On religious expressions of culture and cultural expressions of religion

 

No, the Christmas Fat Man is not universal

Happy 2018, everybody! I have temporarily emerged from writing cave, and have time to do some reflections on the holiday season in Madrid. This is an entry I've been working at for a while, which is no longer completely contemporary, but still hopefully of interest. I kept meaning to revise it and then it kept getting longer. Sorry in advance.

The dreidels have arrived! (Note picture.) Sadly, I was not able to pick them up in time for nochebuena, so a couple of them still have to be delivered to their new owners, which they will be with a small delay, and a print out of instructions on how to play dreidel. And possibly also another delivery of chocolate coins, since the coins were super successful with my new young friends, who presented me with drawings and “a folder to keep secrets in” when they came over for nochebuena, and who had nearly as much fun spinning the chocolate coins (in the absence of dreidels) and timing how long they could make them spin as eating them. In general, I had a lovely and successful nochebuena with new friends this year, and managed to make latkes and let the kids play with the menorah, and generally have a nice conversation about various cultural traditions as well as the all important conversations about food. (The fact that I forgot to get matches and have an electric stove here meant that I had two candles left from the first night of Hanukkah, so the kids got to light them. They loved striking the matches, and lighting the candles, and also blowing them out. Playing with fire is fun.)

But I had to restrain a slight sense of despair and annoyance when one of my guests asked me if “Papa Noel” had brought me presents as a child. I said no, and repeated (for the umpteenth time) that Jews don't celebrate Christmas. My friend, who is somewhat apologetically agnostic, explained to her children that Jews “believe in the same God, but not in Jesus Christ” which is a fair summary of theology for elementary school age kids, and she therefore understands why Jews don't celebrate Christmas. Nevertheless, she protested that “Papa Noel es universal. No es cristiano.” Her husband more practically asked how I got presents as a kid, and I explained that one was given for each night of Hanukkah. As soon as he heard that Jewish kids got a decent haul of loot he was satisfied, but he's the atheist in the family.

In any case, my Spanish friend pointed out, with all the logic and accuracy of a medievalist and a trained academic (and also a Southern European to whom the tradition is essentially still foreign), that Santa Claus-Sinterklaas-Pere Noel-whoever (hereafter Christmas Fat Man) is clearly a pagan tradition, unlike the Reyes Magos which she reasonably recognizes as actually being rooted in the Gospels.

I quite like los Reyes Magos, who will in due time receive their own blog entry, because they definitely deserve it. I like the tradition of Belenes (creches), which I think are pretty, and allow for a variety of genuine artistic expression (and even political commentary, in some of the little figures in the background). But the thing about Belenes and the Three Kings is that because they are inescapably Christian they are also honest. They don't pretend to be “universal.”

This is in fact the second time I've had this conversation in under a month, since a Belgian friend also recently said in a different context (not regarding my childhood) but in almost exactly the same words “but Sinterklaas isn't Christian, he's universal.” As with my Belgian friend, I explained to the concerned Spaniard that I had grown up going to school with many Christian, many Jewish, and a few Muslim children, and that we all were aware of and respected each other's traditions, but nobody ever felt “left out” or deprived or unhappy about not celebrating someone else's holidays. By the same token, I can't remember any of the famous anguished conversations about whether the Christmas Fat Man or Three Kings were “real” or not, because we all knew they weren't, and weren't particularly troubled by that. My dad used to talk in a squeaky voice and pretend to be my favorite teddy bear. I knew it was really him, but still enjoyed it. In the same way, my Christian friends knew their gifts came from their parents, just the way I did, but still enjoyed the idea of Santa. The idea that presents came from our parents and family members was the opposite of disappointing. It was proof that they loved us and wanted us to be happy, which ultimately was a lot more comforting than the idea of a spooky super-natural being who only gave gifts conditional on good behavior. In any case, for all my Christian friends reading this: don't worry, non-Christian children know that they are loved and cherished, and (circumstances permitting) get lots of presents, and don't feel either excluded or unhappy about the absence of some version what the very brilliant Bill Watterson once identified as [either] “kindly old elf or CIA spook.”

From Bill Watterson's The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, 1987

 

What has surprised me being in Europe this year over the holidays is the way Europeans across the continent parrot the phrase “but it's universal” with a suspicious similarity, which tells you that this is a deep seated piece of propaganda. Perhaps this is a provincialism of growing up in New York, but until I came to Europe I was never aware that Santa was supposed to be “universal” either. Santa was ubiquitous, but that's not the same thing. Coca-cola is ubiquitous (to take another commercial red-and-white symbol) but no one thinks you're weird if you say you don't drink it, whether for reasons of health, or personal taste, or political conviction. (That is, they may think you're weird, depending on the reason you give, but it's not beyond the bounds of imagination that someone might choose to not drink Coke.) It's started me thinking about why intelligent, well-educated people of good will genuinely think that a character with “Saint” or “Christmas” in the name is “not Christian at all.” (Did I mention that Jews don't celebrate Christmas? We also don't have saints. Pro tip: Neither do Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.)

In a narrow sense, it's true that the Christmas Fat Man has “pagan roots” (like Christmas trees, which are also foreign and exotic in Spain), but the origin of a tradition doesn't automatically confer universality. According to my internet research, dreidels are a Yiddish variant of a German variant of the Tudor gambling game “teetotum” and the Hebrew letters are just a transliteration of the German (and Yiddish) abbreviations for Stel ein, Halb, Ganz, Nichts (Put in, Half, All, None), which became Shin, Hey, Gimel, Nun and were assigned meaning in Hebrew after the fact. Nonetheless, dreidels are recognized as a specifically Jewish tradition, which is why the nice gentleman at the “Centro de Literatura Cristiana” bookstore where I bought the them asked me if I was “mesiánica” (which I gather is the polite word among evangelicals for Jews nowadays). The Protestant (or frankly just secular) roots of dreidels don't make them “universal” in spite of my gift ideas for my little friends.

The fact is, Christmas itself has pagan roots. As some sects, like Jehovah's witnesses, have pointed out, shepherds do not generally abide in fields keeping watch over their flocks by night except in springtime, when it's lambing season, so the whole festival is apparently off by about five months. So by the same logic one could argue that midnight mass on December 24-25 is universal because it has pagan roots (although those roots stretch farther back in time than the 19^th century, which is when red-suited saints take off in the popular imagination). It would be absolutely true (though perhaps upsetting to the congregants to admit it), but also kind of meaningless.

The “but it has pagan roots” argument also raises the question of why a set of northern European pagan traditions about midwinter should be “universal” in Southern Europe, in the Americas, or anywhere in the tropics, where the idea of cold weather and the sun going away and coming back is essentially meaningless. The answer to that question obviously has to do with a long history of imperialism, and cultural and economic power, but that brings me back to my Coca-Cola example. 

It might be "classic" but it's not universal.

The Coca-Cola company (bless their hearts, as people say in their part of the world) is fairly open about its proselytizing mission to “buy the world a Coke” (or more accurately sell the world a coke, or many cokes), and as a social soda-drinker I certainly support their right to sell and the public's right to buy their product in all the farthest corners of the globe, just as I support the right to believe in saints and angels of the public's choice. I think the first of those is called capitalism and the second is called freedom of religion, a combination that I think used to be called liberalism. In my old-fashioned liberal way, I have serious problems with selling either Coke or religion at gunpoint and some ethical qualms about tacit social pressures that make buying either sodas or belief systems mandatory for people who aren't in the market for them. My instinctive belief in truth-in-advertising leads me to look slant-eyed at claims that something is “universal” when clearly it is really only one option in a crowded marketplace.

In general (and of course all generalizations are untrue), I'd say that Europeans spectacularly fail the “truth in advertising” test about their Christmas Fat Man, which is why I have fewer problems with Santa Claus in New York City than in Europe. (I would say the US but I'm hesitant even to generalize to the rest of the United States, although maybe blog readers elsewhere in the country can offer opinions.) Pagan roots or not, the current Christmas Fat Man traditions were basically popularized in the nineteenth century. For Christians who were becoming uncomfortable or embarrassed about faith, they were a way of celebrating the season in a way that was less overtly religious. Secularizing Christmas was a big deal for Christians who didn't have faith. But for people who never had that faith in the first place, it's just Christmas-lite. Calling it “universal” because it doesn't have religious content is the equivalent of calling Coke Zero “not Coke”; it's true if you care at all about the taste of real Coke, but completely irrelevant if you don't drink soda. So when Europeans say that their Christmas Fat Man is “universal” they mean that it has no religious content. But they are also defining the only way of having no religious content as being an evolution of Christianity. This is why my Spanish friend carefully explained to her children that lighting the menorah had “un significado espiritual” even though I've told her in so many words that I'm an atheist. I realize that it's only a failure of imagination due to a lack of diversity, but the profoundly insulting implication is that the only path to universality is through Christianity, and that's offensive whether or not “universal” implies any belief in God or not.

The conventional wisdom about Europe is that it is much less religious and much more secular than the United States, but the more time I spend here the more I doubt that's actually true, and think that it's simply that the Europeans have redefined a lot of religious things as both “secular” and “universal.” This means that if you hold out against the things defined as “universal” you are not simply not a Christian, but rather going against a universal order of things, which makes you aberrant and deviant (or at best sad and deprived) in a way that simply belonging to a different religion in the United States does not. To return to the soft drink metaphor a final time, if being a non-Christian is like not drinking Coke, in at least large parts of the United States the response to saying “I don't drink Coke” is “A beer, then? A water?” or possibly a condescending “what a shame that you don't drink Coke, you're missing out only drinking water” or at worst “you know alcohol is really bad for you, right? You should try a Coke.” In Europe the metaphorical response to “I don't drink Coke” is “how can you live without liquids? Don't you get thirsty?”

Of course, the Christmas Fat Man is just one example of the way Europeans have redefined Christianity as “secular.” I've had Sevillanos earnestly tell me that there is “nothing religious” about the Semana Santa (and actually some of the same arguments made about its pagan roots). And there was an article a few weeks ago in De Morgen about some far right-winger's (fortunately only verbal) attack on Muslim immigrants participation in some Sinterklaas festival, which was answered by Zuhal Demir, the Flemish right wing's current pet Good Muslim token, who is also a member of the Belgian parliament. Ms. Demir wrote a post on her Facebook page which was clearly intended to be heartwarming in which she explained that as a child she and her (immigrant) parents “knew almost nothing about Christmas, Easter, or Sinterklaas. But we pretended as if we had never done anything else. We learned all about it at school, knowledge we shared with our parents. And within a short time a Christmas tree stood in our living room...and there were candies at Sinterklaas and at Easter. That is the Flemish openness of which I am so proud.” This post encapsulates the real consequences of redefining the “universal”: Accept a Christmas tree in your living room, and the candy from the Sint, and the blessings of baptism (oops, that was the original version of the Semana Santa with the real Inquisition, not the fake one) or else be forever tagged as the Bad Muslim (or Bad Jew), the one who resists the “universal” things which “don't have to do with religion at all” and which (since Europe is a priori “secular”) only a dangerous fanatic would not willingly accept. Ms. Demir has staked her career on what she calls “Flemish openness” and on the belief that if she is sufficiently enthusiastic about pretending that Christmas trees and Easter chocolate have nothing to do with Christmas and Easter she will continue to be rewarded as a cabinet minister. I had family members who shared her hometown of Antwerp who staked their lives on the same principle. Sadly, they are not around to tell her that she is currently seventeen against the dealer.

You have to be closing your eyes and putting your fingers in your ears to pretend that characters with “Sint” and “Noel” in their names have no Christian cultural background. The bishop's miter of Sinterklaas is a bit of a hint that he's not universal too. And according to a recent French court decision, a full beard can “under some circumstances” be considered an “ostentatious religious symbol.” As the highly objective graphic shows, the Christmas Fat Man is well into the “ostentatious” territory.

This is why I prefer the festivals which are honestly specific, and where people are allowed to share, rather than forced into a fake universality. I sang in a gospel choir in school, and was honored and privileged to perform with them (and to hear a sermon) at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. We were honored guests there, but no one pretended we all had to belong. I find the Semana Santa creepy as anything in some ways, but there is at least relatively little pretense that it is anything other than a Catholic celebration (even the local people who think of it as non-religious admit that they're fond of it because it's bound up with their childhood memories). Non-Catholic visitors are welcome, but it's not “something for everybody.” I always enjoyed my friends' Christmas trees as a kid in New York because nobody expected me to have one. I appreciate being a visitor in another culture. That doesn't mean I feel that my own is lacking or that I mistake being widespread with being universal.

I feel a bit ungracious writing all of this, since in fact, as I've said, the people who have insisted to me that the Christmas Fat Man is universal are all kind, well-meaning souls, who have been exceptionally generous to me personally, and who certainly wouldn't dream of being consciously disrespectful or insulting (much less actually dangerous) to people who don't share their particular brand of miasmic Christianity (that is, being Christian by means of it being in the air they breathe, rather than through actual active belief, and therefore believing themselves to not be Christians). I certainly have enjoyed their festivities, and their pretty Christmas lights (that I've taken pictures of for the blog), and I am happy to wish all of my friends who celebrate it a Merry Christmas, and am not at all offended if they unthinkingly wish me the same. But while I am grateful for their generosity, I don't need their pity any more than they need mine.

Hey, out there, European Christians: you have a beautiful culture and we all appreciate it. But appreciation isn't envy, and ubiquitous is not universal. We're not deprived by the lack of a Christmas Fat Man any more than we're deprived by not celebrating Christmas..