As we finish up this semester of discussing appropriation, perhaps it would be timely to discuss an element of our society that has been appropriated and re-appropriated numerous times – to the point where very few people acknowledge the original foundations and contexts: the celebrations surrounding December 25.

For most of us who celebrate Christmas, the idea conjures up a collection of pleasant images. Christmas stimulates thoughts of family gathered around a decorated tree, of music and light and the comforting smell of a special dinner cooking on a snowy winter day. Carolers at the door, sleigh rides, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and sugar plums also come into play, although almost no one today experiences any of these.

It has become commonplace for religious and other specialists to criticize what they consider the poisoning of Christmas with commercialism. Such people usually call for a return to the “real meaning” of Christmas, either as a Christian celebration of Jesus’ birth or as a spiritual celebration of “family values.”. These critiques speculate a Christmas observance from which we have fallen, in which they assume that Christmas was once a religious holiday into which the shopping mall has worked itself.

It’s interesting to remember that before the Roman Empire was “Christianized”, the holiday was not celebrated. In order to appease the communities being overthrown, Church leaders appropriated the traditional pagan celebrations around the time of the winter solstice. While there was absolutely no scriptural basis for celebrating the birth of Jesus at all, let alone in December, this presented itself a convenient vehicle by which the Church could use a pagan holiday for Christian motive.

During the early settlement of the United States, the celebration of Christmas was actually banned by the Puritans who took offense to the excessive drinking, and gluttony of the adults, and permitted begging by children that were associated with the holiday’s pagan roots.

So as we head home to celebrate the birth of Jesus, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, or whichever groups appropriation of the atmospheric phenomenon of the shortest days of the year we subscribe to, let us not forget what it is that we are indeed celebrating…

now, what is it that we are celebrating again?

happy holidays!

jennifer