Christmas and the Golden Calf -or- Deep Thoughts from a Shallow Mind

From Steve Buccheit:

The Old Year is dead. Long live the New Year … Light fires, burn the Yule log, shout to the heavens, dance, feast, give life to the Sun. Bring in the holly and the ivy, the evergreens to remind us that life is and will be. Light the tree in honor of their everlasting presence. The Wheel has turned, light will return.

Whenever I hear people talking about “getting back to the good ol’ religion,” I’m always reminded of Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth. When Bill Moyer brought up the subject of fundamentalism, Prof. Campbell sang “Give me that Zarathustra, just like we use-ta, oh give me that ol’ time religion.”

This entry of Steve’s makes me think of my own Christmas creed (this would be the beginning of the “Shallow Mind” portion of this post :-)

Remembering the reason for the season, as modern-day observers like to say, goes a bit deeper than most of them would like to admit. Christmas, as with most every other Christian religious celebration, began as a pagan ritual observing Winter Solstice. For me, a part of believing in a higher power is accompanied with a sense of reverence, nothing like the full-throated month-long scream of good will that Christmas has become. But then, I don’t believe it’s very reverential to take a pagan holiday and convert it to suit the desires of the masses. Do I observe Christmas? No, but I do celebrate it, because it’s a fun holiday. But for me it’s not a religious day, because I have seen too many truths to believe that it could be (for me).

From Storytelling Folklore Sourcebook (Livo Rietz, 1991) (incidentally this book was my first ever Amazon.com purchase, on Dec. 12, 1998):

Christmas was a very deliberate invention of the church to supersede the old pagan sun birth holiday (Frazier 1922). Many of the old customs of the pagan birthing festival are practiced at Christmas, including the bringing of living evergreen trees indoors.

The people of Upper Bavaria bring in a living fir tree and hang it with wreaths, flags, and inscriptions. The winter solstice practice of worshipping the seasonal tree of birth is far more ancient than modern Christmas custom, and if one of these habits amounts to the borrowing of another, the decorated tree in the house in December is more than likely an echo of the old habit of celebrating the renewed promise of life by worshipping a tree than it is an invention of the “new” religion. The Christmas tree is a custom descended from the ancient Norse belief in Yggdrasil, the world tree, an immense ash. Its roots were in Hel, the kingdom of death, its branches in heaven. The stars hung in its crown. At the base of the tree, around the sacred well, were the three Nornir, or fates, who decided the course of human events.

Now, I’m not deriding the choice of using a Christmas Tree–I love my Christmas Tree–But I am saying that when dealing with the Everlasting we should be careful how we pay homage. Too often these days people believe that the only thing that matters is the heart, that if the our actions are the result of a pure heart then they will be accepted as they were offered. But I believe there are concequences to making offerings of unwanted gifts no matter how they’re intended and, because we are dealing with the Infinite, they are concequences that we can’t account for. You might say “My tree is just there because it’s pretty, it isn’t a part of my core belief system,” to which I would say, Good for you, but if you’re using Christmas as a religious observance of your diety, you could be sending mixed messages. Is it okay to pray to God on your knees if there’s a golden calf sitting behind you on the dresser, even if the calf is there only because you think it’s pretty?