Dr. Gerry Bowler is a preeminent authority on all things Christmas. Additionally, he is a scholar in medieval and early-modern European history, and an authority on the intersections of religion and popular culture. Having written both academically and for popular audiences, Dr. Bowler is literally a walking dictionary of facts and stories. Though, more than that, he can put such details into a broader cultural perspective. And that makes him, like Christmas, most timely indeed. To learn more about Dr. Bowler, visit his website: www.gerrybowler.com/bio
[Radix] What got you started on specializing in Christmas?
[GB] Well, I was trained as an early modern historian, so my work was in sixteenth century political theory. And that wasn’t getting me much in the way of jobs or attention. One day I was invited to a Christmas party at Dr. John Stackhouse’s house, and everybody was to bring a little non-commercial gift to the party. My wife was a singer and sang a Christmas song. As a historian, I thought it’d be interesting to do a little Christmas history quiz-and-answer. The crowd went wild and said it was worthy of a book. I thought, why not? Knowing there has never been a Christmas encyclopedia, I set out to write one. I spent about ten years accumulating data. A friend connected me to McClelland & Stewart, and that was the start of what was going to be called The World Encyclopedia of Christmas (2000). Just as mine went to print, two other Christmas encyclopedias went to print. Funny how we have two thousand years with nothing and then in one year three appear. Luckily, mine outshone the rest. Then somebody asked me to write Santa Claus: A Biography (2005). I started teaching the social history of Christmas and then I was interested in the war against Christmas, so I wrote Christmas in the Crosshairs (2016).
[Radix] I know you get asked this a lot, but what is the actual and authentic date of Christ’s birth?
[GB] The question is interesting for a couple of reasons. Opponents of Christmas, starting hundreds of years ago, asserted we shouldn’t be celebrating Christmas because we don’t even know when the Nativity took place. And if God had wanted us to celebrate Christmas, he would have made that clear. We also have pagan appropriators who like to claim that Christmas is really just Yule-with-the-baby-Jesus. So, the defense of December 25th takes on all kinds of baggage.
Christmas was not on anybody’s mind for the first century of the Church; they were much more interested in the imminent return of Jesus. But it’s the arrival of the Gnostics and their claim that Jesus took no bodily form, that Jesus was a spirit, that shook things up a bit. The notion of a God coming to Earth and having flesh and feces and eating food and burping was just too gross. For such people, we were on Earth to escape our prison of flesh and bone, so they had to deny the full physicality of Christ. This denial led Christians to say, no, hang on, we’ve got stories about an actual birth in an actual place. And why would they mention swaddling clothes if Jesus had no body? That led to people getting interested in the fact that there was a physical Nativity.
The consequent question then was, should we celebrate it? Some said no, because that’s the kind of thing that pagans get up to. Only emperors or pharaohs or King Herod celebrate birthdays. But others argued differently; after all, if it was a real event, it’s worth celebrating, right? Thus, they figured that a date should be selected. So, at least the Church in the West, by the fourth century when Christianity was just becoming legal, picked December 25th. The naysayers said, well, that date was obviously chosen because of the cluster of midwinter festivals that the Romans had, and therefore Christians were either trying to appropriate paganism or trying to slip it in unnoticed amidst the fun and frolic. And so that was accepted by most people for centuries.
Starting about a hundred years ago, though, and then really in the last twenty or thirty years, historians have adopted what’s called the calculation theory, which says that there was a very arcane computation made to pick December 25th: every great human is said to have been born and died on the same calendar date. So, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and people like that all lived and died on the same date. If that’s the case, then we can pick the date of Christ’s crucifixion and his likely birth date. The thought went that God would have created the world at the beginning of spring. And what better way than to create the Word in fleshly form? But that would only have applied to his conception. So, March 25th becomes the Annunciation, the conception of Jesus, and then nine months hence becomes December 25th. That was backed up with calculations to the date of John the Baptist father’s tribe’s service in the temple. The Middle Ages seem to accept that John the Baptist was born at midsummer, the summer solstice, which corresponds to Jesus being born at the midwinter solstice. So there’s another proof for December 25th. The final cherry on the topic is the Church of Rome claiming actual paperwork of Joseph’s registration in Bethlehem. Eastern churches agreed with the calculation theory, but their calculation was based on Egyptian calendars, so they ended up with January 6th. It took a good deal of browbeating from the western Church over a century before the East fell in line with the West, ending up with our present dates. And that is the story of December 25th.
[Radix] One of your latest books, Christmas in the Crosshairs, deals with the war on Christmas. What can you tell us about that juicy topic?
[GB] The whole book was written to document two thousand years of a war, or wars, over Christmas. Those who say that it’s a right-wing fable simply haven’t been doing the reading. My book covers the opposition that Christmas runs into over the centuries and the appropriation that various groups attempt to make. So, as I say in the book, Christmas is the biggest thing going. There’s no human event that is as consequential every year as Christmas: not New Year’s, no other religious festival, no stadium rock tour, no World Cup, no election is as big as just an annual, every-year Christmas. Every country has to come to grips with it some way or another, even something as mighty as Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia or Mao Tse-tung’s China.
[Radix] You could almost say tyrants are afraid of Christmas?
[GB] Oh, absolutely. It is the beginning of the greatest story ever told. It’s a powerful, powerful thing that, like Herod right from the beginning, has them trembling in the palace.
[Radix] Can you speak more about the political aspects of Christmas, about its relation to meaningful freedom?
[GB] Christmas is the beginning of the story that frees humanity from death. If you honestly believe in the Christian message your life is devoid of all kinds of existential dread. We live differently because we believe that, as the Apostles’ Creed says, “We believe… in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”
The present subservience of American conservative Christianity to a particular version of enlightenment-liberty is sad. I despise the Enlightenment and much of what it did. I think everything started going wrong in 1776. So, the Cross has no place on the same rostrum as the American eagle or the Canadian beaver or the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack; it has a peculiar kind of message of its own. But having said that, from the American point of view, the war on Christmas really is a war about how the Constitution will let religious speech appear in the marketplace.
I think this is something that all Christians ought to be taking seriously. But for the time being, it’s only the political right that’s doing so. And they are correct to say that there is a war against Christmas, that the actions of school boards and universities seem to be against it, and that includes any public organization or any corporation with a coordinator encouraging diversity. There is hostility against Christians taking the stage in December and saying, we’ve got news for you and there’s more to Christmas than just a tree and wrapping paper. The other interesting thing is that the secularists in charge of universities and governments and so on are actually making war on the consumer side of Christmas as well. For them, a Christmas tree is as evil as a Nativity scene.
[Radix] Oh, that reminds me! Speaking of traditions, is the Christmas tree a pagan symbol?
[GB] No, no. There’s one Old Testament passage that says don’t bring evergreens into the temple, and then there’s another one that says when you’re decorating the temple, be sure to bring in your evergreens. The Christmas tree is really just part of the desire at midwinter to bring greenery inside. Three things are part of every midwinter festival of all religions. One is light and fire because it’s the darkest time of the year. One is feasting because this is the time of the year when food is at its most plentiful, the harvest is in, the beer is made, and so on. And the third is greenery. The idea is to go out and bring in anything on the landscape that’s green to remind you that spring will come again. The Germans in the sixteenth century are responsible for many, many Christmas traditions. They started lopping off the tops of evergreens, bringing them in and hanging them upside down, not decorating them. It’s just greenery in the house, bringing in holly and ivy and mistletoe and so on. By the end of the century they are bringing in bigger trees and decorating them and they start being lit. There’s nothing terribly pagan about it.
Much of that belief comes from the worship of the oak tree by Teutonic pagans. There is a story written at the end of the nineteenth century by an American named Henry Van Dyke, who said that the originator of the Christmas tree was St. Boniface, who interrupted human sacrifice. Seeing a chief in a German forest who was about to sacrifice his son, he said, Stop! You don’t have to sacrifice your son, chief. You worship this oak, which I now chop down. And if you want to worship a tree, here is a young evergreen symbolizing everlasting life, etcetera. It may also come out of the paradise tree that used to be on the sets of medieval mystery plays. The earliest mention we have of anything like Christmas trees are poles decorated with greenery that were set up outside in London and in German merchant colonies in Latvia or Estonia in the fifteenth century. In other words, if there were some kind of pagan connection, historians cannot discover it. In my opinion, it’s actually part of this whole notion of pagans trying to gain their way into respectability by appropriating Christmas.
[Radix] That is really interesting, the idea that pagans are actually trying to appropriate elements of Christmas. What a switch from some of my friends who believe just the opposite! What about Santa Claus, and the fear that some people have of that?
[GB] Yeah, good question. I know that there are very nice people who think that Santa Claus is a bad idea because it’s telling a lie and you must never tell lies to kids. In fact, it is, as Plato would say, a noble lie. It is such a gift in itself to give kids this. It’s a heightened sense of expectation, a different sense of time. The notion that there is someone who doesn’t know you but loves you and will come and give you good things teaches you about generosity. And when kids do discover the truth about Santa Claus, overwhelmingly they’re cool with it. There’s initially maybe some horror, but always they get into the family conspiracy. They’re happy to know something that adults know that the little brothers and sisters don’t. So for me it’s a good thing. And I’m sorry for families that don’t have it. And as I say, the Santa Claus myth is a conspiracy by parents and has nothing to do with merchants. It’s negotiated individually in each family and perpetuated over the generations. It’s an astonishing act of generosity where parents could be getting the gratitude for these gifts. Yes, it’s just mysterious. And I don’t want to hear a word against it.
[Radix] Excellent. That’s authoritatively stated. Dr. Christmas has spoken. Something you said about Christmas being the greatest story ever told struck me. Obviously, if Christmas is the greatest story it’s timeless, right? What are some of the timeless traits and characteristics that all Christians during Christmas have shared?
[GB] Festivity. Festival is a time apart. It is special. Festival allows a different kind of dwelling in the Spirit. And I say that because there’s a huge chunk of Christianity that is opposed to festivity, that confuses Christmas with Lent. We cannot confuse Lent with Christmas. We can’t confuse Good Friday with Christmas Eve. There are times for us to mourn, times for us to belabor ourselves for our failures. Anyway, I used to debate the festival opposers every year here in Winnipeg. Winnipeg was the center of the Buy Nothing Christmas movement.
I used to debate them every year and it came back to this point that the Christian year is not flat. Protestants can tend to make it flat. But in reality, the Christian year has always had ups and downs: joy, grief, abstinence, and blowout celebration. That’s why I think I finally ended up in Anglicanism after drifting through Evangelicalism. What happens throughout the Christian year is important. So something timeless that Christians have always done is to consider that the birth of the baby Jesus was worth celebrating. So yes, Christmas didn’t always have presents, but always joy. Always festivity. The other aspect that we don’t emphasize enough is magic, and an emphasis on the supernatural. The Enlightenment, again, has sucked the magic out of the universe. It has disenchanted the landscape. Christians believe in astonishing stuff. Just recite the Apostles’ Creed. Christmas points to something different, something we can look forward to.
It’s also the world turned upside down. Jesus not coming to a palace, not being born to Herod or to Augustus, but being born to this peasant family. Who are the first people God tells about this? It’s shepherds, and shepherds are like God going to the pimps saying, spread the news. A pimp might say, well, you know, we kind of have a bad reputation; why ask us? After all, shepherds were deemed to be ritually unclean. Their testimony did not count in court. Christmas showcases God’s willingness to surprise us. He uses foreigners, pagans, and star worshippers. That’s the second part that goes along with hope and unexpectedness, that reversal of the ordinary and then the supernatural.
[Radix] Can you speak more on the social aspects—cross-culturally and for people on the margins—that Christmas played historically?
[GB] Well, let’s take a look at the Twelve Days of Christmas, that invention of what we call late antiquity where the working people get twelve days off. It’s to be socially enforced and literally gets built into the feudal system. So, for instance, a lot of feudal contracts have the feudal lord obligated to provide hospitality and roast beef and beer and firewood and so on to their tenants at the worst time of the year. That’s pretty amazing.
Christmas is also a time to emphasize charity. Dickens totally revolutionized Christmas. He tacked conviviality onto morality, to the obligation for charity and forgiveness, to reconciliation and the power of the supernatural. He tried to bring the classes together. It really changed the attitude toward Christmas in nineteenth century Britain, and then the world. So just in terms of physical and moral comfort, at the worst time of the year, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, Christmas did that on an annual basis. This is powerful stuff!
But in general, I think that what Christmas has tended to do is to affect us more on a personal than a geopolitical level. Christmas is the one time of the year when we are expected to act better. We’re expected to be more patient, more giving. We don’t do it for the Fourth of July. We don’t do it for Canada Day. So, yeah, it does change us.
[Radix] What else is unique to Christmas?
[GB] Christmas is about being anchored and traditional and doing things the same – it’s about remembering. Where January 1st celebrations are forward-looking ones; they’re unconnected to the past. Christmas is rooted. It’s remembering a particular time and place. It’s about remembering Christmases you had as a child. It’s about having those ornaments that you’ve always put on the tree.
[Radix] Speaking of ornaments, can you tell us about the Anglican priest who handed out brass knuckles to the congregants to protect Christmas? I have noticed that during interviews you always get asked about this, and, well, who I am to break tradition?
[GB] Well, one of the things that saved Christmas in the nineteenth century in England was the Oxford movement, sometimes called the Tractarian Movement. Christmas had virtually died. It was on life support early in the 1800s and was saved by Charles Dickens and by collectors of Christmas carols, who go into the boonies and collect these orally transmitted carols that we love to sing, and by the Oxford movement, which was kind of a neo-Catholic revival of church ceremonial interest in the church year, of decoration and of Gothic architecture. A lot of this neo-Catholic stuff looked like Catholicism to some people. There were some ultra-Protestant Anglicans who objected to things like carol services and Nativity scenes and putting Christmas trees in churches. These people would literally physically attack churches that had this. And so, there’s the story of the one Anglican priest who handed out equalizers to his congregation. We call them knuckledusters. The English call them something else – brass knuckles, knuckledusters. Apparently, that priest thought that threats to Christmas trappings should be taken very seriously.
[Radix] Do you have any suggestions to make this Christmas special, despite COVID-19?
[GB] If you can adapt what you have as a tradition and save it somehow in the time of this virus, that’s something to strive for. One thing that we used to do with the kids before they opened their presents was to have breakfast and then have everybody take a turn reading a verse or two out of the Nativity story. So, we’re going to try and do that by Zoom this time, to hand it off from one place to another. So definitely, if you can digitize your roots, that’s something to do. The point is to focus on the important parts of Christmas.
There is a wonderful Italian hymn which asks of Jesus, why? Why did you do this? Why did you come to Earth? Why are you shivering in the cold? I know it’s so that I can love you. You come in the most lovable shape possible, not as a judge. You come as this helpless thing that yanks our hearts out. That’s something that everybody reacts to and which we don’t emphasize enough. I think Christmas is the big missed public relations event of the year for Christianity.
[Radix] Oh, preach that!
[GB] We don’t do our part. We give commercial Christmas and the opponents of Christmas the stage, though the English churches do a really good job of billboard advertising campaigns to bring Christmas home. And, you know, we put up something argumentative like, He’s the reason for the season, but there’s this fabulous story here. There are angels, for crying out loud, mystery, secret police, a miraculous pregnancy, danger, poignancy. We could be doing much, much better.
[Radix] Please send us off with a few last words.
[GB] Yes, I would say, take the load off Mom; figure out a way in your family roster of duties to make sure that Mom is not a wrung-out wreck by Christmas afternoon. The greatest of all Christmas stories is “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas. And if you ever get a chance to see the video of it with Denholm Elliott, the English actor, it is peerless. But one of the scenes is after dinner when the uncles all retire to the couch and loosen their vests and sort of all fall asleep. And you can be sure it’s the women in the kitchen who are, you know, doing the dishes. So, yeah, take the load off Mom, that would be one. Next, start a new Christmas tradition this year so that when you remember the “Covid Christmas,” you remember, oh yeah, that was the year we started doing something neat.