pyroguysr's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The True Meaning of Thanksgiving and Christmas I saw on the news yesterday a minister here in town "going on" about reminding people what the "true meaning of Christmas" is... that it is a celebration of "Christ's Birth" (which historians, researching Roman census records, put at closer to either the end of March to the middle of April rather than in our month of December). As a student of history and a student of comparative religions, I wanted to send him a polite message stating that maybe he should look to pagan history to know the true "meaning" of Chrismas: and that it was actually the opportunist evangelical Christian Church Missionaries (there were no such things as "catholics" then) from around 400 CE* to 800 CE who co-opted the holidays of those "poor pagans" being converted and either forcing or reinterpreting those holidays so that they became "christian" ones (Easter or the Feast of Oesther (an Irish/druidic Goddess of fertility) being another). Thusly, the pagan-druidic/norse holidays of Samhain (day of the ancestors coming from the "otherworld") became All Saints Day, and "Solstice" or "Yule" became "Christmas" or "Christ's Mass Day". All the converts (a superstitious lot) would flock (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes forcedly) to the newly built church to "celebrate" this feast day and then would hurry back to the village and celebrate the harvest festival (Solstice and or Yule) in their own way and hoping to please their own personal gods and goddesses as well as the Christian one - until the more stoic Christian evangelicals tired of appeasing and, knowing they had either a rabid minority or a healthy majority, would then stamp out any "pagan" practice as being "devil worship." Solstice and Yule was also a time of familial and community sharing - the pulling together of family and community resources so that all could survive the cold, harsh, winter months. Yule meant that seasons had come full-circle, now entering the dark period where nothing grew or flourished, where people and families had the highest risk of death: it was the time before the earth experienced a rebirth and would once again become fertile. The druidic pagans tended toward nature worship and tree worship - not to the extent of today's whacked out environmentalists but in the fact that they recognized these trees were deeply rooted in the soil, took nourishment from Mother Earth and therfore became strong. Druids realized that things were put here on earth for our use and, should we need to use them, we should give thanks to the earth and to the thing we are about to use (trees, animals, plants) before we took it or it's life. The Angles and Saxons brought to Britain some of these ideas and the pictish Brits would worship in Oak Groves or among Ash trees. Germanic druidic-norse tribes revered the evergreen because it managed to "remain living" when the rest of the world had "died" during Samhain (pronounced SO-when) - their winter (or dark) season. They would find the largest tree in their village or in their territory, then cut it down, trim the base until the tree would fit inside and bring it into the house for the remainder of the winter to remind them that, even in the darkness and "death" of the earth, there remained everlasting life (gee, doesn't that sound familiar?). This tree represented the unbroken life-circle of nature and the God of All Things or Goddess of Nature**. They would hold onto the bottom portion of the tree that they had cut and put it in a revered place above the hearth. At the Spring Festival, they would then remove the tree from the home, give thanks for its life energies sacrificed during Samhain and then be burned at a ceremony for Imbolc. At the following years harvest festival of the Yule harvest where they would give thanks for a bountiful harvest, cut down and give thanks for another tree of everlasting life, take it in and then place the remaining piece of the old tree... the YULE LOG... onto the hearth fire to symbolize that the "light will conquer everlasting darkness" and to bring good luck to the household over the next year. "Yule" means "wheel" in Norse and Germanic mythology and, in the druidic religion, the "wheel" or "circle" symbolized the unbroken cycle of life and the earths seasons. There are, of course, several interpretations that I've read about the burning of a Yule Log. Another is that it was a huge log cut from the largest tree on one's property (or given by a neighbor - NEVER purchased) and the log was cut from the bottom of this tree and burnt in it's green state for an entired night, then smolder for 12 days. The remains were then kept and used to start the following years Yule Fire. Just because I can envision the difficulty in burining an extremely large log of over a foot in diameter that is still green, I would go with the more plausible "first" explaination above. So, how did WE get these traditions? Those wonderful Victorians in England revived these customs back in the 1800's (providing us with the "Tannenbaum" and "Christianized" them (creating the "Christmas Tree" and the Yule Log turning into a confection rather than a ceremonial fire). The origins of Nicholas or "Old Sain't Nick" have been mired in controversy for most of the last Century. Some people place him as a construct of St. Nicholas who was a byzantinean missionary, others say St. Nick was co-opted from Nordic lore, others say he was actually from Turkish and Middle Eastern lore. Again, it was those lovable Victorians in England that revived these things in the 1800's, but it took the U.S.A. to really commercialize it back in the 1930's to make it what it is today. We use all of these legends, mythologies and ceremonies today without a thought as to their actual meaning. Thus it is that we actually look to (and thank) the "pagans" for the "true spirit and meaning of Christmas." I shall now wait for - and expect- flack from outraged Christians for my even suggesting any of this. But you will be wrong. *CE = Christian Era 2:21 p.m. - 2005-11-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||