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Christmas (Holiday Series #7)
Join Ian and Claire to discuss the origins and contemporary celebration of this globally renowned winter holiday! In this episode, we will learn more about the Pagan and Christian emergence of beloved holiday traditions, as well as the variety of interpretations across cultures. Also included is a discussion of our hosts’ favorite holiday rituals!
Source:
https://www.history.com/articles/history-of-christmas
Transcript:
Claire: Hello, friends, and welcome back to Anthro.mp3. We’re students from UMass who love anthropology, and AnthroHub is a website that we help run that’s full of all things anthro. Make sure to check it out to look at some incredible blog posts and creative works made by students from our school and others. My name’s Claire, and I’ll be one of your hosts for today’s episode. And we actually have a new host joining us today.
Ian: Hi, guys. My name’s Ian. Yeah, I’m a new host here at the Anthro.mp3 podcast. I love studying languages. And I do work in the linguistic anthropology subfield.
Claire: Very, very cool. So, Ian, it’s about time to be getting into the so-called holiday spirit, yeah?
Ian: Yes, indeed. So what better way to invoke the festive feels than by talking about one of the biggest holidays from around the world, Christmas. *Jazz hands.*
Claire: Yes. And one thing I’d like to say before we really get into this episode is that we have already briefly chatted about Christmas in a prior episode. If y’all check out episode 11, that’s where Anna and I chatted about the winter solstice. We actually talked a little bit about different Christmastime traditions and the history of certain aspects of Christmastime, so like the origin of wrapping presents. We also introduced a little bit of the history of Christmas, like how it originated from the pagan winter solstice celebrations. But it’s definitely evolved via Christian influence towards what we sort of know better today.
Ian: Yeah. No, and the origins of Christmas are just so fascinating that all I can do is I highly recommend you guys go listen to check out the episode and listen to it, after finishing this one, of course.
Claire: I think a great place to jump in would probably be Christmas in antiquity. At the risk of repeating myself far, far too many times, we’re not going to go too far into it because we talked about it a lot in our winter solstice episode. But it is cool to mention that long before the birth of Jesus Christ, light and birth were celebrated as the long, cold nights gave way to longer, warmer days. This is where solstice and Christmastime celebrations stem from. The Norse, for example, have celebrated yuletime for a crazy long while, too.
Ian: Very long while.
Claire: Yeah, yeah. Since the winter solstice was a time to celebrate light, warmth, birth, and growth, a lot of pre-Christ traditions actually center around the harvest and food, which I will mention a bit more later. We’re going to talk about that. What’s interesting about Christmas in modernity is that it isn’t necessarily religious or particularly secular in nature. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. I mean, it certainly can be. But it varies from household to household. So my family isn’t religious, but we still celebrate Christmas with lots of fun traditions surrounding it. On the other hand, I know that a big part of Christmas for my extended family, who are religious, is to go to an extended church service or a special service. It’s a totally worldwide phenomenon. My family in Delaware, they go to church for Christmas, but so does my family all the way over in New Zealand or in England.
Ian: So cool. Christmas traditions are so much fun and vary so much from country to country and even family to family. A lot of these traditions do stem from pre-Christ winter solstice celebrations, but have modernized into Christmas-based traditions. Christmas traditions in my family highlight what we hold most important, which is family. We put up and decorate a tree together, eat meals and play games, watch some movies, go on our post-Christmas meal activity, usually a walk or a hike. And my favorite tradition, personally, going to Weihnachtsmarkt or Christmas markets.
Claire: Yeah. And I know we’ll also be talking more about those Christmas markets later because they’re so interesting.
Ian: I love them so much. They’re so cool.
Claire: My family, we used to celebrate with a really big dinner. But after the pandemic, we stopped having my extended family over for a lavish meal. We just kind of didn’t pick that tradition back up, even once we were able to sort of start getting back together in those big groups. That said, food is still an important part of our Christmastime traditions. My parents and I eat cheese fondue for dinner every single Christmas Eve.
Ian: I love that.
Claire: Yeah, and that’s our thing. And we do that while we wait for our bayberry candle to burn out. And that is something that we also talked about in the Winter Solstice episode, our bayberry candle and some of our traditions. And food-wise, my dad always gets a chocolate orange in his stocking every year, while I get nonpareils. So my family, we don’t have a feast anymore, but we still eat special foods throughout the day, like charcuterie boards or lots of fruit and chocolate.
Ian: Fruit and chocolate, it just screams like holiday to me, just because for the longest time, they weren’t readily accessible to people. The sweet, the juice, for lack of a better word, the juicy-like the fruits, it was a special thing to have. So it was for a special time. And that just existed as continued throughout traditions to today. Having a big family dinner is definitely a pretty common tradition throughout America. And food is an important part of lots of different celebrations across the world.
Claire: Oh, for sure. Like in Greece, it’s pretty common to get together with special people, friends, family, significant others, and eat roasted lamb or pork with lots of cheese and vegetable-based side dishes. And again, you see the luxury of the dairy-based products and the meat and all that sort of thing. And kids even go out and sing ‘calanda’ or carols, and they’re rewarded with nuts, dried figs, or sweets from the people they sing to.
Ian: Yeah, in Germany, it is super popular to have a big Christmas meal, traditionally carp or goose is served. But it definitely varies from family to family, which is the case in a lot of cultures. Bird is a popular main course, though, as seen by the amount of chicken that my family eats during the holidays. In Portugal, the traditional meat for Christmas is turkey, and it’s the same in France. Other popular dishes tend to be pork or lamb, which is common in Iceland and the Dominican Republic, for example.
Claire: Yeah, I know that fish is also commonly seen in feasts. And one reason for that is because sometimes people will fast for meat and celebrate as pescatarians during Advent. But that’s certainly not always the case. In Italy, on Christmas Eve, there’s actually an event known as the Feast of Seven Fishes. And the abundance of seafood sort of traditionally reflects and represents the family’s religious abstinence from meat until the Christmas Day feast.
Ian: Interesting. So why is feasting and sharing meals (7:04) such a big part of the worldwide Christmas tradition anyway? There has to be a couple of possible reasons for it.
Claire: Absolutely. If we go back to Norse tradition, at Yule and around the solstice, fathers and sons would bring home really big logs in recognition of the sun and its life-giving warmth and light. And so they would burn those logs. And people of the community would feast until the logs burned out, which could take almost two weeks in some records.
Ian: Oh, wow.
Claire: Yeah. And it was commonly believed that each spark from the fire represented a new piglet or calf that would be born that year, and that the length of the fire and feast represented how plentiful their year ahead would be. And around Europe, archaeological and written records show that wintertime was when many cows were slaughtered because then the people wouldn’t have to provide for the cows or feed the cows throughout the long, harsh winter. So many people had a relatively hearty supply of fresh meat in the wintertime, much more so than other times of year. And it just so happened that most wines and beers finished the fermentation process at that point, too, which made them ready for drinking. What’s Christmas without the warmth of a little mulled wine?
Ian: Well, of course. Glühwein is one of my all-time favorite drinks, particularly to have around Christmas time, around the end of the year. And it ties into Christianity, since wine is seen as the blood of Christ.
Claire: Yeah. And I think it’d be fun to talk a little bit more about Christ and Christmas.
Ian: Yeah.I think it’s a pretty well-known fact that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, hence the name of the holiday, Christmas. But why is it on the 25th?
Claire: So it actually originally stems from Roman tradition. On the 25th of December, according to records, many Romans celebrated the birthday of Mithra, the god of the unconquerable sun.
This was long before the year zero, originally, or the general era of the birth of Christ. And we also see continued celebrations surrounding Roman gods for a long time, through and past the year zero. For example, the Romans celebrated Saturn in December around the same time. I believe, originally, it was on the 17th. But then it sort of extended into more of a week-long tradition and celebration. And this celebration of Saturn was typically called Saturnalia.
Ian: Yeah, exactly. And church officials didn’t actually institute the birth of Jesus as a holiday until closer to around the 4th century CE. Pope Julius I was the one who chose the December 25th date. Maybe it was based on the Roman tradition and the efforts to spread Christianity as the reigning religion, but also could have just been a statement. And it’s commonly believed that the church chose this date in an effort to sort of absorb the traditions of the pagan Saturnalia festival. It was originally referred to as the Feast of Nativity and the custom spread to Egypt by 432 CE-ish. And it’s made its way to England by the end of the 6th century.
Claire: And it’s just so interesting to see the mingling of all these different traditions turning into what we celebrate today. And there’s one tradition that has really taken the world by storm. There’s apps that follow this tradition. We see it on TV. It’s kind of something that everybody knows. And that’s Santa Claus.
Ian: Santa!
Claire: And Santa’s path around the world to drop off gifts for nice kids. He does go by different names. And every legend surrounding him is a little different. But he’s a pretty reliable through line. We do see hints of him in ancient Germany where people honored the pagan god Odin during the midwinter holiday. They believed he made nocturnal flights through the sky to observe his people. And then he would decide who would prosper the coming year or perish. So because of his presence, many people chose to stay inside. And I wonder if this is sort of the basis for the idea of the nice list and the naughty list. Except instead of getting gifts, as opposed to, say, coal, you either get to prosper in the year going forward or perish in the year going forward. So we see today that children stay inside. They go to bed early. You know, there’s the idea that, “ooh, if you stay up waiting for Santa, he’s just not gonna come.”
Ian: Yeah, you’re not gonna see him.
Claire: Yeah, and so children are good all year round and hope for gifts as opposed to coal in their stocking if they’re naughty. Yeah. And we also see traditions of Krampus or other sort of mischievous.
Ian: …spirits or beings.
Claire: Yeah. Exactly. We see images of, I know that in Germany, it’s sort of a cloven-hoofed demon that Krampus is.
Ian: Particularly in the south, like the Alps region. So even in Austria and Switzerland, too, yeah.
Claire: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Ian: I know, it’s more region-based. So like the traditional, like what I grew up with, the traditional big-horned, hoofed, kind of demon-esque, it’s very, the Krampus is very much from the Alps, the mountain areas.
Claire: That’s so interesting. I wonder if the idea of the cloven hooves and the big horns is pulled from some of the animals that you might see on a mountain.
Ian: Yeah, it’s possible, yeah. Stags and other wild beasts.
Claire: And it’s so interesting. And we see a lot of traditions surrounding Krampus. And some of these are a lot kinder. These legends are a lot nicer.
Ian: Yeah, they do vary, yeah.
Claire: So for example, we see one where Krampus is leaving golden twigs in stockings for naughty children to remind them to be good in the coming year. In other cases…
Ian: It does get darker.
Claire: Yeah, we see him kidnapping children and stuffing them in sacks.
Ian: Or whipping them with…
Claire: With branches.
Ian: Branches, yeah. It’s not exactly the friendliest, most kid-friendly experience…
Claire: No.
Ian: But it still serves that reminder to be good, to almost like obey kind of like society and all that.
Claire: Definitely, and I’m sure we could talk for hours.
Ian: Yeah, no, most definitely. There’s a whole lot of theory behind what’s the meaning of this abhorrently violent, but super entrenched tradition of this demon who comes around and takes your children.
Claire: Yeah, there’s this idea of divine punishment if you don’t listen to your elders and follow society’s rules. And we see that in a lot of non-Christmas traditions as well.
Ian: Yeah, exactly.
Claire: I wonder if the Krampus sack is related to Santa’s present sack?
Ian: Ooh, that’s a good question, I don’t know.
Claire: If you’re bad, you’re in the sack. If you’re good, you get presents from the sack.
Ian: Exactly. Interesting. Yeah, so turning away from the more…
Claire: Grizzly.
Ian: Grizzly traditions of Christmas, there’s one Christmas tradition that I really want to talk about here, and it’s one of my personal favorites, and that is the tradition of Christmas markets. Weihnachtsmärkte, as they’re known in the German-speaking world, they are a very popular event that take place usually the week around Christmas, so it’s not a month-long thing, but more like a week, week and a half. And they started in 14th century Dresden with, I’m forgetting the name of it exactly, but it just was a time for people to come together and experience a little bit of joy in a very physically dark time, because it’s the middle of winter, it’s near the winter solstice, it’s a dark time all around, so it’s bringing a little bit of light into the world. And it’s stayed relatively similar throughout the centuries, and nowadays there are vendors who will sell foods like Pfannkuchen or Glühwein, the mulled wine, which is so good and also hits you really hard if you haven’t eaten anything. But they’ve turned into enormous events that are now spreading across the world, like the biggest ones I can think of in Nuremberg or the personal one in the city of Kaiserslautern. It’s just so much fun being able to go with your family and have some good Currywurst or Pfannkuchen, Crepes and all that fun stuff.
Claire: Yeah, and I think something interesting to note for context for our listeners is that you lived for a very long time in Germany.
Ian: Yeah, yeah, I did.
Claire: So when you’re talking about your personal traditions, we can learn a lot about non-American traditions, and it’s so cool.
Ian: Yeah, I’m happy to bring a different perspective over.
Claire: Definitely, and I have a question that I just have a personal attachment to because I really love Weißwurst.
Ian: Yeah.
Claire: Is that also typically served at the Weihnachtsmarkt?
Ian: Yeah, so the different types of Weißwurst and Rotwurst, the red and white sausage, it’s really up to preference. They both are served. Weißwurst, I believe, it’s a little more traditional. That’s always what I’ve gotten from events throughout the year, but even at Weihnachtsmarkt, at Christmas markets. But yeah, it’s not exactly like a Christmas thing. It’s just what’s around.
Claire: Yeah, that’s very cool. There’s so many delicious snacks, and I know we’ve spent a lot of time talking about feasting for this episode, but it’s a big tradition around holidays.
Ian: Food’s awesome, so let’s talk about food.
Claire: For sure, and something that is also interesting that the food makes me think of is the scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge is watching the feast of the family, and something about A Christmas Carol, the Charles Dickens holiday classic, is there’s sort of this message of charity and goodwill towards all humankind, and it really struck a chord when it was released in the United States and England, and that’s one of the reasons why goodwill and charity are so hyped up in tradition today.
Ian: Interesting, yeah, that makes sense.
Claire: It’s because we capitalized on that book, and part of it is, in the capitalist nature,
you buy presents to give to everybody.
Ian: Of course, yeah, we see marketing all the time from the beginning of December, even the end of November into New Year’s time, just buy presents, advertising, advertising, advertising.
Claire: Definitely, but it’s also, it’s really, really sweet, and it really speaks to the…
Ian: It really is, though, yeah.
Claire: Yeah, it really speaks to the goodness of humanity, and we talked a bit about wrapping presents and giving presents in our solstice episode, but it’s definitely important to mention the idea that you give presents to people who you love, and you don’t necessarily expect anything back, and it’s just…
Ian: Yeah, it’s connection.
Claire: Exactly, and that’s what Christmas time is all about.
Ian: Yeah, indeed.
Claire: And that’s a beautiful message to end this on, I think.
Ian: Yeah, thank you guys very much for tuning into the show today, and another thanks to our team members and our collaborators with AnthroHub, especially our tech crew. You guys have done amazing work. To stay connected, you can find us on Instagram @anthro.mp3. You can also find our sources, transcripts of each episode, and more in our AnthroHub show notes. I was with your host today, Ian, joined by our other host, Claire, and our tech crew.
Claire: If you enjoyed this episode, first of all, you will love the winter solstice one, episode 11, but you’ll also really enjoy our next one, which is all about agriculture and ancient civilizations.
Ian: Super cool!
Claire: Oh yeah, it’s a fun one.
Ian: And so keep an eye out on our Instagram for future updates to shows, specials, and events. Catch you next time, and have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, lovely Kwanzaa, Frohe Weihnachten, or whatever you’re celebrating this season, friends.
Claire and Ian: Bye!