someone who claims to have seen it with their own eyes.)
From that moment on, most things can be kept the same. The cracker jokes may have to be changed, as there’s too rich a tradition of Jewish humor to be sullied with weak puns on the phrase “mince pies.” If you really want to lighten the mood, try replacing them with your favorite Henny Youngman one-liners, and see the delight on your wife’s face as you read out what a now-dead twentieth-century gagsmith really thinks of her.
It may seem odd for a Jewish-born atheist to tell you how to enjoy your Christian festival, but why not? It now seems almost trite to point out most of the trappings of Christmas have little to do with the birth of Christ. The tree is pagan, the star is pagan, and the carols are simply a way for schools to keep track of which voices have broken (it’s now illegal to check any other way).
Christmas is a festival built on the very nature of picking and choosing the parts that are convenient. So strap on your tinsel, adjust your most Jewish paper crowns, and enjoy your child’s Nativity play as you would any other piece of classic theater. Because whatever your faith, Jewish, Christian, other or reasoned, Christmas is about the same thing. A day off. And delicious kestrel.
Chapter 16
How to Have a Peaceful Pagan Christmas
C LAIRE R AYNER
It was a blustery, gray December afternoon in the 1970s, and the woman standing beside me at the school gates said, in the way people do when they think small talk is needed, “What are you doing for Christmas? We always start the night before with midnight mass—tiring, but so special, don’t you think? Particularly for the children.”
Here we go again, I thought, and answered as simply as I could. The children were due out in a couple of minutes, so: “I’m a humanist,” I said. “Not religious.”
She stared at me blankly for a moment and then said, “Oh, like the Jews, I suppose. Don‘t believe in the Baby Jesus and his birthday.”
“A great many Jewish people are very religious, just like some Christians,” I replied, “though some are humanists like me.”
“Really.” This time there was a clink of ice in her voice. “So what do you people do at this time of year, then?”
It was the “you people” that got to me. “Oh, the same as you do, I imagine,” I said sunnily. “Spend too much money, spoil the kids something rotten, eat and drink too much, and fight with each others’ relations. We believe in fun and revels and just being together, you see, even if we do spar a bit, just as northern people always have done in the depths of winter—and they’ve been doing it for much longer than a mere couple of millennia.”
And then, at last, the children came cascading out of school and rescued me.
I thought, as I walked home with my whooping offspring playing their “I’m a cowboy” game all around me, about the midwinter revels, and also about man/womankind’s great spring festivals, when the sun is thanked for coming back at last and bringing fertility to plants and animals. These festivals encourage humanity to join in a bit of being fruitful and multiplying (if they want to—there is no punishment for those who don’t) and recognize the re-creative aspect of sexual activity as well as the creative. (For millennia, people have used contraception in one form or another, just to have fun without progeny. The ancient Egyptians had some interesting ideas about that.)
In many parts of Europe, girls danced round maypoles, which were undoubtedly phallic symbols seen as a little encouragement for those in need of something to get them going. I remember being taught at my infant school in the thirties how to plait ribbons round a maypole as I sang a special Maytime song about bees and flowers.
Meanwhile, poets and authors down the centuries wrote umpteen verses and yearning prose about “maying” and how, in May, it was pretty well a duty to be loving and sexy. Robert
From that moment on, most things can be kept the same. The cracker jokes may have to be changed, as there’s too rich a tradition of Jewish humor to be sullied with weak puns on the phrase “mince pies.” If you really want to lighten the mood, try replacing them with your favorite Henny Youngman one-liners, and see the delight on your wife’s face as you read out what a now-dead twentieth-century gagsmith really thinks of her.
It may seem odd for a Jewish-born atheist to tell you how to enjoy your Christian festival, but why not? It now seems almost trite to point out most of the trappings of Christmas have little to do with the birth of Christ. The tree is pagan, the star is pagan, and the carols are simply a way for schools to keep track of which voices have broken (it’s now illegal to check any other way).
Christmas is a festival built on the very nature of picking and choosing the parts that are convenient. So strap on your tinsel, adjust your most Jewish paper crowns, and enjoy your child’s Nativity play as you would any other piece of classic theater. Because whatever your faith, Jewish, Christian, other or reasoned, Christmas is about the same thing. A day off. And delicious kestrel.
Chapter 16
How to Have a Peaceful Pagan Christmas
C LAIRE R AYNER
It was a blustery, gray December afternoon in the 1970s, and the woman standing beside me at the school gates said, in the way people do when they think small talk is needed, “What are you doing for Christmas? We always start the night before with midnight mass—tiring, but so special, don’t you think? Particularly for the children.”
Here we go again, I thought, and answered as simply as I could. The children were due out in a couple of minutes, so: “I’m a humanist,” I said. “Not religious.”
She stared at me blankly for a moment and then said, “Oh, like the Jews, I suppose. Don‘t believe in the Baby Jesus and his birthday.”
“A great many Jewish people are very religious, just like some Christians,” I replied, “though some are humanists like me.”
“Really.” This time there was a clink of ice in her voice. “So what do you people do at this time of year, then?”
It was the “you people” that got to me. “Oh, the same as you do, I imagine,” I said sunnily. “Spend too much money, spoil the kids something rotten, eat and drink too much, and fight with each others’ relations. We believe in fun and revels and just being together, you see, even if we do spar a bit, just as northern people always have done in the depths of winter—and they’ve been doing it for much longer than a mere couple of millennia.”
And then, at last, the children came cascading out of school and rescued me.
I thought, as I walked home with my whooping offspring playing their “I’m a cowboy” game all around me, about the midwinter revels, and also about man/womankind’s great spring festivals, when the sun is thanked for coming back at last and bringing fertility to plants and animals. These festivals encourage humanity to join in a bit of being fruitful and multiplying (if they want to—there is no punishment for those who don’t) and recognize the re-creative aspect of sexual activity as well as the creative. (For millennia, people have used contraception in one form or another, just to have fun without progeny. The ancient Egyptians had some interesting ideas about that.)
In many parts of Europe, girls danced round maypoles, which were undoubtedly phallic symbols seen as a little encouragement for those in need of something to get them going. I remember being taught at my infant school in the thirties how to plait ribbons round a maypole as I sang a special Maytime song about bees and flowers.
Meanwhile, poets and authors down the centuries wrote umpteen verses and yearning prose about “maying” and how, in May, it was pretty well a duty to be loving and sexy. Robert
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