs, and spirits (hopefully in moderation). On the other hand, the sobering thought that some two thousand years ago the secular was uniquely invaded by the holy, as Christian faith affirms it, still encourages hope in even the most skeptical Scrooge.

            Making sense of the collage of diverse symbols and customs in its entirety and finding some significant reason for the season as we now celebrate it, however, is a challenge. Of course, some people have all the answers and dismiss everything different with a “Bah! Humbug! I prefer to embrace it all. In my more reflective moments, I see the American winter solstice symbolizing a search for stability and happiness. In the confusion and uncertainty seemingly dominating the world around us, these mingled traditions, which we hold onto, serve as anchors for the soul. We return to them annually because they are familiar and comforting. They nourish a deep-seated hope in Western culture, best expressed for me by the ancient Jewish longing for the advent of an ideal ruler, whose eternal reign is characterized by peace, justice, and righteousness (Isaiah 9:6-7). This is a hope shared by all people of good will and well worth celebrating.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹This essay was originally published as a newspaper opinion piece in the Springfield, MO, News-Leader and later, edited for publication in Charles Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest? American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene OR: Cascade: 2009), 70-71 (the book has a glossary).

Down the Rabbit Hole

In 1865 Lewis Carroll wrote a novel about a seven-year old English girl named Alice who, bored with a book her sister was reading, chased a large white rabbit with pink eyes down a rabbit hole “into a subterranean fantasy world populated by peculiar anthropomorphic creatures. It is considered one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre.”¹ The literary nonsense genre “is a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning.”² It strikes me that the definition of literary nonsense literature in many ways is an apt description of the biblical world when compared to the world in the 21st century. Nonsense literature “has a kind of internal lunatic logic of its own, and often comprises enigmatic variations on the absurd.”³ The absurd in contemporary literature and literary criticism is a term reflecting “[e]xtreme forms of illogic, inconsistency, and nightmarish fantasy.”⁴

The Earth and the cosmos, as we currently learn about them in public schools and the universities of Western culture, are quite different from the worlds reflected in nonsense literature. The world today operates on the basis of the observations and principles of modern science. This includes the physiological and psychological make up of human beings, and the animal and plant kingdoms, which evolve on the basis of natural selection.

Reading the Bible, entering its world, is much like going down Alice’s rabbit hole. One finds in its pages a world that operates with a logic all its own yet illogically from the perspective of modern science. In the Bible one finds talking snakes (Gen 3:1-13) and donkeys (Num 22:5); that the laws of physics can be suspended so that the earth can be paused in its journey around the sun (Josh 10:6-14); that a Judean Holy man can feed 5000 people from five loaves of bread and two fish (Mark 6:32-44); that the dead can walk after an earthquake opens their graves (Matt 27:52-54); that magic cloth has the “magical” capability to heal disease (Acts 19:11-12); that ax-heads can float (2 Kgs 6:1-7); and that the bones of a dead holy man, like a talisman, possess the power to raise the dead (2 Kgs 13:20-21).⁵ The “logic” that enables these fantasies to work is the presence in the universe of invisible spirit forces.

The biblical world is the scene of a great cosmic struggle between the invisible forces of Good and Evil (Eph 6:10-12). Demonic forces cause sickness (Luke 11:14), insanity (Mark 5:1-20), epilepsy (Matt 17:14-21), paralysis and other diseases (Matt 4:24). They can demonize the human body (Matt 12:43-45) and cause deafness and muteness (Mark 9:25). On the other hand, there are emissaries (Matt 25:41) of an invisible power stronger than the demons but this power sometimes helps (Acts 12:11) or sometimes harms (Acts 12:23) people.⁶

Many continue to view the cosmos from this religious and superstitious perspective. Nevertheless, in the modern Western world, the strength of the biblical worldview has been rendered ineffective because of the advances of modern medicine. In the ancient world what was attributed to unseen invisible forces has been successfully explained by science as due to natural causes. For example, organisms (germs and viruses), unseen by the naked eye but visible under magnification, cause disease; evil spirits do not. Medical practitioners have virtually replaced the religious shaman as the first to consult in the case of illness. The physician’s advice and treatment, rather than prayer or exorcism, is now sought first to combat what in the ancient past were understood to be disease-causing spirits.

The texts that comprise the Bible are flawed by their antiquity and hence the collection is only marginally reliable as a basis for contemporary life. Those anti-intellectual institutions that continue to measure the world and human life by the Bible’s flawed views will only succeed in marginalizing themselves further from the mainstream in the 21st century. Figuring out what century one lives in is a primary responsibility of living in the present.

Here is the main point of this mini-essay: The Bible does not depict a world that actually was but rather a world as it was perceived to be.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland.

²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_nonsense.

³J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (revised by C.E. Preston; 4th ed.; London: Basil Blackwell, 1999), 551.

⁴C. H. Holman and W. Harmon, A Handbook to Literature (6th ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1992), 2.

⁵Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 1-12.

⁶Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 20-22.