Telling stories about our imagined pasts is what humans do. How we tell those stories can hurt or harm us. How we imagine the past can narrow or enlarge our world. This Christmas consider the gifts of world history, and the marvellous stories it offers of our multifarious world.
What’s that song about Joseph’s many-coloured dream-cloak again?
Celebrations of Christmas in the World’s Cultures
There are many ways of celebrating Christmas. Every family finds its unique ways. Each country has its own icon. Those countries under the spell of American mass commercial culture focus on Santa. Some East European countries honour Saint Niklaus. Russians remember figures from pre-Christian Slavic folklore: Дед Мороз (Ded Moroz) or Grandfather Frost, and his granddaughter, Снегурочка (Snegurochka) or Snowmaiden. Those countries who practise the Orthodox Christian faith even celebrate Christmas on a different day, based on the Julian calendar.
Each small society of islands weaves its own fabric, inspired by religious and secular traditions, old and new customs, archaic and functional social processes. It is unlikely that no celebration of Christmas is purely religious nor solely pure tradition. I do not celebrate the religious dimensions of Christmas at all; but can I say for certain that some archaic vestige of spiritual symbols does not invest my gift-giving with deeper significance?
Though I do not embrace the religious side of Christmas, not do I shame Christmas for its spiritual origins. I commonly use the gracious term, ‘Seasons Greetings’, in formal situations; but I have not struck the term Christmas, nor its celebration, from my language because of its origins in Christianity.
For all its technicolour, multicultural, poly-social variations, Christmas remains full of meaning, full of vestiges of world history, and full of mostly happy personal history.
On its hearth, Christmas celebrates three themes, which resonate with the Burning Archive.
Christmas and Gift Exchange
First, Christmas celebrates the gift exchange in civility and kindness that can bring strangers, guests and family, who may differ on many arguments, together for one meal, if not permanently under one roof. It makes me recall my youthful study of the early great French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925).
In that essay Mauss wrote, after one world war and before another, that
“It is by opposing reason to feeling, by pitting the will to peace against sudden outbursts of insanity of this kind that peoples succeed in substituting alliance, gifts, and trade for war, isolation and stagnation…. To trade, the first condition was to be able to lay aside the spear. From then onwards they succeeded in exchanging goods and persons, no longer only between clans, but between tribes and nations, and, above all, between individuals. Only then did people learn how to create mutual interests, giving mutual satisfaction, and, in the end, to defend them without having to resort to arms. Thus the clan, the tribe, and peoples have learnt how to oppose and to give to one another without sacrificing themselves to one another. This is what tomorrow, in our so-called civilized world, classes and nations and individuals also, must learn. This is one of the enduring secrets of their wisdom and solidarity.” (Mauss, The Gift, pp. 105-106)
Christmas and Cultural Exchange
Second, Christmas celebrates the exchange of culture. What else could we Southern Anglo-Americans be doing at Christmas time; when we put up snow-themed decorations in the middle of the Australian summer; if not adapting cultures from their homes? This imaginative displacement and reconfiguration of both culture and environment is fundamental to human society, and to the gifts of world history.
I recall during my podcast interview with Felipe Fernandez-Armesto stressed the value of history to people understanding and learning from other cultures today.
Christmas and Civilizations
Third, Christmas celebrates the symphony of civilisations, and how they house many blended traditions. In a common human love of the hope of rebirth, traditions blend, cultures merge and twist, hard borders of civilizations are brought down. The gifts of the three magi, gold, frankincense, myrrh, each sourced from who knows where on this earth, combined in a symphonic symbol that has inspired more than one civilisation.
Even before Christ, it appears, the world was multipolar. It will remain so long after the final screening of Miracle on 34th Street.
There are some gifts to be received from world history this Christmas. Receive them. Share your own. And let us together relearn the lesson that Marcel Mauss found in the gift: “how to oppose and to give to one another without sacrificing themselves to one another.”
Peace and goodwill to all.
P.S. Since I will be preparing Christmas feasts and unwrapping gifts, I will not be posting next week, except for a pre-recorded podcast just before new year. The weekly newsletter will resume on 6 January 2024.
Happy New Year to all.
Jeff Rich