Christmas is at once the most hedonistic, commercialized, and holiest time of the year. Technically it is Easter Sunday – the day of resurrection - and not Christmas which is supposed to be the most important Christian day. Yet even devout churchgoers generally pay more attention to Christmas than Easter. And resent as they may the calendar expectation of happiness, even humbug scrooges find it hard to completely resist its spirit brightening festivities and gift exchanging pleasures. It says much about man’s paradoxical nature that this mix of deity, merry making, and mammon is the focal point of our calendar.

Biblical scholars point out that Christ could never have been born in a late December. “There were in the same country shepherds abiding in their field, keeping watch over their flock by night” says Luke 2:8. And of course shepherds do not keep their sheep in fields in the winter. Indeed it wasn’t until 375 AD that December 25th was chosen for the celebration of Jesus birth by Pope Julius I, a way some say of giving a Christian element to the pagan Roman winter festival Saturnalia and hence making more converts for the newly established Christian faith. But surely it is the day’s meaning and not its date that matters.

Nothing so evokes the contradictory emotions of Christmas as carols - probably the world’s most universally popular songs - which come in three main types : wintry festival tunes, Santa Claus songs, and traditional religious hymns.

Now idealized never never lands of snowy bell jingling horse drawn sleighs certainly have little to do with an evergreen country like Jamaica. And irresistibly catchy as the melody may be, I find it a little annoying to hear born and grow Jamaicans nostalgically sing “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know”. It is not just that a few plantation-minded dinosaurs might still find the titular coincidence secretly pleasing. What really disturbs is the idea of a people dreaming others dreams and not their own. It is one thing to adopt new cultural mores in search of a better material future. But are our memories to be neo-colonialized as well?

Santa Claus’s original inspiration was Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, the legendary fourth century Bishop of Myra, who was transformed into the Dutch Sinter Claus. He used to be depicted as anything from a green elf to a man in pitchy patchy multi-coloured suit. But Santa as we now know him was created in 1931 by the Coca Cola company. Wanting a figure to represent their drink around the world, they commissioned an artist to paint a fat, jolly man in their corporate red and white colours. Those who charge that Santa is a capitalistic marketing tool designed to brainwash children – one of the few things on which hard-core Marxists and biblical fundamentalists agree – may not be far off the mark.

Indeed Santa Claus is the antithesis of everything Christ’s birth is supposed to represent. Jesus taught that virtue is its own reward. But Santa songs tell children that if they are good they will get lots of presents and if they are bad they won’t. He is in short the very embodiment of naked materialism. 

As a shopkeeper who depends on healthy Christmas sales to pay the year round bills I have divided feelings about Santa Claus. Part of me detests him more each year. But every December customers come asking for Santa, and so every holiday season we hire one. Is this stoking children’s greed, or just making customers happy, as successful merchants must?

Traditional Christmas carols not only contain some of the most beautiful music ever written, they are among the most evocative expressions of man’s hope for a better world. Christianity of course is only one religion among many, and who is to say there are not many paths to paradise? But Christmas is the time when the 40% of mankind who count themselves Christians acknowledge their God. Without Christ, say the carols, the uses of a Godforsaken earth truly are weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. But his coming has brought comfort and joy to the world.

Some reject Christ and yet celebrate the idea of Christmas as the season of peace and love. But as Miguel de Unamuno said, to claim religion’s virtues and consolations and yet refuse religion itself amounts to moral and emotional parasitism. Take away Christ and Christmas is merely a parade of parties and presents devoid of any spiritual significance.

Yet though unquestioning faith may grant an unmatched peace of mind, belief is not something that can be willed. And many must echo these lines from Sir John Betjeman’s “Christmas”

“And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall?                    

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me?”

And perhaps it is not true. It may be that neither Christ nor God nor any higher power nor the soul nor Nirvana nor any non-material reality exists. Perhaps the universe is but an indifferent cosmic accident, life merely a chemical reaction, and consciousness of self only an illusionary byproduct of the brain’s neural interactions. Is life just “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? None of us can say.

Only two unchallengeable facts apply to every human being on this planet – we all want to be happy, and we’re all going to die. Blaise Pascal put it thus

“We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness… One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity.”

Amidst all the festivities this is the reality to which the hymns of Christmas speak. In the words of the lovely “O Holy Night”

“Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn…

Truly He taught us to love one another;

His law is love and His gospel is peace.

Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother

And in His name all oppression shall cease”

The real magic of Christmas lies in this thrill of hope. The hope that universal peace and brotherhood are not vain dreams, that true happiness is indeed possible, that love is real not just a figment of our imagination, that life on this vale of tears is not completely without meaning. changkob@hotmail.com