by Simon Smith
Come on, sing it with me, you know you want to.
It’s the most
Myth-i-cal tiiiiiime
of the
year!
Andy Williams must be spinning.
I like Christmas; I like it very much. I like the sparkle
and glow of it, the red, green and gold of it. I like the sounds and smells of
it: boozy carols and boozier puddings; the crackle of frost on the grass; the
gentle thud of another pensioner falling on the pavement outside. I like the
pagan heart of Christmas too, the unquiet ghosts; the joys and fears of one
year ending and another beginning. I like the excess of it, ever-so-slightly
brittle in the frozen days of winter; red-ruddy faces kissed by wind from the
north and wine from the south; goodwill and cheer, lighting the shadows that
lurk at the cold, dark stub of the year.
The wren, the wren, the king of all the birds
On Stephen’s day was caught in a furze,
Though he was little, his honour
was great…
I am, I freely admit, a rank sentimentalist when it comes
to Christmas. And, at the very great risk of sucking half the fun out if it,
the Season of Goodwill is also philosophically interesting. Not the age-old
question of how Saint Nick manages to do his rounds in a single night. That, I
take it, is a question for Quantum Physics. Christmas is interesting because it
is, as hinted, essentially a myth.
There’s no
getting away from it; Christmas was basically invented by the Victorians. As
everyone knows, it was Charles Dickens and his excellent ghost story, A Christmas Carol, who cemented the
season in our imaginations. That too, of course, is a myth, a story put about
by F. G. Kitton; or so The Dickens Project at the University of California
would have us believe.
For many, of
course, the origins go back two thousand years to a manger in the Middle East
where, in the words of Johnny Mathis, a child was born. (That, America, is what
happens when you don’t have adequate healthcare provision.) As origin-stories
go, this seems unlikely, not least because of documented history. Apart from
anything else, the historical figure we know as Jesus Christ definitely wasn’t
born in December. Would shepherds really
be washing their socks in a field in the middle of winter? Hardly. Various dates
have been suggested; my preference is for October for no better reason than
it’s well known to be the best month in which to be born. Also a good month for
clean socks. Alternative origins may be found in the Roman festival of
Saturnalia and a whole host of other winter solstice revelries, some of which
involved short-term coronations and sacrificial rites. As Terry Pratchett
memorably pointed out, the ‘traditional’ red and white Santa suit wasn’t
invented by a well-known soft drinks manufacturer; it was remembered.
The rising of the sun
And the running of the deer…
All of which seems quite likely
to be made up too. Christmas, like a drunken chain-store Santa, is just a big,
fat fake. The big plastic tree in the corner; twinkling lights; shiny baubles;
tinsel and glitter; a ‘jolly old elf’ breaking in to our houses allegedly to
leave presents (I swear it’s true, your
honour). None of it is real. They found Santa’s grave, kids. He was buried
in Turkey seventeen hundred years ago, presumably after a drink-driving
accident. He must have hit the sherry pretty hard on that last trip and lost
control of the reindeer.
The word
‘elf’, by the way, derives from the Old English word ‘alp’, meaning
‘nightmare’. That’s what’s been creeping round our little bedrooms since the
fourth century. How jolly.
And did I spy, on a starless
night, and did I spy an old wooden cart, piled high with hessian sacks that
wriggle and squirm and whimper and cry and wish that they had behaved just a
little better, as mamma said they should?
Freyja’s
cart climbs the icy road out of town. Old Freyja, whose cart was once a
chariot, drawn by great wild cats from the forest; Skogkatt and Huldrekat:
hidden people. Now something else labours between the staves, beneath the yoke,
another shape pulls the cart along the long track, thick black score in the
deep white snow that leads up into the mountains where an empty pot awaits…
What’s that? Christmas a humbug,
uncle? Well, of course not. We’ll have no smart-casual humbuggery here, no
anti-Christmas cries of ‘wake up and smell the eggnog, sheeple!’. Not today.
I’m not even going to complain about rampant commercialisation.
Christmas is not a fake. Are the good cheer and festivities fake? Are the
Christmas wishes and Christmas kisses fake? And what about that feeling, that
small, warm feeling you get when you open a card from an old friend or
relative; that small warm feeling you get when take a moment to think about
them and to wish for them a merry Christmas and happy New Year? Is that fake?
Well, possibly, but only if you’re a bit of a ****.
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy…
Christmas is a myth; and to say so is not the same as
saying it’s fake, nor anything like it. In fact, Christmas is an example –
better, it’s the example, the perfect
instance and expression of our mythopoeic
nature. Put simply, it’s about stories: stories of justice, naughty and nice;
stories about sacrifice and giving; stories about beginnings that foreshadow
ends; stories to drive away the darkness and wake the sun up again, if only for
a while. Such stories make us who and what we are; they make us human, if we’ve
a mind to be human.
Start
with the wrong theory of language, the wrong ideas about ‘true’ and ‘false’,
and all this is bound to sound suspicious. So much the worse, say I, for vulgar
empiricism, and its odious cousin, philosophical realism.
Where’s
the evidence? Where’s the measurable and the quantifiable truth of it? Where’s
the independent reality of it? Now that’s a humbug.
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree…
Where’s the evidence? How about
in a life lived, in kindness and generosity gift-wrapped and hand-delivered,
from one generation to another? How about in the countless sacrifices made by
those who came before us? Or the simple gift of ourselves, the investment of identity,
thought and understanding, the building blocks of a personality that all those
who had and held us freely bestowed upon us? Would that be evidence enough for
something extraordinary; a seasonal miracle, even?
See there, curled between the
ox and the ass, red fox lies, his golden eyes shinning in the dark; golden eyes
fixed on the eyes of a child in a manger while the child’s eyes are fixed on
his, all through the long night…
I did warn you I was going to
suck the fun out of Christmas. The sterile abstractions of independent realism
and reductive empiricism (which no one really believes in anyway; they just
pretend to because it makes them feel better) have nothing intelligible or
interesting to say about what it means to be a person. They miss the point
entirely. Actually, that’s not quite true. If we look at what empiricism does, rather than what it says, especially in the sciences, we can
learn a lot about what it means to be a person: striving, aspiration, the
overwhelming desire to know and understand; essential elements, these. More
importantly, they teach us that we’re not isolated or independent; we’re
co-authors in the universe’s biography; that is, autobiography.
Closer to
home, we’re co-authors in our own autobiographies too; we participate in one
another’s life-stories; we can stifle and frustrate them or make them a reality
if we choose. And the tools we use are the stories we tell about ourselves and
our world, the myths and metaphors which uncouple us from the vanishing point
of pure reason and remind us of the dialectical extensions that are open to us,
should we only seek them. These myths and metaphors, stories of light and life,
are the ampliatory and amplificatory mechanisms of a consciousness engaged in
its own infinite extensions.
That, I think,
is what this season, this season of the spirit is really all about: spirit
returned unto spirit; reminders of what we are and what we might be, all
dressed in red, gold, green, bearing mistletoe and a holly crown, bringing joy
and good cheer, and a few good stories to tell around the fireside.
So here is to Cherry and to his left ear,
Pray God send my master a barrel of beer…
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