November 30, 2005
Another Side of Christmas Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:15 AM EST Though I do not—surprise! surprise!—find myself in agreement with most of his argument in favor of keeping Christmas in the public square, John Steele Gordon has written a truly interesting and informative history of Christmas. For anyone interested in learning more about the topic, I’d strongly recommend Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize a few years ago. Having grown up as one of a handful of Jewish kids in a predominately Christian small town, I never felt particularly besieged around Christmastime. I enjoy the aesthetics of a good Christmas tree—albeit from a distance—as much as the next guy, and I have a mawkish love of old Christmas movies (Mr. Gordon is exactly right: the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol, with Alastair Sim, is the best—or second only to It’s a Wonderful Life). And come December 23 or so, the radio in my apartment is usually fixed to one of the all-Christmas, all-the-time stations. That said, I have some problems with letting Christmas cross over into the public square. Mr. Gordon correctly distinguishes between the secular and sacred strains in the holiday. But it’s not people like John Steele Gordon who concern me. It’s people like John Gibson, the Fox News commentator who flippantly argued, “If the celebration of Christmas by Christians living in the UAE, a Muslim nation, is acceptable, why not here in a Christian nation?” It’s people like Michael Medved who, in a debate over Christmas, informed viewers of MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, “We are a deeply religious and deeply Christian nation.” It’s people like Fox News’s resident windbag, Bill O’Reilly, who—again in the context of a debate over Christmas—brazenly labeled America a “Judeo-Christian country” and argued that “we can’t be having Hindu and Buddha. I mean, come on. I mean, this country is founded on Judeo-Christian traditions.” The problem with Mr. Gordon’s thoughtful defense of Christmas in the public square is that it is marginal. Most of the loudest promoters of keeping Christmas in public schools and public spaces mean very much for Christmas to assume profound religious overtones. And they have no problem forcing Christianity on Jews, Hindus, Muslims, other non-Christians, and non-believers, because they clearly believe we are guests in a Christian country. I recently visited my father, who lives in the same small town in New Jersey where I grew up. On that visit I had occasion to talk to his next-door neighbors, two junior high students who have dropped out of the school chorus because the holiday concert includes overtly religious songs. Sure, chorus is an elective. But attending the holiday concert isn’t. (I remember. After all, I attended the same junior high.) And so hundreds of kids at the school will be held as a captive audience while their classmates sing, “Christ the savior is born” and “No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin, Where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.” Or whichever carols they decide to include in their repertoire. None of this is unusual. It was standard operating procedure when I was growing up for school concerts to include songs with overtly religious messages. I’m sure this isn’t at all what Mr. Gordon has in mind. But many supporters of Christmas in the public square do. Here is where the problem lies.
November 29, 2005
Long-Winded Lincoln Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:15 PM EST On Thanksgiving Day the New York Post published an editorial that quoted from Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation establishing the modern holiday of Thanksgiving. The newspaper characterized Lincoln as “notably a man of few words,” which prompted a reply in this morning’s paper from Harold Holzer, a longtime Lincoln scholar and friend of American Heritage. Holzer is certainly right to point out that Lincoln could wind stems with the best of them. But as our recent discussion of the Gettysburg Address shows, he at least was capable of being concise, something that is absent in many of our modern politicians. My favorite example came on April 8, 1861. With Fort Sumter in grave peril and a civil war seeming unavoidable, Lincoln sent a message to Gov. Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania that read, in its entirety, as follows: “I think the necessity of being ready increases. Look to it.”
November 29, 2005
’Tis the Season Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST With the safe completion of Thanksgiving—a holiday that as far as I know no one objects to except turkeys—we have officially entered the season of Christmas, a holiday that, these days, it sometimes seems everyone objects to except children. Some say that a Christian holiday should not be foisted upon non-Christians and that everything should be generic, so as not to give offense. Holiday tree, not Christmas tree; “Season’s Greetings,” not “Merry Christmas”; no traditional Christmas symbols unless carefully balanced with non-Christmas ones. I say fiddlesticks. Perhaps a very brief history of Christmas will help everyone relax and enjoy the season a bit more. For the truth of the matter is that Christmas is two completely separate holidays, one sacred and one profane, that have little if anything to do with each other except that, for historical reasons, they both fall on December 25 and are both called Christmas. In the earliest days of Christianity, Christmas wasn’t celebrated at all. It was the events at the end of Christ’s life, not its beginning, that dominated the church year. Theologically they still do, and Easter and Good Friday are far more important holy days than Christmas in the church calendar. The Last Supper was a Seder, the feast celebrating Passover, and Passover always falls on the day of the first full moon of spring in the Hebrew calendar. So the Council of Nicea, in A.D. 325, decided that Easter would fall on the first Sunday following the first full moon of spring, which is why Easter usually comes shortly after Passover. (Because the Hebrew calendar is a lunar one, every so often an extra month is added to bring the calendar back into astronomical reality, and that can make Passover come after Easter, as it did in 2005.) Most Christian holy days are determined by Easter. That is why Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, etc., are all “moveable feasts,” moving around the secular calendar at the whim of the moon. But Christmas does not move. It, and its associated holy days such as Advent and Epiphany, are set not by the moon but by the solar calendar created by pagan astronomers under the direction of Julius Caesar (and slightly tweaked by the astronomers of Pope Gregory VII in 1583, to make it more accurate). The reason why Christian holy days march to the drummers of two different calendars is simple. In the third and fourth centuries, as Christianity began to spread rapidly through the Roman Empire, the church fathers had a marketing problem. The Romans celebrated an annual holiday called the Saturnalia from December 17 to December 24. It honored Saturn, the god of the harvest, but it has its origins in far more ancient winter-solstice festivals. The Saturnalia was party time, with feasting, drinking, dressing up (often in the clothes of the opposite sex), decorating with evergreens, and gift-giving. Sound familiar? It was, of course, a very popular holiday and many did not want to give it up. So the church created a holiday to celebrate the birth of Christ as a substitute. The old Saturnalia customs were cheerfully adopted (although I imagine the early church fathers weren’t too keen on cross-dressing). The giveaway is that while we don’t know when Christ was born, the gospels tell us that it was when “the shepherds were watching their flocks by night.” In other words, when the flocks were up in the hills grazing on summer pastures. In December, they would all have been safely tucked away in barns. In the Middle Ages, such northern pagan customs as mistletoe and evergreen trees were incorporated into the celebration. Then along came the Protestant Reformation. Many of the new Protestant denominations wanted to purify (the origin of the word Puritan) the church of what they regarded as medieval corruptions of the ancient faith. Out went the priesthood, confession, bishops, the cult of the Virgin Mary, and . . . Christmas. Although Anglicans continued to celebrate Christmas, and thus the holiday was prominent in the Southern colonies, Puritans did not, and December 25 was just a regular work day in early New England. It was only in the early nineteenth century that Christmas began to creep back into many Protestant churches. Again, the reason was a marketing problem. New York, that most secular of American cities, whose patron saint is St. Nicholas, invented the modern American version of Santa Claus, by such means as Clement Clark Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (1823), usually known by its first line, “’Twas the night before Christmas . . .” This was a celebration of the wholly secular Christmas that derives from the Saturnalia. Although Moore was an Episcopal priest, his poem is all about sugar plums, not the nativity. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) is equally about the secular Christmas. It is a story about the redemption of a rich but lonely and unhappy man by the spirit of the season and the necessity of love, family, and friends to lead a happy and fulfilled life. The word church appears in A Christmas Carol exactly once, the word Christ never. Meanwhile, merchants such as New York’s A. T. Stewart began opening larger and larger stores. They began decorating these new department stores for Christmas. They pushed the old tradition of gift-giving for obvious reasons of self-interest. And people of differing religious traditions began living in closer proximity. It didn’t take the children long to catch on and exploit the situation. “The O’Reilly kids down the street are getting presents; why aren’t we!?” is not a question parents have good defenses against. (This also accounts for why Hanukkah, once a minor Jewish holy day, is now a much bigger one in this country than in Israel.) By the mid-nineteenth century Christmas was back in the calendar of most Protestant churches, and the secular celebration of the old Saturnalia under the name of Christmas was gathering force quickly. J. P. Morgan’s uncle, of all people, wrote “Jingle Bells” in 1849. Perhaps the most famous of all American Christmas songs, “White Christmas,” was written by Irving Berlin, who was Jewish. Both songs celebrate the winter solstice not the birth of Christ. Today the vast American merchandising and advertising industries spend billions to get people to carry on the ancient pagan tradition of gift-giving. But in recent decades some people have been trying to curtail all public acknowledgment of Christmas in the name of political correctness. A class trip from a public school in New Jersey to see a dramatic production of A Christmas Carol in New York was cancelled a few years ago when one parent objected on religious grounds. Obviously the parent had never read the book or seen any of the many films based on it (the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim is the best in my view). Objecting to A Christmas Carol on religious grounds is like objecting to The Diary of Anne Frank because one scene in the play shows the family celebrating Hanukkah as they hide in the attic from the Nazis. Even poinsettias have been denounced as a Christian symbol and ordered removed from a county courthouse. In fact the poinsettia was brought to this country—and soon to Europe—only in 1828, by the diplomat Joel Roberts Poinsett, after he returned from a stint as American consul in Mexico where the plants are native. They became associated with Christmas only because they bloom at that time, are easily grown in greenhouses, and make a splendidly cheery decoration in the dark days of December. I would hope that in the spirit of, uhmm, Christmas, people, before they lodge a complaint, would ask themselves if what they object to is really an aspect of the Christian holy day or is it actually part of the secular holiday that happens at the same time but has roots that antedate Christianity by millennia. Happy Saturnalia, everyone!
November 28, 2005
Lincoln and Banality Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST Frederic Schwarz says that the thoughts Lincoln expressed in the Gettysburg Address are banal, trite, and obvious, and that it is the words and the concision that make them powerful. Okay, no argument, although I’m reminded of the old joke that the trouble with Shakespeare is he’s so full of clichés. However, I think he has stumbled on the very definition of poetry. Many of our best-loved poems express nothing terribly original in what they say; it is how they say it that strikes us so powerfully and stays with us so long. It is the poet’s business to find the sublime in the obvious. In that sense, Lincoln was a poet. Everett’s oration is prose through and through. (Although, to be fair to Everett, while we have his words we do not have his performance. He was universally regarded as the great orator of his day, which is precisely why he was at Gettysburg.) Speaking of memorization, the only thing I can remember being required to memorize in school was the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech that comes near the end of Macbeth. Forty-odd years later I can still remember it and find myself reciting it often (although I prefer Shakespeare’s even more concise take on this same theme from The Tempest, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep”). But while I was only once required to memorize something, I often did so for the sheer fun of it. Memorization was one of the mental gymnastics I always so much preferred to the physical kind. State capitals, the kings of England, Presidents of the United States, and yards and yards of poetry and song lyrics (of the Gilbert and Sullivan and Broadway variety) still rattle around my head. There is one thing especially I remember learning because I wanted it to rattle around my head. I was 10 or 12 years old and my brother and I were watching on television an old Charles Laughton movie called Ruggles of Red Gap, in which he plays an English butler who finds himself transported to the nineteenth-century American West for plot reasons that need not concern us. During a typically American raucous celebration of July Fourth, the very proper Laughton character recites a speech that brings the town’s citizens to a hushed silence, not to mention two young boys sitting in a dark room. I was so moved by Laughton’s rendition of the speech that I went to the library, found a copy of it, and memorized it right then and there. It was the Gettysburg Address.
November 25, 2005
The Writer’s Voice Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST Part of my problem with the Gettysburg Address may be that I can’t imagine it vividly enough, since I don’t know what Lincoln sounded like—what sort of voice he had, whether he shouted or whispered, how often he paused, and so on. This can make a huge difference. The first time I attempted Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, I couldn’t finish it; it seemed like the most god-awful drivel I had ever read. Then I heard a recording of Kerouac reading some of his poetry, and suddenly it clicked. The author’s literal voice—a soft, earnest murmur with a slight lisp and a stop-start approach—showed me the way to interpret his literary voice, and suddenly I knew how to read him. (Though if Kerouac had lived longer, I suspect he would eventually have sounded much different. When you listen to a 1950s recording of his Beat colleague Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl,” he is quiet but intense, seeming to feel every single word as it spills out. By the 1980s, Ginsberg was reciting his sturdy masterpiece way you would read to a three-year-old, with lots of swoops and shouts and bells and whistles, as if the words themselves were not enough. That’s what happens when you’ve performed the same thing hundreds of times—like Bob Dylan rearranging his songs when he gets bored with them.) Anyway, without hearing a speaker’s voice, the words alone can give a misleading impression of how they were delivered. When I first read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, having no experience with religious sermons of any kind, I imagined him reading it as the grown-ups I knew would have done: Serious, even-toned, yet impassioned, with the voice occasionally swelling to a near-shout for the most important phrases. I envisioned the entire audience of 250,000 hushed and straining to catch every word. Imagine my surprise when I heard a recording of excerpts from that speech, which King delivered with all the cadences and flourishes of the traditional Southern preacher. The only place I had encountered that sort of oratory before was on The Flip Wilson Show, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. I didn’t mean any disrespect to Dr. King, but the speech just sounded so completely different from what I had imagined. After I got used to his speaking style, I went back and reread the speech with a new understanding of what hearing it must have been like. I forget whether current literary theory says that the text is paramount and what we know about the author is a distraction, or vice versa. But I do know that hearing how somebody talks can be either an aid or an obstacle in grasping the essence of his or her work. On the other hand, sometimes it’s neither. I can remember when Mario Cuomo addressed the 1984 Democratic convention, and the next morning everyone was praising his speech to the hills. This made me curious to see what he had said, so I read the speech in the paper. It left me baffled, coming across as a boilerplate recital of the standard Democratic campaign themes. Then I watched several minutes of a tape of Cuomo speaking, and I still didn’t get it. So maybe I’m just a sourpuss.
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