#85 A WOMAN'S BRIEFS -- HISTORY OF A HOLIDAY

In a waaay too long 2015 Christmas letter I sent to friends patient with my ramblings, before I added any information about our children, before I mentioned our eldest driving tugs through the fierce Atlantic ocean pulling a 700’ barge, and our middle mowing, chopping, and taming wooded Kingston acreage, and our youngest fighting the Long Island school system in New York, and two years before Scooter Sublime was born, I began this way:

Accustomed to festivities, Constantine, the first Christian (how convenient for him) Roman Emperor considered a celebration of Jesus’ birth a Great Idea (He was meaning to make Rome great again). It wasn’t a biblical idea but so fine an idea was it that Pope Julius I promptly borrowed and Christianized the last day of a raucous week when Romans honored the Sun god, Saturn.

The first “Christ Mass” took place at midnight, December 24, 336 A.D. while the besotted pagan population struggled for sobriety. Then the Church borrowed January 6, a reliably debauched day dedicated to Dionysus, for the celebration of Epiphany.

Let the squabbles between churches east and west begin – whether, when, where, how, or just what to celebrate: Birth? Incarnation? Holy Mother? Holy Child? Coming of the Magi? Lowly shepherds?

Over the decades, Christianized or not, squabbled over or not, pagan holiday symbols remain comfortably tucked into Christian homes: lights, gifts, greenery, trees, special foods, and by the 4th century, the good bishop of Myra, Saint Nicholas . . . No wonder that by 1659 our Puritan forefathers rejected Christmas. Boston leaders sniffed the pagan and papal symbols surrounding the day, and Separatists to the core, they saw sin.

See? Take a deep breath. We aren’t the only people who have felt the pressure of having a Merry Christmas.