Christmas AD 1978
Christopher Booker
How might we explain to our old friend, the hypothetical visiting Martian, the strange pair of rituals which over the next ten days are going to shape and dominate the outward life of more than half of mankind? As his space ship touches down around 23 December (our Martian of course has a PhD in anthropology and Earth Observation, and is trained to notice these things), he will perceive that something very unusual is going on. Across large parts of the globe, even in Russia, the daily routine of work is coming to a stop. Streets and houses are specially decorated. Unusual amounts of food and drink are being consumed. Special songs are being sung incessantly on all sides. Piles of little parcels are being heaped up around the insides of houses. In some places, even in Russia, people are going off in large numbers to special buildings, full of candles. This strange mood of festivity continues for several more days, reaches another mysterious climax with the consumption of yet more food and drink and people staying up far into the night —and then slowly, over a week or so, everyday life returns to normal. What on earth, as our Martian might wittily put it, is going on?
'Well,' we reply, 'we are celebrating Christmas and New Year'. 'Christmas?' he asks, 'what is that?' Groping with rather less confidence for an explanation, we begin to describe how it was all originally to do with the birth of someone who lived a long time ago, in a place called Palestine. `Ah,' he says, 'the hero of your culture — a very important man?'. 'Well, he certainly used to be regarded as important', we answer, 'but today we really seem to know less and less about him. We don't even know really whether he ever existed. He seems to have been some kind of moral teacher, who told people that they should be kind to each other — but I should tell you that people don't pay very much attention to him any more'.
'And yet', the Martian pursues, 'you are still all going through this tremendous ritual in his honour?' `Ah', we reply, getting back on to stronger ground again, 'what you have to realise is that this Christmas is only really the survival of a much older festival, a kind of mid-winter ceremony to mark the end of the year, which almost all cultures have gone in for, particularly in the colder, more northerly regions of the earth. It's really just a kind of ritual escape from the miseries of winter, the moment when we turn our thoughts to the new year. You see, shortly after this day we call Christmas, we shall move out of what we call 1978 into the year we number 1979'. 'Oh yes', notes the Mar tian, 'and what do these numbers mean?' 'Well', we answer almost without thinking, `they are the number of years that have elapsed since the Palestinian we were talking about was born'. 'Alf, says the Martian — `so here we have this obscure figure, about whom you know so little that you are not even sure whether he existed or not, and who isn't generally regarded as important any more — yet you not only engage in all these strange rituals in his honour, but you even number your years after him. What a strange place this earth is, to be sure'.
The reason why we are sometimes tempted to indulge in this laborious device of hypothesising a Martian observer of our human affairs is that it may help us to get a fresh perspective on things which are so much part of our everyday world that We take them for granted. By attempting to see familiar things through these alien eyes, we can begin to see just how astonishing and peculiar they in fact are. And certainly one of the things which might most forcibly strike a sensitive observer of our own highly secular, technological civilisation is just how much our lives are still given unconscious shape and framework by the incalculable legacy of Christianity.
Take for instance the curious persistence (even in the Soviet world) of this practice of dating our years, decades and centuries from the birth of Christ. When people talk of the 'Swinging Sixties' or the `Roaring Twenties', is it not rather strange that they should unthinkingly choose to localise, say, the Beatles or the novels of Scott Fitzgerald by reference to a religious cult-leader who died two thousand years ago?
There are in fact few more revealing symptoms• of a really major shift in the cultural foundations of mankind than the point at which a society or a whole civilisation chooses to change the basis of its dating. For long after Christ's own time, of course, the prevailing system in the Roman world remained that based on the foundation of Rome itself, and it was only in the declining days of that mighty civilisation that one particularly tyrannical emperor, Diocletian, was so megalomaniacal as to attempt to re-order the whole of history from the central point of his own reign. It wfas this act of folie de grandeur by a notori ous persecutor of Christians which eventually inspired a sixth-century Christian, Dionysus Exiguus, to put forward a new system based on the birth of Christ himself Such was the triumph of Christianity in establishing itself as the central myth in the life of Europe that, despite the efforts of the Venerable Bede to show that Christ could not in fact have been later than 4 BC, the Dionysian system was eventually adopted throughout Christendom (although solve countries, such as Greece and Spain, onlY came to it as late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). The reason why a civilisation chooses to reorient its entire historical perspective round some new base point is that it has already come to see the event which took place at that moment as the most important thing that has ever happened — a moment at which history itself began again, at which life and society were in some very important sense re-born. And even more directly this was why, during the Dark Ages, the old mid-winter festivals of Europe eagle increasingly to be associated with the birth of Christ — because since time immemorial they had marked the point where the year itself is re-born, the moment when, as the sun is weakest, and land dead and nature itself seems to have passed into a cold grave' there is that miraculous turning point., towards the astonishing renewal of life an" abundance the following year. In the Mid' dle Ages, indeed, Christmas Day Was regarded as the beginning of the year. It was only after centuries of tussling between 25 December and Lady Day on 25 March' marking that other moment of renewal it! the natural calendar, the bursting forth 01 spring, that New Year's Day was officiallYf fixed in Britain by the calendar reforrn ° 1752 to be on 1 January. In all the tedious and pitiful debate that has gone in our society over the past centurY or more as to whether Christ was a 'myth or not, nothing has been more striking than the failure of either side in the argument t° recognise that by far the most important thing about Christ is that he did become a, myth. If he had just remained a historical figure, or the author of a few memorable, parables and moral homilies, we might still, be dating our history from the first year the reign of our monarch (as many tribes have done), we might still be celebrating Saturnalia at the winter solstice, and the memory of the man Jesus would scarce); have survived for more than a couple ° generations, if that. The reason why Christ was transforMed over the centuries into the most important, symbolic figure in the history of mankirla was precisely that he did become a rilYthic hero — in such a way that the cosmic P11? jection of his life, beginning and ending 111 those two great numinous episodes 01 renewal celebrated at Christmas and ivil Eas ter, could become the central, life-g thread of a whole civilisation. For in°rf than fifteen hundred years, the people °. Europe lived out their lives within th` Christ-myth. It shaped the whole outward and inward pattern of their existence, giving not just coherence to their lives, but much more important that symbolic charge which Came from the endless cycle of renewal, through the great festivals of the year, from Christmas to Lent to Easter to Whitsun to Harvest (Lammas) and back to Christmas again. And if today we find it incomprehensible that a mere 'myth' should be able to give a living framework to existence, then let it merely be recalled to what extent our own secular year is still shaped by the vestiges of that mythic framework — Chri"las, Easter, and the 'summer holidays' Which are a relic of the post-harvest time of relaxation. The point is that human beings must have myths and rituals. We actually need myths, great archetypal stories, to stir us to the depths of our being, to put us back in touch with that unconscious core of our existence from which we so easily become isolated — feeling in consequence a strange sense of emptiness and lack of meaning. It is precisely through these mysteries, these symbolic re-enactments of death and re-birth, that we must richly feel life and meaning Welling up in us again. Today we live in a curious, bleak age (not unlike the classical world at the time of Christ's own birth) when the old myths of our culture have for centuries been losing their full symbolic power — but before new °ries of equal power have come to birth. Our hunger for myth is so unquenchable that the world is filled as never before with Pseudo-myths, fragments of fantasyrenewal. Religious and secular cults, festivals and rituals of every description abound from the celebrations of the October Revolution in Red Square to the chanting on the terraces every Saturday afternoon, from the frenzied worship of pop Musicians and film stars to Transcendental Meditation. There is almost nothing that we do not unconsciously try to transmute into life-renewing myth, from the heroics of W. orld War Two on the cinema screen to the dreams of revolution. Rut none of these million-and-one Shadows of the real thing have the power really to renew the hearts of men. They are erely splinters of a mirror which has been I!reParably shattered. There is nothing so Iragic as a culture without a single, worldtranscending myth — because in the end it is °111y that which gives human existence a true sense of meaning. So we are left, in these last days of the Christian era, in a 'range limbo. We chase dreams and phantoms of the future, we hanker sentimentally for that which is gone. We put up laser beams in Oxford Street, or watch the r‘inages of choirboys singing carols flickering rviet our television screens. We feel a tenbonie set iSe of emptiness and despair — and Y because we have lost touch with our !truest selves, with that divine power which streams deep within every one of us, and h b °se renewal, dissolving every egocentric arrier, is what Christmas is all about.
Previous page
