Throughout the North Temperate zone (in which western civilization arose and matured), there is always a reminder in the sky that things will not last.
All through the summer and fall, when the world is smiling and green things are growing and harvests are collected and stored, the Sun marks out a path in the sky that each day is lower toward the southern horizon than on the day before. The lower the sun is, the less intense is its warmth and the shorter the days get, so that the less-intense warmth has ever less time to do its job.
This is a sobering reminder in the very midst of prosperity that winter is coming, a time of dreary cold and of the apparent death of the plant world.
Yet the decline of the Sun slows and finally there comes a time when the Sun halts its southward drop altogether and then begins to mark out a higher and higher path each day than the day before. The weather continues cold for months after the Sun starts its rise, but that rise is a portent and a promise in the midst of decay that the winter will not last forever and that spring is coming, and with it a renewal of warmth and life and happiness.
We know exactly what causes this. We know about the Earth’s tipped axis and how it affects the Sun’s apparent path in the sky in the course of the Earth’s annual revolution about its luminary.
Primitive man did not know this, however, nor did he have any concept of the Sun being kept on course by the inexorability of celestial mechanics. He felt the fall and rise of the Sun to be the work of all-powerful gods, who acted out of obscure motives of their own, either in whimsical benevolence or petulant anger.
In short, primitive man could never be sure that the Sun would not, on this occasion, continue its weary decline until it disappeared forever beyond the southern horizon, leaving Earth to eternal winter and death.
Consequently, on or about the time when the Sun halts in its southern flight and begins its climb back to warmth and life (this turning point—the “winter solstice”—comes on December 21, by our calendar), there is a vast outpouring of relief. It is natural that the time be celebrated with grand festivals and merrymaking.
To the Romans, Saturn was the god of the spring planting and was eventually viewed as being in charge of agriculture generally. When the Sun made its turn, therefore, and there was the promise of successful spring planting to come, the Romans considered it the result of Saturn’s benevolent care in setting a limit to the Solar decline. Their winter solstice festival was thus in his honor and was called the “Saturnalia.”
It was the happiest and most popular of all the Roman festivals and it was eventually extended to seven days in length, running from December 17 to December 24. It was a time of unrestrained gaiety and feasting; public offices, businesses, schools were all closed in its honor; servants and slaves were allowed a period of relative freedom in which they might mingle with their masters in mutual bonhomie; gifts were exchanged. Such was the all-round benevolence of the time that a little sexual license was winked at. (It was this last that incurred the wrath of moralists and has caused “saturnalian” to refer to anything marked by orgies of drink and sex.)
By the third century of our era, however, the Roman gods were moribund, and eastern religions more and more swayed the hearts and minds of Roman citizens. Yet one aspect of the old religion remained untouchable, and that was the Saturnalia. Whatever else of their old ways the peoples of the Roman Empire were willing to give up, the Saturnalia had to remain.
The most prominent of the new religions was, for a time, Mithraism, which was a form of Sun worship. Mithraists saw in the fall and rise of the Sun the promise that after man’s death there would come a glorious resurrection. The Saturnalia suited them, therefore, and they added to it a climactic day of their own. On December 25, the day after the conclusion of the Saturnalia, the Mithraists celebrated the birth of Mithra, the symbolic representation of the light of the Sun. This great “day of the invincible Sun” was the most popular aspect of Mithraism.
The Mithraists made the major mistake, however, of excluding women from their religious rituals. The rival religion of Christianity wisely included women, which insured that while many fathers were Mithraists, many mothers were Christians, and the children were far more apt to follow their mothers’ early teachings than their fathers’ later ones.
Even so, Mithraism remained hard to defeat while it celebrated the Saturnalia and the day of the invincible Sun. Some time after A.D. 300, therefore, the Christians invented Christmas. It became proper for Christians to enjoy December 25 and all the saturnalian happiness associated with it, provided they called it a celebration of the birth of Jesus the Son and not Mithra the Sun. (There is, of course, no Biblical warrant for December 25 as the day of the birth of Jesus.)
The Saturnalia is, in any case, the victor, and the Christmas we now celebrate is only formally Jesus’ birthday. For many, that aspect of it is quickly disposed of with minimum fuss. It is the Saturnalia on which our attention is fixed—the gift-giving, the holiday cheer, the time of good feeling, the eating, drinking, celebrating.
In fact, in the modern United States we have a much bigger and better Saturnalia than ever the Romans did. From the moment Thanksgiving is over, all the traditional Christmas decorations begin to blossom forth in businesses, homes and streets, and we all enjoy (or sometimes suffer) an intense four-week celebration. Even the permitted sexual license survives—in attenuated form—in the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe. What we celebrate is a purely pagan festival presided over by Santa Claus—a comparatively modern invention, frozen into his present form in 1822, with the publication of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” by Clement C. Moore.
Another modern myth that has grown up around Christmas is that it is a time of universal benevolence in which even the hardest heart will soften, a theme immortalized forever in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” first published in 1843.
As a result, whenever some despicable thing is done during the month of December, the general reaction is a disapproving “and at Christmastime, too,” as though it would be less despicable if done at any other time.
This, you may be sure, has not escaped the attention of crime writers. In their search for graphic wrongdoing, they need not stress violence or sex if they do not wish to; they need only place the deed in the month of December and draw attention to Christmas.
Consequently, we bring you a dozen fictional transgressions and misdeeds that are somehow associated with Christmas. If by any chance you feel a bit cloyed at that time of year and need a salutary counterweight to the saccharinity of the season (and which of us does not, now and then), here is the book for you.
So stretch out beside the Christmas tree and read.