Peter Costello
Christmas in the Cross Hairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday
by Chris Bowler
(Oxford University Press, £20.00)
In this first week of the New Year it may seem a little late to be reviewing a book about the history of the holiday that we have just got safely through here in the West. But it ought to be remembers that in many parts of the world, where perhaps ancient traditions are more respected, Christmas actually falls tomorrow.
This is in countries and communities largely in the East and among Oriental Chrstians who still follow the Julian rather than the Gregorian calendar, introduced into the world by Pope Gregory in 1583.
At that time many Protestant countries, notably England (and, because of the Anglo-Irish, parts of our own island) refused to accept it. That is until 1750, when the change was finally made in these islands, followed by protests of the reactionary kind that we are still familiar with from those demanding that the king “give us back our 11 days” – the time difference between the two.
This is only one of the numerous rows that have encrusted the feast, ever since it was introduced (largely to replace a pagan midwinter celebration).
Author Gerry Bowler is a Canadian academic historian. He is the author of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, but long interested in that conflicted area where religion meets popular culture, he has published The World Encyclopaedia of Christmas and Santa Claus: A Biography. So this a serious book, but one with a light touch as appropriate.
Our present day festival is the product largely to the last two centuries. In the 19th Century, writers like Charles Dickens and Washington Irving (an influential American writer whom we should all know more about) sentimentalised the feast day, as we can see in A Christmas Carol and some of the chapters of Bracebridge Hall.
Non-believers
Today, of course, it often seems to many people, even to some non-believers, that Christmas has turned into a giant shopping spree, carefully manipulated by commercial interests largely American, like Coca-Cola. The introduction of the concept of ‘Black Friday’ is surely an absurd novelty which the press should not promote.
Earlier Christmas had been famously been banned by the English Republicans in the time of Cromwell – much as I suppose their modern counterparts would ban Christmas for fear of offending Muslims and Jews.
Gerry Bowler, in this most fascinating and fully sourced history, deals with all of this in detail. In answer to those who complain that “Christmas is not what it was” he suggests it never was.
This book is great post-Christmas read, confirming all ones worst fears. But it might enable us next Christmas to see just exactly what is ‘traditional’ and what is not. Indeed to get a clearer idea of what exactly tradition is. Forewarned in this case would certainly be forwarded. Here is a celebration of a feast, the true source of which in the Nativity, the world needs to be aware of in ways it isn’t today.