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Yule vs. Giftmas vs. Christmas

I used to be annoyed by how early "Christmas" starts.  This year, the "Christmas" decorations were in stores before the Halloween decorations.  Turkeymas was all but forgotten in the rush to Christmas.  


If I had my druthers, I'd mandate the following:

1. You can only say "Happy Holidays" or "Blessed Advent" until December 24th.
2. Only Advent hymns until December 24th.
3. No Christmas lights until December 24th.  Then they stay up for 12 days. 
4. Nativity scenes can't display Jesus until the 24th or the Magi until January 6th.  
5. Gift-giving occurs on January 6th (Epiphany or Tres Reyes).  

I came up with that list about 15 years ago and realized immediately that it would never happen.  But, as I looked at the list, I realized that it also bore the solution for me to not go full humbug every year.  The realization is this:

There are three festivals that happen in December: the human (Yule), the secular (Giftmas) and the Christian (Advent and Christmas).  Obviously, there's a lot of overlap, but defining these three has helped me tremendously.


This is the easiest one because there's the least I, or anyone, can do about it.  It was bemoaned all the way back in the late 60s in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.  It's the reason "Christmas" happens earlier and earlier every year ... because it's about money.  A solution could be to do what Latinos do (less and less), the Medieval practice, which is to give presents on Epiphany (Tres Reyes).  Makes sense.  Or convert to Eastern Orthodoxy.  Also, you get all the post-Christmas sale options, too.  But, as that's not going to happen, I just mentally spin it off into its own thing (not even a "holy" day, really) and try to ignore it.  

𐌾𐌹𐌿𐌻𐌴𐌹𐍃 - YULE

The other word is the Gothic predecessor (maybe) to the word "yule" and I only used it because it looks so damn cool!  

Short version: This is everything having to do with the season, with the Winter Solstice and all of that.  The snow, the lights, a lot of stuff that's been looped into the story of St. Nicholas, etc.  If you'll listen to the lyrics of most of the songs that are played during December, even if they say "Christmas," they're not about Christ.  They're about Winter.  I don't have a problem with this, it's not anti-Christian (or is less so than Giftmas), etc.  If that's sufficient, you can skip down to the Christmas section.  

Long version: Need to talk about "paganism" for a moment.  For a lot of people, including Evangelical Christians and self-proclaimed pagans, "pagan" means non-Christian or pre-Christian religion.  Often, people loop in polytheism.  Anything not explicitly found in the Bible is considered pagan.  Thus, Evangelicals talk about the corruption of Christianity by pagansism (because Catholics) to make Christianity less Christian and Pagans talk about the appropriation of pagan customs (because Catholics) to make Christianity more palatable to pagans.  This is a short and hilarious way to put it.  

My family was looped into all this nonsense.  We started using "Resurrection Sunday" because "Easter" was based on the name and feast of Ishtar (it's not).  My sisters burned their Cabbage Patch dolls because they are named for Hindu deities in the factory (they aren't).  And we came damn close to ejecting the Christmas tree, Santa and all of that as pagan as well.  I think my mom put a stop to that one because she loooooooooved Christmas and everything about it.  

The thing is that if you look for non-Christian elements anywhere, you're going to find them because almost everything was something else before it was Judaism or Christianity.  Ever been to Wednesday Night Worship?  Were you worshiping Odin?  Because that's what "Wednesday" means.  Odin's Day.  The English words "day" and "father" derive ultimately from a (probable) Proto-Indo European deity, Dyḗus ph₂tḗr, literally "day-father".  The word "deity" does, too, as do Jupiter, Zeus, deus and pater and a host of other words.  

Even Hebrew culture has remnants of paganism.  The word "Adonai" is cognate with "Adonis," a Greek god.  The paleo-Hebrew abjad (alphabet ... kind of) was preceded by a Phoenician script which, itself, likely was adapted from an Egyptian phonetic script. 

Quick aside: I have a private theory which I cannot prove but want to believe to the point that I will.  It is likely that all phonetic writing originated from a simplified version of Egyptian hieroglyphs used for phonetic writing.  The Bronze Age Collapse happened around the 12th century B.C. and the Hebrews had fled Egypt 100 to 300 years before that.  The Hebrews were led by Moses, who had been Egyptian royalty.  Now, royalty were educated, but a scribe's education in a culture with an ideographic/pictographic writing system was quite intense and I doubt the royalty were fully literate in that sense.  So, Moses and the Hebrews, who had no writing yet, flee Egypt.  Moses needs a way to write shit down, so he uses the Egyptian phonetic script or just modifies the Egyptian glyphs he knows for the Hebrew language.  Then, several centuries later, the Mediterranean world collapses and this writing system the Hebrews are using (which, at the time, looked VERY different from the one they use now) becomes the standard around the Mediterranean.  It eventually morphs into the Greek and later Roman alphabets. 

Back to what I was saying.  One can prove that pretty much anything has a pagan origin.  But what's fascinating is that, a lot of times, we take that for granted when it may not be true.  Consider a lot of the claims about Christmas.  

1. The Christmas Tree is pagan.  There's evidence of arboreal worship in pre-Christian religions, but no evidence that the Christmas Tree has any connection to such practices.  It's a non-sequitur.  Correspondence, not causality.  Evidence indicates that the Christmas Tree is not only Christian, but Protestant in origin.  This is a good source.  

2. December 25th was chosen because of Saturnalia or the Sol Invictus or Yule or Mithras or [insert some other Winter Solstice based celebration here].  Maybe.  My brother and many others are convinced that Jesus was born sometime in September, I think.  I'm not a Hebrew scholar, but I am scholar enough to be extremely wary of trying to set any kind of solid date based on a Lunar calendar.  For all I know, Jesus was born on Juneteenth.  And there is some evidence that seems to indicate Christmas was set on the Winter Solstice intentionally.  The Church father Cyprian (d. 258) remarked (De pasch. Comp., xix): “O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born…Christ should be born.”  In the fourth century, Chrysostom, "del Solst. Et Æquin." (II, p. 118, ed. 1588), says: "But Our Lord, too, is born in the month of December . . . the eight before the calends of January [25 December] . . ., But they call it the 'Birthday of the Unconquered'. Who indeed is so unconquered as Our Lord . . .? Or, if they say that it is the birthday of the Sun, He is the Sun of Justice."

But, there is also evidence that the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25th) is the older feast based on two traditions.  

1. That Adam and Eve fell on that date.  
2. That Jesus died on that date and that the conception of a prophet occurs on the same date as their death.  

Anyway, the feast of December 25th as Jesus' birthday was just dated 9 months after the (maybe) earlier feast of the Annunciation.  It also could have happened the other way around.  (This is a good, if lengthy, discussion on the topic.)  Bottom line: It cannot be conclusively stated that Jesus was or was not born on December 25th or that the date of December 25th was or was not chosen because of any pre-existing holy day.  

3. Santa Claus is pagan.  Ehhhhh ... complicated.  St. Nicholas wasn't.  He was a real person and a badass.  Kris Kringle is DEFINITELY not pagan.  It comes from the word "Christkindl", a Christ-child character that Martin Luther tried to introduce to replace the veneration of St. Nicholas.  A lot of the other stuff?  Maybe.  I wouldn't be at all upset if we returned to a more historically accurate veneration of St. Nicholas on December 6th and got it untangled with Christmas entirely.  Seems unlikely.  Ultimately ... I don't care.  

I hope you can see that a lot of the Christmas-is-pagan stuff is just bad history ... mostly propaganda created by anti-Catholic Evangelicals with an agenda and neo-pagans with a surprisingly similar agenda.  Strange bedfellows and all.  

Regardless, even if it were pagan in origin ... I don't care.  Things that came before Christ or Christianity aren't, in and of themselves, evil.  You may have noted, in #2, that there are multiple feasts that occur around the Winter Solstice.  That should tell you something.  Consider a person living in Northern Europe around December in 200 A.D.  They had brought in the last harvest several months before (with much feasting and celebration) and it would going to be many months before they could even start planting, much less harvesting.  They come to December 21st, the longest night of the year.  Sunrise on the next day brings with it a promise, that the days will get longer and longer until the time will come when they can plant and harvest again, when food will be plentiful, when death by starvation won't be a constant worry.  

Wouldn't you celebrate?  Wouldn't you sing songs about the sun, whether you worshiped it or not, and put up lights and drink alcohol and party a bit?  I should hope so!  Unless you're Calvinist.  They don't like to party.  

And so, all the winter stuff, the lights and the cocoa and a lot of the songs, I class as "Yule."  Now, if you search for Yule, you will find a lot of utter bullshit based on a lot of spurious sources.  Here's a hella-brief summary of some reliable information:

1. The Old English/Anglo-Saxon feast of midwinter was called geol with the month before being called Ærra-Geol-monaþ (before-Yule-month, or December).  
2. Yule basically means either "feast/festival" or comes from a PIE word meaning "joke/jest" and is potentially the origin of our word "jolly."  
3. There are "pagan" connotations.  For example, some of the titles of Odin contain the Norse rendering of yule (jol) and mean, essentially, "Father of the feast/festival".  But the word yule/jol does not refer to Odin specifically any more than the word "father" refers to Odin, the All-Father, specifically.  

That's pretty much it.  But, as I said before, it's perfectly normal, human thing to celebrate things like harvests and birthdays and solstices without them being specifically associated with a particular religion, Christian, Pagan, Norse, Celtic or whatever.  No one gets a monopoly on that.  


Finally, there's Christmas.  By which I mean the specific, intentional celebration of the birth of Christ.  As mentioned earlier, there's actually precious little of that in all the stuff you see in Wal Mart or hear on the radio.  It's mostly Giftmas and Yule.  But, going back to my original rules, the main way I try to do this is through hymns and things specifically referencing Christ.  

There's a LOT of Advent hymns that are really great, so try to keep to those before Christmas Eve.  
Also, keep the Baby Jesus out of the Nativity scene until Christmas Eve as well.  

Then, on Christmas Eve, go all out for the next 12 days until Epiphany.  Annoy your friends and neighbors by wishing them, "Merry Christmas," on December 29th!  They'll hate you for it.  Keep those lights up!  And listen to actual Christmas carols during that period:
Then, maybe, give out gifts on Epiphany instead of Christmas.  Maybe, instead of putting the Christ back in Christmas, put the MASS back in Christmas.  Go to church with the fam!  

But, at the very least, I hope that spinning off Yule and Giftmas in your head will help you, as it's helped me, to be less annoyed during this time of year.  In conclusion, most of what you're seeing and hearing isn't about Christ so ... who cares?  

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