THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS

My personal thoughts about this festive season.

I usually fictionalise my thoughts, but this, I suppose, is a sort of essay, the sort I wrote as a sixth-former at school when I was developing a social conscience.

With Christmas just round the corner it’s worth me trying to share a few thoughts about this festive season.

Firstly, these days we call it Christmas but before the invention of Jesus as a figure around which an already failing Roman Empire could try to regain some of its earlier strength and unify in face of angry opposition there was, in this country of ours, the need for celebration as a means of combating the irksome cold of our winters, and I’ve no doubt that Bronze and stone-age folks managed many a joyous party during which good will and friendliness abounded and, for a season, friendliness and love and maybe even kisses shone a light in human hearts. After all, people can’t have changed much since then, can they? Evolution is really very slow….

So Christmas isn’t dependent on Christ after whom its modern incarnation was named but had its birth in the human tendency to seek warmth and celebrate whatever they could find worth celebrating wherever they could find it. And no doubt, even in the dark reaches of prehistory, drink was taken! There is evidence!

It was Charles Dickens who, being a talented and skilled writer, brought Christmas to a different level in the nineteenth century.

He had a social conscience born of his own upbringing and the poverty experienced when his father was incarcerated in a debtor’s jail. Can you imagine anything more pointless �" incarcerating a man who is in debt behind bars where he had no chance of working his debts off? But that was what happened when Dickens was a lad in the first part of the nineteenth century. And, incidentally, that is the kind of society that some Brexiteers claim they would like to return to!

Charles Dickens left school and formal education in order to help the family finances and despite that he developed to be possibly the greatest author and writer of stories of the Victorian age. And it was he who invented Scrooge. What a name! Sheer genius!

He was moved by the plight of children working long hours down coal mines and in factories. Maybe his own childhood informed him of the desperate state and short lives of many youngsters back then, and so when he wrote “A Christmas Carol” he incorporated his anger and empathy into a story aimed at illustrating the huge gap between the wealthy and the poor.

Scrooge was a wealthy man rules by the accumulation of ever more wealth and a reluctance to spend what he already had, and he needed to be taught a lesson ... and it took three spirits to do it. He needed to examine his own past, take a close look at his present addiction to wealth and finally witness the very pointlessness of accumulating piles of pennies which mean nothing to a corpse when it is buried in the ground. And it was Dickens’ portrayal of inequalities within society that went some way to eradicating the extremes of poverty that forced parents to send even young children to work.

And by moulding a Christmas for Scrooge he created a focus for Christmases to come.

There are some who believe that the very notion of Christmas is divisive in a multi-cultural society, but it’s only a word, a name that goes along with a jolly fat man with a reindeer-powered sleigh and winsome Christmas carols sung as I heard this morning in a supermarket by a class of youngsters from a primary school.

There is no doubt in my mind that when Emperor Constantine opted to foist a little-known sect onto the Roman Empire his motives were far from faith-driven but had more to do with unifying the forces still loyal to empire. And then that empire, even as it collapsed into itself, took that vestigial offshoot of Judaism and polished it, created a new testament that was very selectively chosen from extant documents and even incorporated elements of earlier religions into representations of the man Jesus, and then preserved it to the point that today it bears absolutely no similarity to the humility of its origins.

And yet, in the name of that faith wars have been fought and many, many have died. Divisions within it (the Catholic versus Protestant split that tarnished much of the second millennia of European post-Christ history) have lead to cruelties beyond belief, burnings at stakes, beheadings, hanging,drawing and quarterings, isolation in rat infested dungeons, the Crusades, wars a-plenty ... and none of these reflected in our twenty-first century love of Christmas.

Now the past is returning to plague us. There is evidence of an increasing divide between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. Now, in what ought to be a time of plenty, there are those who sleep their endless nights on frozen streets, starve there, even die there. That is our society today, or part of it. The more the rich gather to themselves the less is for the real creators of that wealth.

I suppose what we need is another Dickens, another genius with the will and conviction to remind us who we are and what we need. And to my mind that man or woman isn’t there at the moment. Socialists and humanists can shriek until they’re hoarse, those who need to listen, in whose hand solutions to social problems and inequalities lie, just aren’t listening.

They have their own agendas and whilst I’ll bet many of them will take their expensive coats and bejewelled selves to church this Christmas, not one of them will deflect one degree away from their own concepts of a jolly season with its opportunities to gather ever more meaningless and pointless wealth to themselves.

Not one of them will see the frozen corpse in the gutter.

And not one of them will understand what Christmas means to me.

© Peter Rogerson 19.12.17

Reviews

[barleygirl]

As we in the USA are passing the most obscene tax-cut for the rich today, I'm reading this. The irony is overwhelming. Your words are brilliant. I love that you're so realistic about all the Christmas hype. I love reading a no-nonsense history-based account of what it all means. I love your blending of old times & present times, allowing the reader to pick & choose what it all means to him/her. My Christmas point of view has always been very different than anyone around me, engaging in the superficial materialistic hustle-bustle. I love hearing from a kindred spirit that isn't married to all the stereotypes! *smile* Here's wishing you & your loved ones the most joy this season (((HUGS))) Fondly, Margie

[Peter Rogerson]

It seems that we in the UK are following in the footsteps of the Trump regime in the USA and it troubles me. Thanks for your comment ... I always look forward to what you have to say.