While I hope that these blog essays are usually about something a little out of the way, circumstances on occasion impose a certain necessary conventionality. With Christmas now but four days away, and having already spent at least the last ten days in strenuous activities related to it, only a conscious and artificial effort would allow me to let it go unnoticed or to fail to wish all my readers a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. That to do so might risk offense to someone is merely one among many other puzzling cultural phenomena that have overtaken me in my advancing age. I myself have always been pleased to accept the good wishes attendant upon any occasion whatsoever, including commemorations in which I have no actual personal involvement, such as National Stamp Collecting Week. So here’s wishing you a penny British Guiana magenta in your stocking.
Of course in its origins Christmas is a Christian holiday, the more theologically proper name of which is “the Nativity of Our Lord,” referring to the birth of Jesus. But in current American cultural reality the religious dimension has long been overshadowed by the aspect of secular commercialism measured in shopping days. In this aspect it is indeed a national holiday of that vague and non-committal sort for which the annoying greeting “Happy Holidays” had to be coined, the previous “Season’s Greetings” having proved insufficiently ecumenical. Nonetheless Christmas continues to be bathed in the indeterminate suggestion of biblical nomadic pastoralism, supplemented by reindeer and stockings for non-existent chimneys. The central player in the scene is no longer a babe in a manger, let alone the incarnate Logos of the neoplatonists, but a bewhiskered and beloved old guy in red pajamas whose tenuous connection to Christianity is in the philology of his strange name, no longer easily graspable even by students of early Germanic dialects. And of course there is a whole lot of wintry iconography wholly foreign to the climes in which most actual Christians now live. But Christmas a humbug, Mr. Scrooge? Nonsense. Eight hundred and ninety billion in sales last year. Changing social realties perhaps complicate Christmas celebrations, as also the lack of them; but those celebrations remain, in all their extraordinary variety, a source of anticipation, excitement, and enjoyment for many millions—including, perhaps, you. They certainly do for us.
The highly poetic accounts of the Nativity in the gospels clearly have very different emphases behind them. Two of them are much concerned with underscoring the fulfilment of specific Hebrew prophecies, and they are the folkloristic ones from which all the great details in church pageants come: crowded inn, chilly stable, shepherds, three kings following a star. The main point about the Nativity for John, who was something of a Platonic philosopher, is that Jesus was the pre-existent, eternal divine force that had created the universe. In the beginning was the Word. And Mark doesn’t say a thing about Jesus being born. Jesus just shows up, announced by John the Baptist. There is no particular warrant for the December date. The European winter can be cold and dark, and various evidences of pre-Christian winter revelries suggest that the gospels themselves were already influenced by widespread social practices intended to relieve winter, at least momentarily. In this regard the odd medieval belief that God created the world in the month of March—mentioned by Chaucer among others—may have played a role, as a nine-month gestation period would then lead to December.
The wintry aspects of the situation are much on my mind at the moment because, with a close eye to the weather forecasts, we are planning on Friday to drive to Montreal to be with Luke, Melanie, John Henry, and Hazel. More exactly we are planning to be driven to Montreal. The chauffeur northbound will be Katy, the chauffeur southbound Richard. So if the creeks don’t rise—a possibility, incidentally, that has merited an actual meteorological caution—almost all of the family will be gathered together somewhere else than in the parental homestead in Princeton. It is a very happy prospect, if just a little unnerving to us. Vagaries of the current calendar and a slight uncertainty concerning the precise plans for our return might conceivably alter the publication date of the next post; but it is my hope to continue GladlyLerne on its accustomed schedule in the rapidly approaching year. In the meantime, we send friendly greetings and all best wishes to all our regular readers and, indeed, anyone who has come upon this post by typing error or other misadventure.
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