Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan | Page 6

good
use of the idea |24| that the birthday of the Saviour had replaced the
birthday of the sun.[7]
Little is known of the manner in which the Natalis Invicti was kept; it
was not a folk-festival, and was probably observed by the classes rather
than the masses.{24} Its direct influence on Christmas customs has
probably been little or nothing. It fell, however, just before a Roman
festival that had immense popularity, is of great importance for our
subject, and is recalled by another name for Christmas that must now
be considered.
III. The Provençal Calendas or Calenos, the Polish Kolenda, the
Russian Kolyáda, the Czech Koleda and the Lithuanian Kalledos, not to
speak of the Welsh Calenig for Christmas-box, and the Gaelic Calluinn
for New Year's Eve, are all derived from the Latin Kalendae, and
suggest the connection of Christmas with the Roman New Year's Day,
the Kalends or the first day of January, a time celebrated with many
festive customs. What these were, and how they have affected
Christmas we shall see in some detail in
Part II.; suffice it to say here that the

festival, which lasted for at least three days, was one of riotous life, of
banqueting and games and licence. It was preceded, moreover, by the
Saturnalia (December 17 to 23) which had many like features, and
must have formed practically one festive season with it. The word
Saturnalia has become so familiar in modern usage as to suggest
sufficiently the character of the festival for which it stands.
|25| Into the midst of this season of revelry and licence the Church
introduced her celebration of the beginning of man's redemption from
the bondage of sin. Who can wonder that Christmas contains
incongruous elements, for old things, loved by the people, cannot easily
be uprooted.
IV. One more name yet remains to be considered, Yule (Danish Jul),
the ordinary word for Christmas in the Scandinavian languages, and not
extinct among ourselves. Its derivation has been widely discussed, but
so far no satisfactory explanation of it has been found. Professor Skeat
in the last edition of his Etymological Dictionary (1910) has to admit
that its origin is unknown. Whatever its source may be, it is clearly the
name of a Germanic season--probably a two-month tide covering the
second half of November, the whole of December, and the first half of
January.{26} It may well suggest to us the element added to Christmas
by the barbarian peoples who began to learn Christianity about the time
when the festival was founded. Modern research has tended to disprove
the idea that the old Germans held a Yule feast at the winter solstice,
and it is probable, as we shall see, that the specifically Teutonic
Christmas customs come from a New Year and beginning-of-winter
festival kept about the middle of November. These customs transferred
to Christmas are to a great extent religious or magical rites intended to
secure prosperity during the coming year, and there is also the familiar
Christmas feasting, apparently derived in part from the sacrificial
banquets that marked the beginning of winter.
* * * * *
We have now taken a general glance at the elements which have
combined in Christmas. The heathen folk-festivals absorbed by the
Nativity feast were essentially life-affirming, they expressed the mind

of men who said "yes" to this life, who valued earthly good things. On
the other hand Christianity, at all events in its intensest form, the
religion of the monks, was at bottom pessimistic as regards this earth,
and valued it only as a place of discipline for the life to come; it was
essentially a religion of renunciation that said "no" to the world. The
|26| Christian had here no continuing city, but sought one to come. How
could the Church make a feast of the secular New Year; what mattered
to her the world of time? her eye was fixed upon the eternal
realities--the great drama of Redemption. Not upon the course of the
temporal sun through the zodiac, but upon the mystical progress of the
eternal Sun of Righteousness must she base her calendar. Christmas
and New Year's Day--the two festivals stood originally for the most
opposed of principles.
Naturally the Church fought bitterly against the observance of the
Kalends; she condemned repeatedly the unseemly doings of Christians
in joining in heathenish customs at that season; she tried to make the
first of January a solemn fast; and from the ascetic point of view she
was profoundly right, for the old festivals were bound up with a lusty
attitude towards the world, a seeking for earthly joy and well-being.
The struggle between the ascetic principle of self-mortification,
world-renunciation, absorption in a transcendent ideal, and the natural
human striving towards earthly joy and well-being, is, perhaps, the
most interesting