A Humanist looks at Christmas
- I -

At the low point of the year, when the day is shortest and the night longest, comes the Winter Solstice. A few days later, when the seasons have turned, we welcome the lengthening days as life breaks its routine for Christmas. Families reunite; care homes, homeless shelters and hospitals strive to shed a ray of light into the troubled lives of their residents. The magic in the air even drives four out of every ten people to join others in church, recalling the birth of a baby in a Bethlehem stable.
Yet this is not the national awakening of a long-forgotten, half-remembered, Christian faith. Our first hint that something else is going on comes with the surprising revelation by the Church of England that 22% of adults professing non-Christian faiths were amongst those in Church last Christmas. It seems that the Christmas story speaks deeply to humanity, breaking the confines of religious dogma and somehow touching the hidden secrets of our inner selves.
The psychologist Carl Jung discovered indiscriminate adoption of pagan imagery in the mediaeval hymns to Mary and plundering of fertility myths by the Church Fathers to picture her as an undefiled, unploughed field. We find the origin of our Christmas celebrations not in Christian theology but buried unconsciously deep in our pagan past. Oliver Cromwell and his puritan followers knew this all too well, but their attempts at suppression – they even abolished Christmas in 1647 - merely drove ancient revelries out of the church into the secular arena to be condemned from the pulpit as sins of the flesh.

- II -

The prehistoric winter was hard and food was scarce. The sun’s path through the heavens sank daily lower and people feared its imminent death leaving only starvation in utter darkness and bitter cold. Every year with the passing of Winter Solstice the sun’s path began to rise again. Every year the sun was reborn. And every year primitive peoples celebrated the sun’s rebirth.
The great empires of antiquity continued the celebration. In Rome the week-long Saturnalia was a time for feasting and revelry. People decked their houses with lights and greenery; they gave one another presents symbolizing prosperity, happiness and hope for a good life. At the week’s end, on December 25th, came the birth of the Sun God, Sol Invictus.
When the Emperor Constantine converted an often unwilling Roman Empire to Christianity it was expedient to keep the solstice celebrations. The Unconquered Sun God became the Christian Son of God and, in 324AD, December 25th became the birthday of Jesus Christ. Nine hundred years later Francis of Assisi introduced the Christmas crib by placing animals around the altar at the Midnight Mass.
Christmas as we know it today is the child of romantic Victorian nostalgia. Charles Dickens’s novel ‘A Christmas Carol’ sets the scene and the postal service delivers Christmas cards whilst we decorate our Christmas trees, introduced from Germany by Prince Albert. Every year we enjoy the full panoply of the ancient Winter Solstice celebrations with fertility symbols - holly, ivy and the aphrodisiac mistletoe - adorning our homes. Wotan, the sun god, rides again through the skies, now disguised as Santa Claus, to leave yuletide presents under his sacred evergreen tree as he did thousands of years ago.
As humanists we can happily join in celebrating the turn of the year and look forward to the forthcoming summer. We suspend our disbelief in fertility magic as we hang the holly wreaths outside our front doors. We forget that Norse gods do not really ride the skies in reindeer driven chariots as we fill our children’s Christmas stockings, and we set aside our sure knowledge that young women cannot retain their virginity and yet become pregnant, unsullied by the human male.
Bernard Halter