The Battle for Christmas (55 page)

In recent years, though, we have been seeing a movement to “reform” New Year’s Eve itself. The movement has resulted in the introduction of so-called First Night celebrations held in many American cities beginning in about 1980. Supported by downtown businesses, First Night events have been allowed to retain the public aura of the older holiday, but—and in this they are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century battle for Christmas—they are essentially efforts to suppress the use of alcohol. It is no coincidence that the First Night phenomenon has emerged from something that is very much like a late-twentieth-century temperance movement.

T
HERE ARE
other pockets of carnival Christmas that are less obvious but even more interesting. Take the African-American community, for example. Even many Southern blacks who were pious and ordinarily sober insisted on drinking and frolicking at Christmastime. The folk singer Huddie Ledbetter, for example (better known as “Leadbelly”), recalled from his childhood around the turn of the century that even though his family attended church on Christmas Eve (the Ledbetters were fiercely committed Southern Baptists), after that they would drink hard liquor and dance all night for a full week.
¹⁶

African-American Christmas music is still largely associated with such carnival behavior—at least in
the blues
, that quintessential African-American genre. I have found scarcely a single example of a conventional “children’s” Christmas in blues music, but there are at least a score of Christmas blues about romance. “I begin to whoopee when it is almost Christmas time,” one such blues begins. “If I don’t get it by Christmas,” another one ends, “I’ll have a New Year’s blues.” And a third simply imagines that the day after Christmas is really St. Valentine’s Day. Remember that Christmas in the slave South
was
a time of carnival for most slaves.
¹⁷

Several Christmas blues simply associate the holiday with reunion with a woman—as in a very famous song, “Hellhound on My Trail,” recorded in 1937 by the legendary musician Robert Johnson about a man on the run. The second verse of this driven piece offers the singer a moment of respite, a respite that he associates with Christmas, and a reunion with his absent lady friend. That verse begins as the singer expresses the flitting fantasy that if it were only Christmas, “Oh, wouldn’t we have a time, baby?” It’s romance he’s thinking of here, not opening presents. This might be a vestige of slave culture, when Christmas provided a time of reunion for couples who lived on different plantations. In fact, in one blues song, Christmas stands first for leisure-time itself, as the singer rejoices that he doesn’t have any work to do, so that “every day is Christmas.” (Which means he will be free to join his girlfriend and spend all his time making love to her.) In another song, the singer laments that he is all alone at Christmas, and compares himself to “a rooster looking for a setting hen.”
¹⁸

It is characteristic of the blues to be filled with such wordplay, and especially with vivid double entendres. One Christmas blues consists entirely of an extended pun in which the singer searches for his Christmas present in his girlfriend’s “dresser drawer.” Or the wordplay might involve sly mockery of other elements of the middle-class domestic Christmas, especially Santa Claus himself. The singer may simply inform his lady friend that “Santa Claus will be to see you, this very Christmas night.” Or he may be a “backdoor Santa,” a surreptitious Lothario who makes his “rounds about the break of day.” Or he may assure his woman that he is not too old to perform his expected role: “I’m gonna be your Santa Claus even if my whiskers is white.” Other Christmas blues are based on a rich metaphoric brew involving stockings or Christmas trees. In one of these the singer, without bothering to explain himself, urges his woman to take her stocking and “hang it up on the head of the bed.” In several other blues renditions, the singer proceeds to reverse the stocking’s
sex
when he asks his girlfriend to “let me hang my stocking right on your Christmas tree.”
¹⁹

The possibilities of variation in the wordplay based on these stock phrases seem to be almost as limitless as those contained within the strict formal confines of blues music itself. In addition, all of these Christmas blues are in part
directed at
the conventional domestic Christmas ritual, a ritual they manage to transform into a kind of joyous sacrilege. (The “backdoor Santa,” for example, gives presents to any children he encounters on his rounds, but only to keep them quiet while he is otherwise engaged with their mother’—“Ho! ho! ho! ho!”) Such gestures are a form of cultural theater, and the mocking commentary they offer is exactly what Mikhail Bakhtin, writing of the sixteenth-century European world of Rabelais, has placed at the heart of carnival sensibility.
²⁰

?
HE BLUES TRADITION
, of course, represents only one aspect of the African-American Christmas. At the other end of the spectrum is the African-American holiday known as Kwanzaa. Based loosely on an African harvest celebration, this Christmas-season ritual has been gaining in popularity in recent years, especially among middle-class American blacks who wish to reclaim their African heritage. Domestic in its nature, Kwanzaa is a good instance of an “invented tradition,” one that serves as an alternative to the mainstream Christmas holiday (but which also mirrors it in its essentially domestic features).

In this, Kwanzaa is similar to the old colonial holiday of
Thanksgiving
, which the Puritans introduced as a more acceptable alternative to Christmas. Thanksgiving was intended to offer New Englanders an opportunity for seasonal feasting after the conclusion of the harvest, an occasion that was not tainted by the pagan origin of Christmas or by its carnival associations. (In the late eighteenth century, when Christmas had begun to reenter the New England calendar, regional governors sometimes responded by ordering that Thanksgiving be held as close to Christmas as possible—in one year as late as December 20.)
²¹

And in this respect both Thanksgiving and Kwanzaa are similar to the Jewish-American holiday of Chanukah. As innumerable commentators have pointed out, until recent times Chanukah was a distinctly minor holiday in the Jewish calendar. Even in its earlier history, though, it seems to have shifted its meaning to fit new circumstances. To begin with, it was simply a celebration of a military victory in the second century
BC
, the improbable victory of the Maccabees over their Syrian Greek occupiers, together with the rededication of the profaned Temple that followed. But nowhere in the original accounts was there any reference to the oil that
miraculously continued to burn for eight days (the period of time required for such a ritual rededication). Only around the beginning of the Christian era, at a time when many Jews were becoming assimilated into Hellenic culture, did Chanukah become a “miracle of lights.” Such a major reinterpretation achieved two ends: It played down the element of Jewish military might at a time when assimilated Hebrews would not have wished to appear warlike, and it imitated the Greek solstice celebration, which similarly entailed the burning of lamps (and would itself later be metamorphosed into the ritual of Yule logs and Christmas lights).
²²

There is only one element in the observance of Chanukah that mirrors any aspect of the carnival tradition: the element of gambling. Gambling was forbidden in medieval Jewish culture, but an exception was made during the eight days of Chanukah.
²³
That custom survives today in the form of the little spinning top used by children and known as a dreidel. Dreidels can come to rest on any of four sides, each of which bears a special mark—rather like dice. The connection with dice is a real one: Dreidels were designed as gambling instruments.

But it is not Chanukah that we must look to for the closest Jewish version of the old Christmas. For that, we must turn to another Jewish holiday: the early spring festival known as Purim. This holiday marks the liberation of the Jewish people from still another ancient oppressor. Like the carnival Christmas, it is celebrated with the same radical inversion of social hierarchy and the same sanctioned transgression of behavioral boundaries. This point has in large measure been conveniently forgotten by assimilated Jews, but it is well remembered by the most traditional portion of the modern Jewish community. (Back in 1687, though, the Reverend Increase Mather of Boston was able to note that “the Days of Purim” were not intended as a “religious festival” but as what he termed a “political holiday,” and Mather went on to observe that “Jews do not look upon these Days as Holy; they spend them in feasting, and in telling merry Stories.”)
²⁴

Merry, indeed. Mather was correct, but he could easily have gone further than that. Purim is a latter-day Jewish Feast of Fools. Even today, in a modern parallel to the “Boy Bishop” ritual of medieval Europe, yeshiva students take on the role of rabbis. Sacred biblical texts are mocked, recited in nonsensical juxtaposition. Children are expected to interrupt the retelling of the Purim story with jeers and noisemakers. Outdoors, the holiday is a time of parade and masquerade, and of almsgiving, too.
²⁵
The streets of Jerusalem and Brooklyn are thick with street theater
on these occasions. There is even a rabbinic injunction to get completely drunk at Purim—literally, to drink so much that one can no longer tell the difference between the two central characters in the Purim legend, the hero, Mordecai, and the archvillain, Haman, a Persian who had unsuccessfully ordered the annihilation of the Jews. Metaphorically speaking, that means to get so drunk that one cannot distinguish good from evil. It is hard to imagine a more profoundly carnival-like gesture.

Here, then, and in some improbable places, are remnants of a carnival holiday tradition. But a word of caution is in order: We should pause before thinking of these as remnants of the “real” holiday tradition. We should not assume that Kwanzaa is less authentic than the blues or that Chanukah is less authentic than Purim or that Thanksgiving is less authentic than New Year’s Eve. One set of all these celebrations may be “respectable” and (in the United States, at least) relatively recent, while the other may be rowdy and relatively older—but neither has a monopoly on authenticity.

To be sure, this book has argued that the “respectable” set of holidays—and particularly the familiar Christmas—represent something of an “invented tradition.” This is no longer such a novel idea. One recent collection of essays, published in England under the title
Unwrapping Christmas
, actually opens with a blunt claim: “A consensus appears to be emerging around the interpretation of the contemporary Anglo-American Christmas which would place this festival firmly within the more general category of phenomenon termed ‘the invention of tradition.’”
²⁶
But while “the invention of tradition” offers a very useful historical tool, like all tools it is subject to abuse. The easiest and most tempting way to abuse the idea of invented traditions may be to believe that if a tradition is “invented,” it is somehow tainted, not really authentic.

There are several reasons why such a belief is false. But the most important of them is that it is based on a profoundly questionable assumption—that before there were “invented” traditions there were “real” ones that were
not
invented. It is difficult, though, to imagine such a thing as a tradition that was not invented—and reinvented, and invented yet again. That is surely as true of the carnival Christmas as it is of Christmas as domestic idyll. As I noted in Chapter I, the carnival Christmas varied widely
from place to place and from time to time, and it is fruitless to define some primal unchanging tradition even in a small region of, say, England or Ireland. The wassail songs surely changed from one year to the next, depending in any given year on variables as unstable as the quality of the harvest or the ephemeral mood of the relationship between patrons and their clients.

To return to a point made in Chapter i, it is useful to think of traditions not as static entities but as dynamic forces that are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated. Inversion rituals, for example, expressed the fault lines in the society of early modern Europe, the great inequalities of wealth and power that both separated the classes and bound them together. The very appeal that peasants and tenants sometimes made to “customary rights” (to old traditions, in other words) was on occasion used as a political gesture, to help preserve certain Christmas benefits (the best beer, for example, or an extra day of leisure) that could always come under challenge—in a year of poor harvest, or with the less-forthcoming son of a generous landlord. The appeal to age-old custom, then as later, was more political strategy than simple statement of fact:
We are entitled to it now, because we have always had it
might well mean little more than
You let us do it last year, and we want it again now
. It is in just this way that traditions have always been fashioned.

Yet this is difficult to accept. Today we may yearn for a past that has no past. We require
some
traditions to be unchanging, to exist outside of time—and if these cannot be our own traditions, then at least let them be the older ones that they displaced. If Santa Claus and Christmas trees turn out to be creations of the past two centuries, at least
carnival
itself must be rooted in deep cultural soil, as transcendent as the seasonal cycle itself.

But we must try to recognize such temptations for what they are. Our own culture has made us acutely aware of inauthenticities that pervade our own lives—in advertising, business, and politics. And that awareness presses us to seek out the practices of other, different societies, including those of our own past—distant places and times that carry the promise of being more “in touch” than our own with “what really matters.” Invariably, these alien societies carry an implicit promise: They have remained untainted by the forces of commodity culture. Thus we are easily fascinated by “primitive” peoples whom we can make out to have had minimal contact with Western society. We tour the Third World, or untouched pockets of our own society, and we do not choose to suspect that the natives already know all about us and just what we expect them to be
like (or to recognize that it is our own culture that is selling them to us as just another commodity). We read about times gone by and we do not wish to think those were just as complex, and as morally ambiguous, as our own times. But of course they were. Someone expressed this idea with great elegance by pointing out that “nobody has ever lived in the past.”