Christmas

[Guest guest]

It is really interesting that Renuka loves celebrating Christmas. Did

you know that actually Christmas does NOT celebrate the birth of

Christ? (Now it celebrates the birth of Renuka and Sadhana's daughter,

also.)

Surprised? I'll tell you. Until the year 354, Christ's birthday was

celebrated after Easter, which was till then the biggest festival of

the Christians. Pope had a problem. Many converted people of

Europe used to celebrate the winter Solstice on December 19th, and the

feasting and merriment would continue for a week. This was a much

bigger festival which eclipsed Easter. Not wanting to be upstaged by

this, the pope declared that December 25 be celebrated as Christ's

birthday! (I think that Munish will have his say here.)

The pagan festival most closely associated with the new Christmas was

the Roman Saturnalia, which honoured the god of the harvest, Saturn,

on December 19 and was marked by seven days of riotous merrymaking and

feasting. At the same time in northern Europe a similar winter

festival known as Yule was celebrated in which giant logs, trimmed

with greenery and ribbons, were burnt in honour of the gods and to

encourage the sun to shine more brightly.

Having incorporated these elements, the Christian Church subsequently

added, in the Middle Ages, the Nativity crib and Christmas carols to

its customs. By this time lavish feasting was the highlight of the

festivities with large quantities of food, including a decorated

boar's head, ceremoniously consumed over eight or nine hours by rich

and poor alike.

All this came to an abrupt end in Britain at least when in 1552 the

Puritans banned Christmas, a move followed in Massachusetts seven

years later. Although Christmas returned to England in 1660 with

II, the rituals all but died out until revived in n

times.

Christmas as we know it today is thus a 19th-century invention. The

decorated Christmas tree, common in German countries for centuries,

was introduced to Britain by Prince Albert, Queen 's Consort.

Carols were revived and many new ones written, often to traditional

melodies.

The custom of carol-singing, although with ancient origins, dates

mainly from the 19th century. Christmas crackers were invented in the

late 19th century by an enterprising English baker, Tom , who, by

1900, was selling 13 million worldwide each year, and Christmas cards

only became commonplace in the 1870s, although the first one was

produced in London in 1846.

The familiar image of Santa Claus, complete with sled, reindeers, and

sack of toys, is an American invention which first appeared in a

drawing by Nast in Harper's Magazine in 1868, although the

legend of Father Christmas is ancient and complex, being partly

derived from St and a jovial medieval figure, the " spirit of

Christmas " . In Russia, he traditionally carries a pink piglet under

his arm.

So you can see that Christmas is not actually Christian at all!

Kishore Shah 1974