The Origins Of Christmas

In 1984 when I was four years old my family lived on the island of Oahu in the town of Kailua. My father’s sister was nannying for us, and my grandparents visited during Christmas. One of my very first memories (if not the first) is looking up with joy from my newly opened Christmas present—a large, Caribbean-blue, plush My Little Pony with long purple hair. It was the most amazing gift, and I couldn’t believe that such a thing existed. But almost immediately my parents reached out for it. “Oh,” said my Mom. “That was supposed to be for your sister.”

The scream I loosed in response to her reaching to take away such a prize made all the adults recoil in confusion. I remember the look on my parents’ and grandparents’ faces as they puzzled over my possessiveness of an obviously feminine toy. It is probably my first memory because of the intensity of the rollercoaster of emotions I experienced that morning, but because they let me keep the pony, it is one of my favorite.

Christmastime growing up was often filled with cookies, banana bread and, when our family’s fortunes were up, mountains and mountains of presents. Christmas was one of the only times of year when there was actually some peace and joy in our home, everyone taking the time to relax and enjoy the cold, wintry days once we moved to Utah or carted off to ski days in the nearby mountain resorts, drinking hot cocoa and being with friends and seeing our cousins while Christmas music played on a loop.

Every Christmas Eve we were conscripted to reenact the Nativity scene, narrated directly from the Bible by my father, as each of us took turns whining or causing trouble, making shepherd staves or angel halos out of tin foil, and wise men wearing my parents’ bathrobes with ties banded about a towel on our forehead to replicate a traditional keffiyeh, while the youngest lay in a laundry hamper lined with towels to signify baby Jesus, to much hilarity. One Christmas we received a Nintendo Entertainment System from my maternal grandparents, to the ire of my own parents. Another I received a small parakeet, who died three days later when my sisters accidentally left the front door open and he froze to death.

Christmas was never lacking in celebration and gift giving, and the joy of the season in my youth was precisely why Christmases as an adult were oppositely so frightening and lonely after my family kicked me out on my own for being gay. But toward the later end of my childhood my mother suddenly became overly religious about the Christmas holiday, making enormous efforts to shift our celebration from one of joy, togetherness, warmth, and good food to pious and despairing obsession with Jesus and the supposed amoral nature of the world. An innocuous looking folio bound in red and green felt held a collection of purported Christmas stories, one or two of which were read every night. But as I grew older I realized how disturbing many of those stories were, often not even about Christmas at all, but instead religious lessons which taught self-hatred, shame, and distrust of others.

Christmas was dear to my heart, and every year on my own I would put up a tree and observe the season, making tremendous effort to survive my depression by replicating my Mother’s cookies and amassing a cherished collection of prized ornaments, cookie cutters, and the biggest Christmas music catalog of anyone in my family. Even though I was no longer religious, Christmas was and still is a time of year that I love, but even though I continued to observe and celebrate this season I began to be regarded with animosity from even my own family, who were recruited into amoral, hypocritical, and very un-Christmas-like culture war against those who do not share their same religious beliefs. Though my family sought to avoid outright conflict during the holidays, the absence of engagement, the emotional and physical distance, and the superficial niceties which papered over and obfuscated their imbibing of hate and fear mongering eviscerated the joy of the season and caused no small amount of tension and conflict during a time which should be about love, family, and joy.

During a relationship with someone who was important to me and before I finally learned how to resolve the trauma of my childhood, we both fervently reveled in the Christmas holiday. But the trauma of our youths was so intense that it also became one of the most tumultuous times of the year in our relationship, each of us burdened with unrealistic expectations for the other to operate in spite of the amazing amounts of pain and heartache we each carried with us surrounding the holiday and rejection and persecution from our respective families. My father was kind to save for me all the unopened bottles of wine and whiskey left from his vacation property renters which made visiting with my siblings who were/are raising my nieces and nephews in a religion which teaches them to discriminate against me more bearable. But when that relationship ended I simply didn’t even bother going home for the holidays anymore because I no longer had anyone on my side to buffer the pain of indifference and emotional isolation from my own family.

The irony of the mass trauma and pain caused by the Holiday season seems entirely and inexplicably lost on those gatekeepers who sustain and promote it and complain about how it is going, concerned more with proselytizing and domination of families, friends, and society than engendering love and togetherness, the very ostensible point of the holiday. Though my family’s abuse of me growing up led to dangerous suicidal depression, I was and am still the one expected to accommodate their sensitivities and beliefs, as if there must be a choice between the two rather a spirit of harmony and inclusivity, as if my personal beliefs and needs are invalid or detestable simply because I am not religious and they are.

The true irony of the Christmas season is that every single aspect of it is entirely pagan, and in truth is a holiday which can and should be celebrated and enjoyed by more than simply those who subscribe to religious belief. Our rich history with celebration during this special time of year goes back far before Christianity was even a concept, and has its roots in our shared humanity as a human family and not at all about the religions which have co-opted it for their own purposes.

One of the biggest icons of the Christmas holiday is the Christmas tree which, like many Christmas traditions, religious adherents celebrate without any consideration of where it came from or why we do it. Like, seriously what the fuck does decorating a tree have to do with Jesus? The giving of gifts being explained as a tradition established by the visiting Wise Men makes a little more sense (although also erroneous), but stringing lights and ornaments on a chopped-down evergreen tree does not exactly mesh seamlessly into the Nativity story.

Christmas too is filled with words and traditions which do not mean anything in the context of Christianity. Yule, Yuletide, roast pig or ham, and even caroling are other Christmas traditions which are repeated and practiced naively as if they aren’t completely and entirely unrelated to the Christian religion. Western Christianity originated in the Roman Empire in the First Century CE (AD). Before Christianity appeared on the world stage, nearly the entirety of our ancestors which would later come to adopt or be coerced into Christianity were all pagan religions and traditions whose beliefs and practices were more oriented toward the natural world and often consisted of Polytheism (the belief in many gods). Before the more recent human history, human life was very hard—rampant with disease, loss, scarcity of resources, and rife with conflict. Though we had spread across the globe, we were still very much at the mercy of the natural world, especially winter and changes in seasons and weather, and so our destiny as human beings was very intensely focused on such variables and potential liabilities to our survival. Because it was such a time of stress, winter was often the subject of intense religious activity meant to appease the gods which man believed in control of our destinies and to comfort our families and societies during times of want. But because life is cyclical, these beliefs incorporated those cycles into their systems of worship and mythology, to explain how the natural world worked and to promote awareness, appreciation, and preparedness for these variables which could potentially cause us much heartache and loss if we were otherwise ignorant.

Many interpretations of Christian traditions seek to explain or excuse them in support of Western Christianity, but their roots are far older and deeper and often lost to history because of the consuming nature of the spread and competition between religions. Christmas was originally called Yuletide, or ġēol or ġēohol in Old English, and was a celebration surrounding the Winter Solstice, which lasted for 12 DAYS WHICH IS WHY WE FUCKING SING ABOUT THE 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS WHICH HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH JESUS. Yuletide had specific traditions, such as sacrificing a boar or pig to celebrate the season and share food with our families and community during a time which would normally be difficult to find food, which is also why we still have the traditional Christmas Ham, which is actually a Yuletide Ham. The Yule Log was a tradition of burning a portion of a log each day during the 12-day advent. More than any of our traditions, the Christmas Tree is most important to our shared history as people who come from these traditions because worship of nature was most symbolized by this marvel of the natural world which persisted unchanging through such devastating and dangerous change in seasons. Most animals and nearly every other kind of plant must accommodate winter, but not the mighty evergreen, which stands unchanging against the snow and cold and freezing temperatures to defiantly endure. Most curiously, the practice of actually decorating a tree was a tradition of our pagan ancestors who would tie foods and tidbits to an evergreen to give overwintering birds something to munch on, which is also why many traditional Christmas Tree decorations are, in fact, birds. Even the Christmas Star is rooted in our ancestor’s past and the use of the heavens, astrology, and celestial events to predict or understand the world through divination.

The primary point of celebrating a holiday during the dead of winter was to pay respect to the natural world and give thanks for preventing eternal winter—the knowledge that spring would come again—and that this time of year was significant in the great pause it demanded of all life subject to it. The successful preparation for Winter as well, storing up lots of food and crafting necessities for survival such as clothes and shelter meant that we could also endure, and we celebrated this with great feasts and rituals meant to help pass the time, feed everyone, and promote joy, hope, and comfort.

Even some traditions which seem more recent like gift-giving and Santa Claus or Christmas lights are also rooted in other traditions like the Roman holiday Saturnalia, also celebrated at the Solstice, which promoted unbridled revelry and personal gift-giving as well as the personification of ideals in the form of Father Time, or more accurately Saturn, whose Greek name was Chronos, the Greek word for time, whose festival Kroina worshiped Chronos and preceded Saturnalia which preceded Christmas, showing how Christianity, which originated in and was promoted by the Roman Empire, transitioned and repurposed cherished traditions for political reasons across several millennia. Romans would line the city streets with wax candles, which must have indeed been a sign to behold and why we still put out lights even today. Hanging Mistletoe was also a Saturnalia tradition. Literally nothing about the Christmas tradition has anything to do with Christianity except the specific words and religious ideology which co-opted our ancient traditions for political purposes. You could spend days on Wikipedia and still not reach the end of the trail of the origins of the winter holiday, because it encompasses many, many lifetimes of tradition passed on from generation to generation and encompasses the rise and fall of entire empires, languages, cultures, and civilizations, and it doesn’t really matter what actual words are used. Words are arbitrary, and derived from political movements and the heaving sea of history. The real value of this holiday is in the richness of our past and the true origins of our beloved human traditions and history which, like the evergreen tree, have endured. To me, it is something which is far more awesome and wonderful than banal religious trappings.

Human culture is uniquely influenced by the politics of the past, and all of us are an accumulation of every geopolitical and sociopolitical conflict, history, and tradition of millions and millions of other human beings across thousand and thousands of generations. No tradition is inherently valuable other than what is personally meaningful for each of us, and to adhere to such traditions at the exclusion of others and the fomenting of divisiveness for the sake of dogma and individual belief systems only serves to cheapen the richness of our traditions and the amazing and enduring accumulation of human civilization and struggle which has preceded us. Christmas can be whatever is meaningful to you, because in truth it has many meanings and has evolved throughout history to suit the needs and trends of the age, to bring comfort, joy, and togetherness during times of need. The reason that this and other holidays are so joyous to us as children are not the presents, the trappings, or the traditions, though they are wonderful, but the mere closeness to our loved ones and the emotional intimacy these occasions facilitate, which is also why they can be so devastating for those of us who are rejected from them simply because of our different belief systems. Even Christmas music is not joyful because it’s actually about Christmas. The songs which touch our hearts are beautiful because they are music, written by men and women in states of joy which we in turn feel when listening to them, and regardless of the actual words the celebration can be about whatever is meaningful to you. There is much value in these practices regardless of our personal histories, and we can all share in the joy of the season if instead of celebrating our ideals we instead celebrate life and each other as these traditions are meant.

Christmas and Winter are often times of intense depression. You can read How To Cure Depression, or you can buy a copy of my new book, The Perfect Child, which explores the origin of childhood trauma and methods to resolve the psychological pain and heartache of the past.