Imagine for a moment you’re a Roman citizen in AD 320 or so. All your life, you’ve merrily celebrated on December 25th the feast of the birthday of Sol Invictus – the ‘Invincible Sun’ and patron deity of the emperor. Now, though, Emperor Constantine has rebranded it the Feast of the Nativity, for his new upstart deity Jesus Christ, the true sun god so he claims. You are irate. How dare he trample over our festival? OK, so he’s the emperor; he can do what he wants.
You share your grievances over a jug of beer with a Germanic pagan a few years downstream, and you have an instant ally. His Yuletide festival has similarly been born again as Christmastide. “Put Yule back into Yuletide!” “Put Sol back into Sol Invictus!” your banners proclaim.
We sometimes brandish the slogan ‘Put Christ back into Christmas!’ Some historical realism is needed. We Christians did rather steal the festival in the first place! We can’t complain too much if it gets subsumed by some later ideology.
And subsumed it largely is. The new gods of consumerism have no shame in which festival they appropriate. Recently celebrated Halloween has exploded commercially in recent years. I write this just before so-called Black Friday, when retailers sell at wildly marked-down prices. The marketing people have scored another extraordinary success; in the US, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, somewhat like our Boxing Day sales – we don’t even have Thanksgiving yet have been sucked into the commercial vortex. Christmas shopping now almost seems calm in comparison. Somewhere under all these layers at this time of year, Jesus’s ‘birthday’ is buried.
Does he mind? Or is he too humble? A stable in an unknown village to poor parents, hardly the background of someone who wants to make a fuss. He would rather we remember his death and resurrection. He’ll be happy, though, if we do celebrate his birth. After all, God’s incarnation as one of us is a remarkable moment in time.
Meanwhile we have long dark nights and winter’s cold to get through. Bonus food and drink may ease the passage. The Romans and Pagans got some things right.
I hope you have a restful and enjoyable celebratory Christmas.
