Pagan ritual and the Christmas tree
Daphne Caruana Galizia writes about the sacred and profane elements of Christmas, and concludes that the reason why the pagan customs haven’t been wiped out by the more restrained Christian ones is because the pagan customs, with their wine, food, largesse, parties and gift-giving, are outrageous fun - and people still need to mark the winter solstice with celebrations that defy hunger, cold and the wolves at the door. Additional research by Paul Caruana Galizia.
In northern Europe – Germany, Scandinavia and the Low Countries – ancient pre-Christian traditions are incorporated into the celebration of Christmas, and these are the very ones that have spread all over the world as symbols of the Christmas spirit. The true meaning of Christmas in northern Europe is to a great extent what it was from the beginning: a mid-winter festival that celebrates light and hope as a defence against the winter gloom and misery of the shortest day of the year. This is the winter solstice, or Mitwinternächt (midwinter night), which falls on 21 December. In the northernmost parts of Europe, there is little or no daylight that day. The 12 days of Christmas, celebrated eternally in the famous song of the same name, were originally the Twelve Harsh Nights, or Rauhnächte. There is no room for misunderstanding in that name.
Christianity reached the people of northern Europe very late in the day – only a thousand years ago, which partly accounts for the reluctance of those people to give up the traditions and beliefs to which they were so firmly attached. People of Viking, Saxon and Germanic descent decked their halls, which were literally long-rooms where whole households lived and slept, with any pieces of greenery they could find at this deathly time of year, to symbolise life in the presence of freezing death, when crops didn’t grow and animals had to be culled or taken into shelter. The only greenery they could find came from ice-resistant holly, fir trees sprice and the parasitic mistletoe, and so these came to be associated with the winter solstice, now even in Mediterranean Malta where the temperature on Christmas Day is likely to be in the warm 20s, and no holly or mistletoe is seen in real life.
We have no way of knowing the dates of the birth and death of Jesus Christ, so when the celebrations of these two major events in the story of Christianity were marked down, the periods were chosen with political prowess, to smooth the transition from paganism to monotheism and Christianity. Christmas was strategically placed more or less at the winter solstice; Easter, a moveable feast, was put down in the spring, to do battle and merge with the pagan festivities of rebirth. The confusion between pagan and Christian mid-winter celebrations reached its apotheosis in medieval times, when progressive, dangerous and often ill-fated attempts were being made to convert the heathen tribes of the north. The truth is that the customs and decorations of those tribes proved to be undeniably more attractive to people than austere ‘celebrations’ of Christianity (prayer and a slightly better meal than normal). We have carried that confusion into the present, because the attraction remains.
Some people like to say that the pagan elements of today’s Christmas celebrations – the largesse, the shopping, the boughs and decorated trees – are a denial of the true meaning of Christmas. But they are not: they are an affirmation of another true meaning of Christmas – that it coincides with the winter solstice and that the marking of the solstice is so ancient as to be deeply rooted in the human psyche, at least in the colder parts of Europe. The reality is that there is nothing wrong in celebrating both in parallel and in different ways, giving the Christian aspect what it is due in terms of prayer, and giving the solstice its due too, in terms of eating, drinking, and fighting off the fear of the wolves at the door and the blizzards outside. You cannot separate largesse from Christmas. Perhaps this is the mistake that those early fathers of the Church made: in thinking that marking Christ’s birth at the winter solstice would eradicate the need to mark the latter. Instead, Christ’s birth has almost been overwhelmed by the solstice, something that would not have happened had it been marked in another month. But then, perhaps, it wouldn’t have been as great a feast.
Roman mosaics from what is today Tunisia show the mythic triumphant return from India of the Greek god of wine and male fertility, Dionysus (dubbed by some modern scholars as a life-death-rebirth deity). The god carries a tapering tree. Yet arguing from this might seem a little far-fetched, as probably the real reason the fir tree is symbolic of the pagan Christmas is because it is native to northern Europe and one of the few trees to stay green when half-buried in snow. Confusion occurred when somewhere along the centuries, at a time when people had not the faintest idea of geography, it was decided that the Cross was made of wood taken from the fir-tree. There is a poem written in Old English, the Dream of the Rood, in which the fir-tree itself is the cross on which Jesus was crucified.
In the incredible harshness of a northern European winter, with no proper warm clothes or central heating, freezers for food stores or recourse to imported fresh foods, survival through the winter was a matter of good fortune and careful planning. The cyclical nature of the seasons was associated in those early days with spirits, good or evil. The bad spirits killed the summer and brought in the winter. The few trees that stayed green looked to those people like the only ones which stayed alive, and so they became a symbol of everlasting life. They were believed to be protected by good spirits and their magic power. This magic could be transferred into the home and onto those who lived there if the immortal branches were cut and brought inside. Darkness, cold, disease and lack of proper nutrition and vitamins C and D took many lives, and people clung to the hope of protection vested in those pieces of greenery, as many in later centuries, much farther south in Europe, clung to holy pictures and other religious lucky-charms.
An early story about the Christmas tree tells how the English monk and missionary Saint Boniface, who was born in AD680 and originally called Winfred, was preaching a sermon about the Nativity to members of a Germanic tribe who had come along for the entertainment. To convince them that the oak-tree, which they revered, was not sacred and inviolable, Boniface felled one - an unlikely story, as his chances for survival when he set about doing this would not have been high. The fallen oak crushed all the plants beneath it, except for a fir sapling. Seizing the moment, Boniface told his audience that the survival of the fir was a miracle, and that this was the true holy symbol: the fir-tree was the tree of the Christ-child.
Over time, the life-protecting role of the fir-trees and their boughs changed and became purely decorative. The original reason why they were put in homes faded into distant memory, but the need to go through the motions remained, as so often happens with traditions. The decorated tree that we know today is something else, though it is linked, and it is also a fir-tree, though made of plastic in the south of Europe or replaced with a coniferous pine. The earlliest known reference to a decorated tree is in the chronicles of a guild in the city of Bremen in Germany, which reported in 1570 how a small fir was decorated with apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers, and erected in the guild-house, for the benefit of the guild-members’ children, who collected the dainties on Christmas day. Another early reference is from Basel in the Germanic part of Switzerland, where in 1597 it was recorded that the tailor-apprentices carried around town a tree decorated with apples and cheese.
If you can't beat them, join them. Keen to appropriate these pagan customs for itself, the Christian Church began to promote the decoration of trees with apples too – but these apples were described as representing the ones that brought about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, a story from Genesis that seemed incongruous at the celebration of the birth of Jesus and of the New Testament. In medieval times, when people couldn’t read, had no education and couldn’t grasp abstract concepts, rudimentary performances in the village square, which came to be called miracle plays, were used to tell stories from the Bible or the life of Christ. Evergreen boughs were incorporated into these performances, and particularly into the one that told the story of Christ’s birth.
The main stage-prop was an evergreen tree decorated with apples, the forbidden fruit of knowledge (interesting that knowledge should be forbidden or considered dangerous, producing consequences of permanent distress).
Legend has it that Martin Luther, the 16th-century church reformer, first added lit candles to a tree, thereby provoking a tradition that led to many thousands of house-fires over the centuries, across Europe and in North America. Ah, the consequences of our actions. Walking towards his home one winter evening, composing a sermon, he was awed by the brilliance of stars twinkling amid the trees. He rushed home to reproduce the effect, an early example of installation art. Yet there is no record of lights on a festive tree until the 18th century. The first report we have comes from the august pen of Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote in 1765 about one which he saw in Leipzig.
The hiatus between the love for decorated boughs in the Middle Ages and their renewed popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries might have something to do with the rise of Puritanism, which is always a bore, then as now. One of the most tedious Puritans of them all was the English Lord Prosecutor Oliver Cromwell, the man notorious in history not just for having the king beheaded but for banning Christmas, or rather the more pagan aspects of it. His words sound like those of several who would wish to do the same today. Christmas, he declared, was: “an extreme forgetfulness of Christ, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights”
. These delights included special food and drink, dancing and decorating. His views were shared in the New World across the Atlantic, where shiploads of English Puritans had emigrated in the hope of founding a truly Puritan society, starting with the famous Pilgrim Fathers who left Plymouth for the upper east coast of America on board the Mayflower in 1620. They would be horrified to see that their dreams of a puritanical utopia have culminated in Manhattan.
The Puritans outlawed the celebration of Christmas in their settlements in Massachusetts, and the stringent rules were still going strong several decades later, when in 1706 a Boston mob smashed the windows of a church where a Christmas service was being held. Their justification for this act of violence was that the celebration was more closely related to paganism than to Christianity, and that no one really knew in what season Christ was born. That reasoning has its echo in our own times, when some in Puritanism’s opposite pole of Christianity, Catholicism, would wish to see Christmas celebrated, but without the winter solstice trappings – only they are not quite sure of what to propose as an alternative that will make up for the loss of fun and games.
The stern solemnity of the Puritans was diluted and finally completely overwhelmed with the arrival in the United States of trickles, then floods, of Christmas-worshipping German and staunchly Catholic Irish immigrants in the 19th century. And then the fun really began when the Italians began to arrive in huge numbers in the early 20th century.
The Italians don’t celebrate Christmas in the way that the Germanic populations of Europe do, but the occasion is marked with gargantuan meals all the same, even if there are few or none of the decorative trimmings and not so much of the present-giving. The Maltese were the same until parts of the urban middle-class adopted English Christmas customs in the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. But even then, the vast majority of the population had Christmases that were devoid of decorated trees and presents. It was only in the last 30 years or so that the notion of exchanging presents on Christmas Day, or putting up a decorated tree, became common practice in Malta – and at first, the trees were tiny and made of tinsel, and placed on the front window with a curtain behind them, so that passers-by got the full effect while those at home did not.
Godey’s Lady’s Book, an American 19th-century publication, did much to promote Thanksgiving Day, the traditions of which have since merged with those of Christmas, including the turkey which we in Europe got from America. Those who sustained Puritan sympathies felt permitted to celebrate Thanksgiving in a way they couldn’t celebrate Christmas: the fourth sunday of November is when thanks is given for the survival of few of the original English settlers in Plymouth, through drought, savage winters, disease and attack by the natives. Godey’s Lady’s Book took English Christmas customs and presented them to Americans of English origin as a suitable way to mark Thanksgiving. Because Thanksgiving is so close to December, the inevitable happened, and the celebrations and customs segued into one holiday season.
Prince Albert, consort of the British queen Victoria and a German, is usually credited with popularising the decorated Christmas tree in Britain, from whence the fashion was exported to the far corners of empire and across the Atlantic to New York and Washington in the 19th century. But its roots are a lot older than that, particularly when you remember that the English and the Germans share in part a Saxon heritage. Victoria had significant Germanic heritage of her own in any case, and was familiar with the custom of Christmas trees from childhood. In her journal for Christmas Eve 1832, the delighted 13-year-old wrote: “After dinner...we then went into the drawing-room near the dining-room...There were two large round tables on which were placed two trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments. All the presents being placed round the trees...”
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“I must now seek in the children an echo of what Ernest [his brother] and I were in the old time, of what we felt and thought; and their delight in the Christmas-trees is not less than ours used to be”.
The Christmas tree has continued to retain its symbolism today. The decorating of the household tree is a family event, accompanied by special food and drink – though in the more Nordic countries it is put on up Christmas Eve rather than on the first day of December. Trees are given as gifts from city to city; the people of London are still given a giant tree every year by the city of Oslo, in acknowledgement of British support for Norwegian resistance against the Germans in World War II. And Newcastle receives every Christmas a mammoth spruce from the people of the Norwegian city of Bergen, in thanks for the part played by soldiers from Newcastle in liberating Bergen from the Nazis.
Pagan these customs may be in origin, but in spirit they embody the real virtues of Christianity – generosity, joy, kindness towards others, and love for life. Oh, and they’re probably far more fun than the straightforward Christian alternative, whatever that may be, because we haven’t been told.