The Extremist

Christmas and Saturnalia

Last week I was invited to a "Saturnalia." I had to look it up. Webster says "saturnalia" is a synonym for "orgy," which seems wildly optimistic for any soiree at which an overweight, bald geezer like me would be welcome. Either my invite was a careless mistake or I was really invited to a Christmas party whose host was indulging the modern trend to take the Christ out of Christmas. Religiously I am impossible to offend. When you invite O'Boyle to soak up your rum and slurp down your canapes you can call the event whatever you please.

That isn't true for the hypersensitive forces of godlessness however. Unlike the Romans, modern pagans don't have hungry lions to work with. Instead they wield the sword of hurt feelings and launch battalions of earnest, sensitive ACLU lawyers to destroy small town creches and end the scourge of public caroling.

In fairness to modern pantheists, they are right about the origins of Christmas. Christians just barged in and took over. Long before there were Christians, Mediterranean polytheists marked the end of the year with a week long party in memory of an ancient Golden Age ruled over by Saturn, the god of planting, husbandry and thrift. Not a god who would have much of a following today.

The mythical Golden Age was a time of abundance and peace. Slavery and cruelty were unknown. Private property did not exist. The land and all it produced were shared in common. A productive, contented people lived in blissful innocence, unsoiled by ambition, greed or love of money.

Foreshadowing the fate of modern communist utopias, the reign of the good god and kindly monarch vanished. But his memory remained. Shrines in his honor studded the high places of ancient Italy like busts of Marx and Lenin in the sociology departments of Ivy League universities.

By the time Jesus came on the scene, the most barbaric feature of the Saturnalia, human sacrifice, had vanished from polite society. But even though the king of the feast was no longer sacrificed, contemporaries reported a week of reveling that would induce apoplectic seizure in a Puritan.

The Roman celebration featured a mock king called the Lord of Misrule, gift giving, and role reversal for slaves and masters. For a week slaves had the run of the villa. They ate, drank and bossed their masters around as if they had become the masters themselves. Perhaps a new pagan triumph would get us a week off from airport strip searches and bureaucratic ring kissing.

In the first few hundred years after Christ's death his followers spread like a wet blanket over the debauched glory of pagan Rome. The Roman authorities resisted conversion by publicly murdering Christians in imaginative and gruesome ways. But Christ's message enthralled mankind like no message had before.

In the marketplace of ideas Christianity had more to offer than paganism. Where heathen nostalgia looked wistfully back to a communist utopia, the ironies of Christianity looked forward to a kingdom of light and everlasting life. Christianity was freighted with promise of redemption and peace. And of course, you can't beat rising from the dead to make a lasting impression.

Christian paradox replaced heathen simplicity. For Christians, grace and glory came not from great works that appeased angry gods but from good deeds and humility. Christians told us that to get, we must give. To live forever, we must die. To triumph we must love our enemies.

Paradox often inspires confusion and mistrust. It's no wonder that pagans, who trust no higher authority than that of emperors, senators or presidents, don't trust Christians or the ironic message of their God.

After 400 years of abuse from Roman politicians, Christians were able to start bossing pagans around. In 391 Theodosius I, the last emperor of a united Roman Empire and a Christian, made Christianity the official state religion. He turned the Saturnalia into Christmas. He outlawed pagan holidays that he hadn't preempted for Christ. Like a one-man anti-pagan ACLU he disbanded the Vestal Virgins.

From then on Christians were in charge, usually showing they were no better than the pagans who had tormented them. Christians were as susceptible to corruption, folly and the madness of crowds as any pack of heathens. They followed lunatics like Peter the Hermit to the Crusades, tortured heretics under Torquemada, fought a Hundred Years War, burned witches, and much more, all with the murderous verve of Nero or Diocletian.

But because Christians have often failed to live perfect Christian lives doesn't diminish the power of Christ's message or extinguish the hope of mercy and redemption that He offered. That Christmas is just a pagan solstice ritual painted up in red and green doesn't make a message of universal peace less worth celebrating. At Christmas we celebrate our striving to transcend weakness, fear and fallibility not our success at having done so. If a few fanatical nonbelievers take offense at such a celebration, it seems a small price to pay.

In the spirit of the season, and at the risk of offending sensitive non-Christians who have read this far, I will recall for you the famous line from the Nativity story in the Gospel of Luke. It summarizes the bright promise of Christianity and shines over Christmas with the simple eloquence of the star above the stable:

"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

I wish you, one and all, a Merry Christmas.

This essay is from Democracy the Painted Whore. Which, by the way, would make a perfect Christmas gift!

Blue Plywood Duck of Peace

It’s that time of year again when my wife badgers me into Christmas preparations. Something about the holidays compels her to dream up symbolic objects for me to saw out of plywood and festoon with lights. Last year it was an eight-foot high peace symbol. This year I spent a couple days assembling what my brother refers to as The Duck of Peace. No politics this year, just peace.

A clumsy craftsman, I approach the project grumbling and grumpy. But somewhere amid drilling, sawing, and stapling, the Christmas spirit latches on to me like a panhandler onto a tourist.

We lay it out in the dark, in the carport. The plywood, smudged with pencil marks in the rough shape of a dove, or chicken, or duck ― who can tell ― doesn’t look promising. It looks like something little kids have scrawled on a sidewalk.

As I put jigsaw to plywood expecting disaster, Father Christmas grants an unlikely gift. The silhouette looks pretty good. It looks really good. Dovelike… smooth… Picassoesque… I warm to the project. I think about the Jolly Old Fat Man.

St. Nicholas, Nicholas of Myra, Nicholas of Bari, all names of the same fourth century cleric who is the Christian predecessor of the secular Santa, made his reputation, as many saints do, with kindness and miracles. He saved three girls from lives as streetwalkers by giving each a dowry of gold. Saints, fairies and leprechauns all pay in gold . I admire the honesty of imaginary creatures.

Much more impressively, St. Nicholas is also said to have restored three children to life after an evil butcher cut them up and soaked them in tubs of brine. No wonder nostalgia for the Dark Ages is scarce. But as miracles go, raising people from the dead is hard to beat. Nick was a shoe-in for sainthood.

Six hundred years after his death, devoted fans boosted St. Nick’s remains from his hometown of Myra, Turkey, and brought them to Bari, Italy. In 1087 Frederic II built a basilica to store the relics. There is little that will improve your saintly reputation more than a king building a cathedral to shelter your bones. St. Nick’s popularity surged throughout Europe.

He became the patron saint of Greece and Russia, of thousands of churches, of children, unmarried girls and ironically, sailors, whose interest in unmarried girls is anything but saintly. Apropos of our modern secular celebration and its orgy of shopping, St. Nicholas is also the patron saint of merchants and pawnbrokers.

I mess around with the Duck of Peace some more. Back lighting doesn’t work. I paint it white. I try rope lights behind the silhouette. It looks like an unfinished road sign, offering incomplete directions to nowhere.

After the Reformation St. Nicholas fell into disfavor in all the Protestant countries except Holland. Protestants could be such wet blankets. The Puritans in England and America banned celebrating Christmas. But Sinterklaas, as he was known by the Dutch, lived on, and blended with the legend of a Nordic magician who punished naughty children and gave presents to good ones. Sinterklaas made it across the Atlantic to New Amsterdam, later New York, where he became Santa Claus.

I hang the plywood duck. It spins in the wind. I take it down again, add a couple stabilizing wires, and put it back up. A foot and a half of rope lights won’t light. I take it down again and spend an hour replacing defective rope lights.

Santa wasn’t a player in American holiday lore until the middle of the 19th century. Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem, A Visit from Saint Nicholas, (“‘twas the night before Christmas…”) became enormously popular and began our love affair with the fat man. Moore didn’t even bother claiming authorship until 20 years later, when Santa had become a lot better known.

By the middle of the 19th century, illustrator Thomas Nast, who invented the comical images of donkeys and elephants to symbolize the two parties, used Moore’s description to draw the first popular version of our modern Santa. The jolly red-suited Santa was further refined and fixed in our holiday tradition by a popular series of advertisements drawn by Haddon Sundblum for the Coca Cola Company beginning in 1931. Never underestimate the power of a good ad or of wearing red.

I finally got the duck outlined in lights and stable on its wires, but it was still unimpressive until our friend Christopher showed up with some design advice. I can count on Chrisopher to warn me of the worst fashion and interior decorating faux pas which, as a chronic heterosexual, are a constant peril for me. He suggests a blue floodlight. The Duck of Peace is transformed. No longer a childish pencil sketch on plywood, it now looks cool… a grown up symbol… the perfect holiday image for my family this year, our first without the kindly deception of Santa Claus.

Our two boys are not little any more. Home schooling has extended their naïveté by a year or two, but now, at 11 and 12, certainty has replaced suspicion. They boldly tell us they know the truth. My wife and I, like Democrats caught with pistols, have no comment. We neither confirm nor deny, but we know we’ve been found out. I love how grown up and smart our sons have become. I mourn their lost innocence.

My holiday decorating chore is done. Even without Santa’s help, I’m ready to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. At the end of my sons’ boyhood, in my home behind the Blue Plywood Duck of Peace and in yours wherever you are, may the kind and generous spirit of Saint Nicholas bless us, one and all.