Tag: Christmas

Between the Times

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

Curmudgeon reminds me of a thought I had last night while looking at holiday decorations on homes in the neighborhood. We are in that mysterious and wondrous period when Halloween decorations are still up and Christmas ones have dawned.

Further proof that the U.S. the greatest nation on God’s green (and getting greener thanks to added warmth) earth.

But I do wonder if Thanksgiving functioning as the start of the Christmas shopping season is really the product of Anglicans pushing Advent. Isn’t the Sunday after Thanksgiving always the first Sunday of Advent?

Who Created Christmas?

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

One answer looks either to fourth-century emperors who devised December 25 to compete with pagan holidays or to popes who established Christmas as a festival for the western church. Another might point toward the tradition of Lessons and Carols which have become a Protestant (Anglican) way to observe the festivities.

But the point of the question is to wonder why people like Barry Manilow, a Jewish-American, feel so comfortable with Christmas that they can’t wait to record another holiday album. After all, many of the Christmas “standards” came from the pens and pianos of Jewish Americans who found the way that Christian Americans carried on during December so inviting that they could compose a song like “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”:

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you “Be of good cheer”
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
It’s the hap -happiest season of all
With those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings
When friends come to call
It’s the hap – happiest season of all

There’ll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
There’ll be much mistltoeing
And hearts will be glowing
When love ones are near
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

There’ll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
There’ll be much mistltoeing
And hearts will be glowing
When love ones are near
It’s The Most Wonderful Time
It’s The Most Wonderful Time
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

That song, by the way, came from Edward Pola (nee Sidney Edward Pollacsek) and George Wyle (nee Bernard Weissman). Wyle also gave us the theme music for Gilligan’s Island, a tune to which Amazing Grace, I hear, can also be sung. Talk about inter-religious synergy.

This is a wonderful song and captures much of the experience of many North Americans during the last half of December each year which finds citizens of the United States observing Christmas as a national holiday.

But can you imagine, as I attempted last night, non-Muslims writing songs to communicate a sense of Ramadan festivities. We watched two holiday movies to take advantage of the respite from a work schedule. The first was The Bells of St. Mary’s (and boy, Bing Crosby was pretty engaging; Ingrid Bergman was fetching even in a habit), a Christmas movie that was remarkably successful with all Americans at a time (1945) only four years before the most successful anti-Catholic polemic ever written, Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power, a book that was a best seller and offered through the Book of the Month Club. Here was a story of a priest and a nun who disagreed over the running of a parochial school. It was, in some ways, insider Roman Catholic baseball stuff. And yet it is a very charming movie that once again underscores how congenial Christmas can be.

But imagine if the movie makers had created a film about a Muslim school which featured a conflict between a female teacher and an Imam during the observance of Ramadan. How endearing or inviting would that be? If you were part of a Protestant minority living in Quebec City during the 1940s, the parallels between the Roman Catholic observance of Advent and Christmas might be akin to the experiences that Christians (Protestant or Roman Catholic) might have in Baghdad during Ramadan. But again, Christmas invites non-Christians to join the festivities and create holiday expressions that although lacking in explicitly Christian content warm the perhaps sentimental hearts of Christians.

The other holiday movie we watched was Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football, a documentary about Dearborn, Michigan’s high school that is staffed and populated primarily by Muslim (Arab) Americans. The movie follows the coach, players, and family members as they prepare during the fasting and feasting of Ramadan for THE game against Fordson’s arch-rival, Dearborn High. It is the closest I could come to a movie made in the U.S. that featured a holiday foreign to either Christians or Jews. Well worth seeing (and only 55 minutes).

But the aspect of Christmas that most Americans find so inviting has next to nothing to do with the birth of Christ — if it did have much to do with the incarnation, I can’t imagine Barry Manilow lining up to sing those songs. It is a time for families to gather, for cooks to cook and trenchermen to eat, for givers to give and receivers to decide how to negotiate wrapping paper. In other words, it is a time to consume. Even more, it is an important cycle in the business year of many merchants. Lots of religious folk may not care for the commercialization of Christmas but that doesn’t keep the Puritanically minded from spending and eating (no drinking, of course) even if in a less than crass way.

As much as the commercialization of Christmas may seem foreign to Christianity, Protestants should be careful in getting huffy, not in the ways that Rev. Kev. suggests, but for the reason that Presbyterians like John Wanamaker, the owner of one of Philadelphia’s largest department stores, played a huge role in cultivating a holiday atmosphere that appealed to lots of people who didn’t care a wit about the baby Jesus or his reason for taking human form. (The best book on the commercialization of Christian holidays remains Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Consumer Rites.)

So once again, as I enjoy a break from responsibilities and look forward to a festive meal and time with friends, I enter yet another holiday with great ambivalence. With classes behind and grades in, Christmas is indeed one of the most wonderful times of the year. As someone who leans heavily against the liturgical calendar (other than fifty-two holy days a year), I am not all that upset by a secular Christmas. But it does give me pause that the First Advent can be so easily domesticated. It was not so with Herod who tried to snuff out the babe in the manger and all infants doomed to be born near that day. I don’t know exactly how it will happen, but the Second Advent will likely not invite such merriment (at least for those in the First Adam). So I wonder if Christians, if they are going to invest some religious energy in Christmas observance, should spend a little more time considering that the First Advent leads ultimately to That Great Day.

Turns Out this Liturgical Calendar Thingy Is Complicated

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

First — hello — Advent is not Christmas:

There’s a segment of evangelicalism that’s increasingly drawn to liturgy, especially the Anglican tradition, said Larry Eskridge, associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. But he thinks that’s a part of the Advent boom. “There’s also undoubtedly a commercial element as well,” he said. “As the popularity of the practice grew among an influential segment of the evangelical community, that popularity was cashed in by the Christian publishing, manufacturing, and retailing industries. The visibility of Advent wreaths, candles, banners, books, tracts, etc., undoubtedly had a major impact on a lot of folks’ awareness, tolerance, and embrace of the practice.”

I see the modern adaptation of Advent as a wonderful entry point to the riches of ancient Christian tradition: the church year, sacraments, and liturgy. Indeed, I’m one of those new Anglicans Eskridge refers to—but I got there via a hip Baptist church that introduced me to the seasons of the church year (and cofounded Advent Conspiracy).

But sometimes I find myself befuddled by a particularity of this movement. As a season of the church year, Advent is intended to prepare us for Christmas—a 12-day celebration, a season in itself. Advent is traditionally the fast before the feast. But I see few recent adopters of Advent keeping the feast. Thirty days of waiting, anticipation, preparation—and then when the person on whom you’ve waited arrives, Alright, we’re done here. Pack up the Christmas tree. What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

Fast between Thanksgiving and Christmas? You have to be kidding.

But if you can mix politics into whether or not to observe the Christ Mass, you might be on to something:

. . . when we look to the seventeenth century, we see some evidence of the Kirk making progress in convincing even lay persons that celebrating Christmas really was naughty. One significant factor working in the Kirk’s favor was, somewhat ironically, King James’s new-found conviction that Scottish Christians really should celebrate Christmas. James put significant pressure on the General Assembly of the Kirk meeting in Perth in 1618 to adopt, among a variety of liturgical/practical reforms, a religious calendar consisting of at least a handful of religious days, one of which was Christmas. For James, getting the Scots to celebrate Christmas was one small step towards creating uniformity of religious practice in his lands, which as of 1603 had come to include England. In any case, so far as the common people and their proclivity to celebrate Christmas went, it turned out that telling them they must celebrate Christmas was the surest way to keep some of them at least from doing so.

But if you are a neo-Calvinist, it’s easy peasy:

But let’s think about this for a second. As Abraham Kuyper said, “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’” That includes Christmas. It is, and always will be, his. It is as possible to remove Jesus from Christmas as it is to remove him from the church.

No Room In the Inn but How about Your Living Room?

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

‘Tis the season and that means nativity scenes are now decorating the brown grass that used to be the green placeholder for the gobblins, spider webs, and styrofoam tombstones of Halloween festivities. But looking at one collection of the holy family this morning on a frigid and overcast day made me wonder why Americans who celebrate Christmas and believe in both the baby Jesus and the risen Christ — if they are going to decorate for the holiday and disobey one of Christ’s Ten Commandments — don’t find more comfortable accommodations for Mary, Joseph, and the babe. Why, for those not living in the South or California and who confess Jesus as Lord, subject the family to conditions worse than those of first-century Palestine in whichever season Christ was actually born?

Of course, late fall is not the bleak midwinter, and Bethlehem cannot produce the wintry conditions that Michigan does. In fact, if Jesus had been born in Michigan, the carol, “In the Bleak Midwinter” would actually make sense. Its first stanza is a perfect description of winter weather in the Great Lakes region:

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Today Bethlehem’s highs will be in the 60s. Hillsdale’s will be 33 (and that feels generous).

So if Christians want to show that they really care, don’t let Jesus, Mary, and Joseph endure December’s elements. Bring the nativity scene inside near to the chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Ho ho ho.

North Pole Dancers

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

John Fea’s piece about the War on Christmas reminded me of an entirely new front in that potential conflict. While listening to Philadelphia sports talk radio this morning, a show that my wife wishes I would abandon because of the too frequent banter about the female form, I heard an interview with dancers from a local “gentleman’s” club. They spoke of upcoming attractions — North Pole Dancers — that feature women wearing (and then not wearing) Santa outfits that would put audience members in the “spirit of Christmas.” I understand that the birth of Jesus involved some exposed flesh of both mother and child, but to associate a direct violation of the seventh commandment (sixth for Roman Catholics) with the incarnation is well nigh unfathomable.

It made me wonder if secular Turkish culture would ever stoop so low as to try to capture the “spirit of Ramadan” in strip club events. In many cities in Turkey visitors will find advertisements (and more) for clubs that feature scantily clad women. Turkey is by no means innocent. And perhaps the market forces of Islamo-Calvinism have tempted Turkish entrepreneurs to abuse Islam for the sake of profits. But I find hard to believe that Islam could ever be so domesticated as to allow Turks to confuse something holy with something so profane.

The market forces that underwrite the American Christmas make me think that Pope Francis was on to something. Now if he could only join Reformed Protestants in a call for ending the church calendar.

Christendom without Christmas?

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

One of the remarks that Doug Wilson made in his lectures last weekend concerned a defense of Christmas trees in the local town square. The superiority of print to sound recordings is that you can find a statement much quicker with your eyes than your ears. So I was too lazy to go back and listen for the remark. But the interweb is a remarkable device and I found the following:

The Anti-Christian Liberties Union (ACLU) knows that getting Christmas trees off public property is well worth fighting for. This is why we as Christians have to learn that saying “merry Christmas” is an act of insurrection. How do we define our lives? More than this, how do we define our lives as a people? Far from retreating into a minimalist celebration, or no celebration at all, we as Christians must take far greater advantage of the opportunity we have in all of this. Now the Lord Jesus is on His throne. And His government will continue to increase. But He works through instruments, and one of His central instruments for establishing His kingdom on earth is the faith of His people. Why is it that Christians shopping at WalMart are being reminded over the loudspeakers that “He comes to make His blessings flow, far as the curse is found.” Why are they telling us this? It’s our religion. Why don’t we believe it? But if you believe it, then say merry Christmas to somebody.

But the stakes of Christmas are even higher:

To be fair, we ought not to be too hard on the secularists for their ongoing war against Christmas. Because Christmas started it.

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, there were no doubt people in the surrounding neighborhoods who drank too much, or who quarreled with their wives, or who sometimes shaved the edges of their business dealings. And Jesus came for that sort of thing, no doubt. His authority is exhaustive, and so no sin, however petty, is outside the reach of that cleansing authority. He came to make His blessings flow, far as the curse is found. He doesn’t overlook the little things.

But He doesn’t miss the great things either. It is interesting to note where the initial conflict was. Jesus had Herod’s attention right away. The first clash was a political one, right out in the public square. The very first battle was what sort of display was going to be allowed on the county courthouse steps. And that issue was important enough, crucial enough, that Herod was willing to shed blood over it.

So when Doug Wilson comes into his Christendom with Peter Leithart as his Constantine and James Jordan as Leithart’s Eusebius, will they make room for Reformed Protestants who don’t celebrate Christmas or don’t buy Christmas trees? (But we surely do take the holidays granted by civil and private authorities, thank you, very much.) I mean, judging by the behavior of Old School Presbyterians and secular libertarians, one might think they are on the same side of the culture wars — opposed to public religiosity. Of course, Old Schoolers object to the kind of religion that passes for public consumption, and secularists object to the kind of public that includes religion (whether orthodox or adapted). But can Wilson see the difference between those objections? More important, can he admit that his mere Christendom will be as difficult for orthodox Protestants as it will be for Jews, secularists, and Roman Catholics?

What Kind of Witness Do Presbyterians Have Anymore?

Published on by D. G. Hart36 Comments

Over at the Imaginative Conservative I ran across this intriguing tidbit of church history:

Did you know that Christmas celebrations were banned in Scotland until 1958? I certainly didn’t, not until my son started working on his sixth grade “Christmas around the World” report. I haven’t looked up what the English did in this regard (Scotland always has had a good deal of autonomy within Britain, and never stopped following its own legal code). But it seems the good Presbyterians of the established Church of Scotland (“the Kirk,” ironically enough for traditional conservatives) thought Christmas was a Catholic holiday, best stamped out with criminal penalties for unwholesome celebrations (pretty much anything outside of church), along with persistent tolling of bells to make sure everybody went to work on the day.

Bruce Frohnen, the author who uses this piece of trivia to introduce reasons for celebrating Christmas and Epiphany, goes on to say that times have changed and the old reasons for Presbyterians not celebrating Christmas have changed as well:

None of this is intended as a complaint against Presbyterians. In our secular age those of us who’ve “got religion” need to let bygones be bygones—especially when it comes to wrongs with their origins dating back a long way, and which aren’t really relevant to the character of people or religious practice today. What’s more, as they say, “at least they took us seriously.”

This is a curious line of reasoning since it suggests that those who take religion seriously (the “got religionists”) have no reason to take the old reasons for differences between Presbyterians and Roman Catholics seriously. But if the “got religion” crowd does believe religion to be important, then doesn’t that belief extend beyond a generic conservative Christianity doing battle with secularists and egalitarians? Doesn’t it lead all the way to what traditional Presbyterians and traditional Roman Catholics have believed traditionally about practices like the church calendar (redundancy intended)? This is not to say that beliefs change. Presbyterians (in the U.S. anyway) revised their confession in 1789 on the subject of the civil magistrate. Roman Catholics “developed” their doctrine of the church at Vatican II such that salvation now is possible outside the Roman Catholic Church. Still, despite changes and developments, what is a traditional Presbyterian to do who still objects to the “doctrines and commandments of men” implied in the liturgical calendar used by Rome, Moscow, and Canterbury (not to mention Dort)? Can confessional Presbyterians find a seat at the pro-religion, cultural conservative table if they bring up objections to other conservative faiths on the basis of their own conservative faith?

This is, by the way, an important example of why religion — at least conservative faith — is not glue that keeps cultural conservatives together that many scholars and journalists suppose. The religion of the culture warriors (in James Davison Hunter’s old categories) may bring them together, but it is more likely going to be some kind of ecumenical, broadly tolerant religion that stresses morality (the way the old liberal Protestants did), not one that tells Protestants they are in danger if they don’t fellowship with the Bishop of Rome or that tells Presbyterians they should not observe man-made holidays.

Either way, it is remarkable that even mainline Presbyterian churches like the Kirk as little as a half-century ago would not observe the liturgical calendar. Not even the Orthodox Presbyterian Church had that kind of tenacity — just look at the hymns devoted to the birth of the baby Jesus in the Trinity Hymnal.

But if you are thinking about holidays and wondering how to bring in the New Year with a good movie, the Harts recommend Hudsucker Proxy (1994), a Coen Brothers production that ranks right up there with Miller’s Crossing. Hudsucker is set at the end of 1958 — talk about harmonic convergence — the year that the Kirk started observing Christmas, and stars Tim Robbins and Paul Newman. We are planning on some sparkling shiraz to go with the popcorn and should be in bed by 10:30. Woot!

What Should We Do about Christmas?

Published on by D. G. Hart27 Comments

If I were a devout Muslim or even a lukewarm agnostic for the past few days, I certainly would have observed oddities that Christians in the U.S. take for granted as normal. I am thinking of the oddity of hearing Dean Martin or Nat King Cole or Johnny Mathis or Tony Bennett crooning lines like “Christ the savior is born” or “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Indeed, one of the mysteries of American popular culture is that so many pop singers have felt compelled to cut a Christmas album (I was especially aware of this yesterday during a meal accompanied by a Christmas song Pandora station that was featured on the family room television screen.) Has any holiday of the monotheistic faiths, the birth of Abraham, the Exodus, the birth of Mohammed, his flight from Mecca to Medina, been the subject of so many songs that in turn become the back drop for shopping and dining for almost an entire month of the year?

Granted, not all of those Christmas or in-the-deep-deep-winter songs have Christ’s claims in view (nor does winter feel very deep so early in the season or in an era of climate change). Yesterday, for instance, was my first encounter with the song “A Marshmallow World,” sung by Dean Martin (what agent ever told Dean that he had a voice?). Here are the lyrics:

It’s a marshmallow world in the winter,
When the snow comes to cover the ground,
It’s the time for play, it’s a whipped cream day,
I wait for it all year round.

Those are marshmallow clouds being friendly,
In the arms of the evergreen trees,
And the sun is red like a pumpkin head,
It’s shining so your nose won’t freeze.

The world is your snowball, see how it grows,
That’s how it goes, whenever it snows,
The world is your snowball just for a song,
Get out and roll it along.

It’s a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts,
Take a walk with your favourite girl,
It’s a sugar date, what if spring is late,
In winter, it’s a marshmallow world.

The world is your snowball, see how it grows,
That’s how it goes, whenever it snows,
The world is your snowball just for a song,
Get out and roll it along.

It’s a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts,
Take a walk with your favourite girl,
It’s a sugar date, what if spring is late,
In winter, it’s a marshmallow world,
In winter, it’s a marshmallow world,
In winter, it’s a marshmallow world.

Of course, the season is littered with any number of “seasonal” songs, sung apparently by pop stars whose agents and recording companies tell them that a holiday album will sell and enhance their hold on the singer’s adoring public. But many of these albums include the Christmas standards, “Silent Night,” and “O Holy Night,” which then introduce some rather vigorous theological claims about the baby Jesus and what he was born to do.

Which raises the question about whether Christmas stands as evidence of successful transformation of culture by American Christians or is it a sign to anti-transformationalists of just how thin the project of transformation inevitably becomes. If I were a “let’s keep Christ in Christmas” guy, I might take encouragement from hearing Johnny Mathis singing “Silent Night,” that is, if I could stomach that insipid melody (bah humbug yourself!). But I could also imagine a devout neo-Calvinist insisting that stars like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra cheapen the meaning of “Silent Night”‘s lyrics by singing them without meaning what they sing, or only intending to make a profit.

Either way, Christmas stands as testimony to how much Americans take a certain variety and practice of Christianity for granted. That nonchalance may be good for shop keepers and manufacturers who depend on December purchases to have a good fiscal year. But it appears to be lousy for considering the deeper significance of Bethlehem babe’s purchasing power.