Ghosts of Christmas Past

[Dave Monroe]

From: FrodeauxB@[omitted]
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 09:44:13 EST
Subject: Merry Christmas
To: pynchon-l@[omitted]

It is not necessary to understand things in order to
argue about them.--Pierre Augustin Caron de
Beaumarchais, French author and dramatist.

David

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9912&msg=43528

Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1998 13:02:21 -0500
From: "Terrance F. Flaherty" <Lycidas@[omitted]>
To: pynchon-l@[omitted]
Subject: Merry Christmas and Peace to All

Merry Christmas and Peace to ALL

This Christmastide of [1998],
with the War settled and the Nation bickering itself
into Fragments,
wounds bodily and ghostly, great and small, go aching
on,
not ev'ry one commemorated,-
nor, too often, even recounted....
for the Times are as impossible to calculate, this
Advent,
as the Distance to a Star.
                        -TRP-


Ich finde dich in allen diesen Dingen,
denen ich gut und wie ein Bruder bin;
als Samen sonnst du dich in den geringen
und in den groBen giebst du groB dich hin.

Das ist das wundersame Spiel der Krafte,
daB sie so dienend durch die Dinge gehn:
in Wurlzeln wachsend, schwindend in die Schafte
und in den Wipfeln wie ein Auferstehn.
                                    -RMR-

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all this way for
Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and
death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death...
I shoulf be glad of another death.
                            -TSE-

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9812&msg=34737

Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2000 14:38:59 -0600
Subject: Santa Claus ain't coming ...
To: pynchon-l@[omitted]
From: Dave Monroe <monroe@[omitted]>

... 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 the 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 the 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 late December,
teh decision was part of what amounted to a
compromise,
and a compromise for which the Church paid a high
price.  Late-December festivitiec were deeply rooted
in popular culture ....  In return for ensuring mass
observance of the anniversary of the 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 the 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 and 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
ulture 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 the margins of early New England
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, and
thy 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--a place that ignored or resisted orthodox
New England culture.  (15)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0012&msg=51652

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.pitts.emory.edu/ResearchAssist/BIB/Christmas.html

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com