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Spirit of Christmas past

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THIS STORY APPEARED IN

December 25, 2011

The Origins of Christmas takes us through the tussle over deciding Jesus… (istockphoto )

Ah, Christmas, that glorious May 20 holiday, when we recall how Jesus was born in a cave with the aid of an anxious midwife. Wait, start over. Ah, Christmas, that fine feast day of March 25, with no Bethlehem census, no three kings. Scratch that. Ah, Christmas - oops, sorry, there is no Christmas because if Jesus is pure spirit (as many early believers believed), then how could he, physically, be born? Besides, only pagans are tacky enough to celebrate birthdays.

I’m messing with you. But that’s because “The Origins of Christmas’’ (Liturgical Press, 2004) messed with me - in a good way. All those oddities listed above lie in the holiday’s history and color and sparkle forth in this short, fascinating volume by Joseph F. Kelly, a professor of religious studies at John Carroll University. There are plenty of books about the Santa and sleigh bells version of Christmas (yes, I’ll get to them) but this one considers the wellspring of it all.

Christmas - Christ’s Mass - had a slow start. It wasn’t even celebrated until the third or fourth century, and only cropped up in writing a half-century after Jesus died. That’s because the first Christians were convinced Armageddon was on deck, making resurrection a more pressing topic than birth. Also, why write books if the end is near? Later, when there was no apocalypse now, the gospels were composed, and Matthew and Luke (but not Mark or John) felt compelled to offer a birth back story.

In other words, out of 27 books in the New Testament, only two bring up the Nativity. And none mention Christmas, that is the Feast of the Nativity. How did we get from such silence to “Silent Night?’’ Kelly takes us through the tussle to reach consensus on a plausible birth date, since no one knew when Jesus was born (May 20 and March 25 were in the running), and how our modern Noel is an eggnog of gospel, apocrypha, medieval add-ons, Biblical borrowing (the ox and donkey in the manger, for instance, are on loan from Isaiah 1:2-3), and hitching onto Roman feast days. Christmas would finally land at the winter solstice, to co-opt cult of the sun worshippers and Saturnalia’s 100-bottles-of-mead-on-the-wall festivalgoers.