Santa Claus ain't coming ...

[Dave Monroe]

... to Puritan New England, at any rate.  From Stephen Nissenbaum, The
Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished
Holiday (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), Chapter 1, "New England's War
on Christmas," pp. 3-48 ...

In New England, for the first two centuries of white settlement most
people did not celbrate Christmas.  In fact, the holiday was
systematically suppressed by the Puritans during teh colonial period and
largely ignored by their descendents.  It was actually illegal to
celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681 ... (3)

Why?  What accounts for this strange hostility?  The Puritans themselves
had a plain reason for what they tried to do, and it happens to be a
perfectly good one: There is no biblical or historical reason to place
the birth of Jesus on December 25. (4)

It was only in the fourth century that the Church officially decided to
observe Christams on December 25.  And this date was chosen not for
religious reasons but simply because it ahppened to mark the approximate
arrival of the winter solstice, an event taht was celebrated long before
the advent ["no puns where none intended"] of christianity.  The
Puritans were correct when they pointed out--and they pointed it out
often--that Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a
Christian veneer. (4)

But teh Puriatns had another reason for suppressing Christmas.  The
holiday they suppressed was not what we probably mean when we think of a
traditional Christmas.  As we shall see, it involved behavior that most
of us would find offensive and even shocking today--rowdy public
displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established
authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing
harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes. (5)

[... actually, my guess would be that that is precisely what many of us
probably mean when we think of our traditional Christmas, but ...]

In northern agricultural societies, December was a major "punctuation
mark" in teh rhythmic cycle of work, a time when there was a minimum of
work to be performed.... there was plenty of newly fermented beer or
wine as well as meat from freshly slaughtered animals ... (5)

... boundaries and rituals changed over time and varied from one place
to another.  What is more useful, in any setting, is to look for the
dynamics of an ongoing contest, a push and a pull--sometimes a real
battle--between those who wished to exapnd the season and those who
wished to contract it ... (5)

In early modern Europe, roughly the years between 1500 and 1800, tehe
Christmas season was a time to let off steam--and to gorge. (5-6)

Christmas was a season of "misrule," a time when ordinary beavioral
restraints could be violated with impunity.  It was a part of what one
historian [Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe; Mikhail
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The
Politics and Poetics of Transgression] has called "the world of
carnival." (The term carnival is rooted in teh Latin words carne and
vale--"farewell to flesh."  And "flesh" here refers not only to meat but
to sex--carnal as well as carnivorous.)  Christmas "muisrule" meant that
not only hunger but also anger and lust could be expressed in public....
Often people blackened their faces or disguised themselves as animals or
crossdressed ... (6)

The Puriatns knew what subsequent generations would forget: that when
the Church, more than a millenium earlier, had placed Christmas Day in
ltae December, teh decision was part of what amounted to a compromise,
and a compromise for which the Church paid a high price.  Late-December
festivities were deeply rooted in popular culture ....  In return for
ensuring mass observance of the anniversary of teh Savior's birth by
assigning it to a resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed
to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always
been.  From the beginning, the Church's hold over Christmas was (and
remains still) rather tenuous. (7-8)

The Puritans understood another thing, too: Much of teh seasonal excess
that took place at Christmas was not merely chaotic 'disorder" but
behavior that took a profoundly ritualized form.  Most funadmentally,
Christmas was an occasion when the social hierarchy itself was
symbolically turned upisde down, in a gesture that inverted designated
roles of gender, age, and class.... Increase Mather explained with an
anthropologist's clarity what he believed to be the origins of teh
practice: "In the Saturnalian Days, Masters did wait upon their
Servants...." (8)

The most common ritual of social inversion during the Christmas season
involved ... charity. (8)

In return, the peasants offered something of true value in a
paternalistic society--their goodwill.  (9)

This exchange of gifts for goodwill often included the performance of
songs, often drinking songs, that articulated the structure of the
exchange.... wassailing ... (9)

In an agricultural society, the kind of "misrule" I have been describing
did not really challenge the authority of the gentry.... In fact,
episodes of misrule were largely tolerated by the elite.  Some
historians [Burke, Zemon Davis] argue that role inversions actually
functioned as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments
within clearly defined limits, and that by inverting the esatblished
heirarchy (rather than simply ignoring it), these role inversions
actually served a s a reaffirmation of the existing socvial order.  (11)

Here was exactly what the Puritans tried to suppress ....  It was this
entire cultural world, with its periodic seasons of labor and
festivity--and not just Christmas itself--that Puritans felt to be
corrupt, "pagan," evil.  it was this world that they systematically
attempted to abolish and "purify."  They wished to replace it with a
simpler, more orderly culture in which people were mnore disciplined
[Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish] and self-regulated ... in which
lavish periodic celebrations--the seasonal cycle itself--were replaced
by an orderly and regular succession of days ... (12)

The Puritans knew that the power to name time was also the power to
control it.  (13)

Christmas was kept on teh margins of early New Englad society.  Still,
it was never suppressed completely.  (14)

... such old and deep roots in English culture could not simply be
erased by fiat ... it always hovered just beneath the surface of New
England culture, emerging occasionally into plain sight.  (15)

Who were the poeple who practiced Christmas misrule in
seventeenth-century New England?  Not surprisingly, the evidence
suggests that they were mostly on the margins of New England culture (or
altogether outside it).  It si difficult to know for sure.... New
England's early Christmas-keepers were at most barely literarte,a nd
tehy left no records.  (15)

It was fishermen and mariners who had the reputation of being the most
incorrigible sinners in New England.  Maritime communities ... were
notorious for irreligion, heavy drinking, and loose sexual activity;
they were also repositories of enduring English folk practices--place
that ignored or resisted orthodox New England culture.  (15)

... and so forth.  At any rate, suggestive perhaps of just why Pynchon
seems to favor Christmas, V. and Gravity's Rainbow even beginning ca.
Xmas, that carnivalesque--and you can't spell "carnival" without
"carnal" ...--aspect, its association with birth, kenosis (vs. ...),
incarnation (vs. the _______ emphasis on resurrection), its subversion,
even if only in a recuperable symbolic inversion (and of that
master/slave dialectic, at that), of that Puritan order(liness), as well
as its overlay of official culture over popular, pagan underpinnings
(and note unsavory, from the Puritan point of view, associations with
Catholicism, via Rome, Saturnalia), its emphasis on and preservation of
folk culture, and, er, sailors ...