Christmas: The Last Carnival

About a month ago I finished Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy," in prep for a coming conference SLCC's hosting this Spring.  In it, she details the ancient, widespread, and global phenomenon of the festival, wherein mankind gathers together to dance, party, get ecstatic, go wild, forgets their differences, and just all-around enjoy ourselves!  This need for gathering, for release, for festival, is hard-wired into us genetically she argues--we need to come together, we need to cut loose, we need get outside ourselves, we need this communal catharsis, and that often and repeatedly.

And indeed, throughout the super-majority of human history, that is precisely what we did; every major and minor culture on earth has its regularly scheduled festivals dating back to pre-history.  From the Spring and Autumn Festivals of China, to the Dionysian Cults of Greece, to the Years of Jubilee of the Jews and the ecstatic warrior-dances of African tribesmen and Native Americans and the Carnivals of Catholic Europe, these festivals provided rich and poor, male and female, young and old, with the release, the togetherness, the wildness, the sheer joy we needed for the sake of our own mental health.

(One of my favorite anecdotes of early LDS history is that in Nauvoo, with Joseph Smith shot dead and mobs burning down farms and as the Saints prepared for the punishing journey west, Brigham Young each night would clear the Temple to hold inside a party--dancing, music, the whole shebang.  Each night.  He even assigned a brass-band to each wagon company heading west.  That was a man who understood the importance of the Festival impulse).

Of course, the powerful always had an uneasy relationship with Festival--any gathering that so regularly violated the oh-so-carefully-constructed hierarchies of the state, that leveled and erased the distinctions between rulers and ruled, was obviously a threat to their positions. Hence, the ancient Roman state, for example, would hold solemn and dignified processionals in honor of Emperors, in order to compete with the festivals; try as they might, though, they could never fully stamp Festival out, so just learned to co-exist with them.

The Catholic Church tried to just straight-up co-op the festivals as solemn religious holidays--hence the Spring Equinox became Easter, Winter Solstice was assigned Christmas, etc--but the festival impulse is not so easily squashed; the Catholic calender became filled with religious holidays, but as every one who's ever lived in Latin countries (as I have) knows, all those Saints' days are just excuses to party.  Always have been. 

Ironically, it was the Protestants, then, who succeeded where the Catholics failed--following the Reformation, the Festivals that occurred almost weekly were snuffed out across Europe.  Even the Catholic countries suffered a noticeable drop-off in Festival; sure, Rome and Rio de Janeiro still have Carnival, and formally-French New Orleans still has Mardis Gras, but nothing to the level of what once was.  The Protestants won.  Festivals were crushed across Europe, and then the Europeans crushed 'em wherever they colonized, which was pretty much everywhere.  In the West, all the old festivals were dead...

...all except Christmas.  Tenacious, wonderful, stubborn Christmas.  The Puritans and the Utilitarians would've cancelled Christmas if they could've (Dicken's Scrooge was really not all that strange of a character, frighteningly enough), but they couldn't.  Oh to be sure, we no longer have the unrestrained Christmas parties of ancient yore like our fore-bearers did; but consider the unprofitable-excess, the costly-expenditure, the exhaustive-spending that by all rights should drive any "sane" economist mad, that is associated with our Christmas gift-giving, gaudy-decorating, and gleeful wrapper-destroying.  Consider how this is the one time of year where the word "festive" (adj: like unto a festival) is applied un-ironically.  Consider how in English we apply to this holiday the anachronistic-modifier "Merry," an adjective reminiscent of England's distant, pre-Protestant, joyous past, back when it earned the appellation of "Merry ol' England!"

Consider the multitude of set songs and carols, the approved colors, the sacrosanct traditions, the seasonal foods and drinks, the trees, lights, near-non-stop parties, gifts, and communal gatherings, the hardy insistence that we celebrate and be happy that is all associated with the Christmas season--all these are the classic props and tropes of Festival!  The muted-yet-still-not-silenced Festival impulse dies hard in us, and throbs all the more powerfully during the Christmas season. 

If some of us find the Christmas season so exhausting, maybe it's because we get so little practice with proper festivals the rest of the year--our carnival muscles atrophy with so little exercise--such that we have to cram in all our festive impulses into this one month, lest we never get the chance and we all go mad with melancholy.

And thank the Good Lord above that we were spared this one last Festival, that Christmas at least was left us, and that when we needed it most--just after the Winter Solstice, the darkest evening of the year, when we receive the least direct sunlight and Seasonal Affective Disorder is wrecking havoc on our moods and physiologies, when the whole land is barren and covered in silent and silencing snow frigid as death, and the haunting gloom closes in around us (consider what a depressing month January often is)--that this, this is the day we chose to throw up our brightest lights, embrace our most generous instincts, release our most joyous passions, give our biggest gifts, and hold out largest parties!  The Earth is at last turning back closer to the sun, but we decide not to wait that long for our light--right when things are darkest, Christmas swoops in and saves us from slitting our wrists in despair!

It is a Festival of near-Bakhtinian proportions, an expenditure of near-Batailleian extremes.  Christmas is a revelation of our best selves, of the wild potential we could've been, of what we still should be, of the celebration that United Order will look like.

Please don't mistake me, as though I'm suggesting a religious holiday be returned to its worldly roots--remember that Christ's first miracle was to deliver more wine to a wedding party, and I do mean party.  The Savior understood the importance of the Festival impulse.

And on that first Christmas, the angels declared to the shepherds, "I bring you good tidings of great Joy!"   Like every Festival, the first Christmas was a call to shake ourselves from our doldrums, to wake up, be glad, and partake of rejuvenating, redemptive joy!  

And all to what end?

To have, "on earth peace, good will toward men."  It's the true peace that comes of good will, earned from the erasure of the distinctions (as Festival strives for) that separate us and isolate us and depress and oppress us; a joyous reuniting of man with each other, and of each other with God; a supreme and joyous At-one-ment. 

Have a Merry Christmas.  And I mean it.