Happy Solstice Eve!
Celebrating the Season in Style
In a recent survey of a thousand Americans, three quarters reported that we have forgotten “the real meaning of Christmas.” Among respondents identifying as Christian, the proportion is even higher, at 84%.1
This is surprising, or even astonishing, as the real meaning of Christmas is virtually impossible to miss. Here in America, five days before Christmas, lights shine across every block, holiday music plays in every mall, and ads on YouTube remind us not to miss the opportunity to spend more money at various commercial avenues every year. All across America, the joyous celebration of consumerism is alive and well.
To be fair, Christians are dismayed that Christmas wasn’t supposed to be about consumerism. For instance, Sadie Boscher complains,
People nowadays are so incredibly greedy. The holiday now revolves around what people are receiving and whether or not it’s good enough for them. Christmas is now perceived as a day to ask for luxurious things you wouldn’t usually receive from people. For some people, receiving a gift is like receiving a compliment. People end up longing for more. The thirst is never satisfied because you’ve had a taste of the good life, that’s Christmas.2
Others, like Ida Brown, take things a bit more philosophically:
While shopping at a favorite department store, I found myself humming Christmas songs as I eyed the vast array of decorations, ornaments and holiday-packaged gifts on shelves and in the aisles.
It was October.3
But this could just be a case of denial, as Ida insists that, despite clear evidence for Christmas being a celebration of commercialism, it’s somehow a celebration of Jesus’ birth:
Has the meaning of Christmas changed? Of course not. It is still a celebration of the birth of the Christ child.4
But this is not really true—and it was never really true. No one knows the year when Jesus Christ was born, let alone the date; textual evidence suggests it might have been in the autumn, but textual evidence is conflicting:
Nowhere, however, does the New Testament specify when Jesus was born, and the currently accepted year is unlikely to be correct. Indeed, only two gospels—Matthew and Luke—even mention Jesus' birth. Furthermore, being driven primarily by theological considerations rather than by a concern with historical accuracy, the two infancy narratives not only contradict one another in almost every detail; they also run counter to logic and are completely unsupported by the historical evidence.5
Instead, the origins of Christmas lie in pagan festivals like Saturnalia, Mōdraniht, and Jul—December 25th was the start of the Roman New Year, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, celebrated immediately after the close of Saturnalia.
In other words, Christmas is really a capitalist holiday, which monetized Christian values, which were used to repackage pagan festivals, themselves a sacred or superstitious interpretation of the winter solstice. So if you want to know the real meaning of Christmas, it’s basically that we live on a planet with a pronounced axial tilt, such that our northern hemisphere’s shortest day occurs (as of the time of this post) tomorrow.6
Our family doesn’t much go in for traditional American culture. Our sense is that the values and traditions of the Western World, and especially of America, aren’t very well motivated or robust to the sweep of history. Neither commercialism, nor monotheistic holidays, nor even paganism seem particularly inspiring, so for years, now, we’ve been celebrating the Winter Solstice as just that: the winter solstice, an astronomical event relating to the position of the Earth in its orbit around our star, Sol. We celebrate all the solstices and equinoxes, without really prioritizing any, in a way that’s simple, fun, and limited to two days at most.
And what we’re finding out is that there is a serious benefit to this—You can actually have a pretty good solstice celebration even if your living situation is totally chaotic. All you need is about $15, and about four people and it works fine. Here is how:
1. Go Outside and Obtain Objects or Evidence Pertaining (Well, Vaguely Pertaining) to Winter.
Usually this entails sending our kids wandering through the snow looking for greenery, which could take the form of branches off of our pine tree, the juniper bushes at the back, or plastic Christmas garbage I tried to throw away the day before.
Arrange these objects around the house, or wherever it is you happen to be hanging around lately. We usually add a few candles, but given the proliferation of allergies lately, some readers may be allergic to wax, or fire, so you’ll have to please yourself, here.7
2. Lecture Everybody About Seasons (Optional)
Usually I get a globe, spin it around a bit, and talk about the Earth’s orbit and a variety of other topics pertaining to astronomy, climate, and history.
Mixing science with holidays is fun for me, and our children tend to put up with this pretty well! But your own mileage may vary.
3. Obtain Plain Brown Paper Bags to Wrap Presents.
Proper solstice presents are humble and tasteful. No bows. No ribbons. No garish wrapping.
I know people think they like vivid wrapping paper that looks like the aftermath of a war between the care bears and the LGBTQ+ coalition. But do they really? Brown paper packages tied up with strings; these are a few of my favorite things; but who ever sang a song about modern wrapping paper?
4. Obtain a Variety of Simple Presents
Extremely simple presents. Forget the Playstation, the motorcycle, the new cell phone. Really good solstice gifts are things like a candy bar; a ball; a bag of gaming dice; a handful of nuts.
That’s not to say this is all your gifts should be. Mixing in a genuinely good present or three helps a lot, especially if it’s something that you made yourself, or something that can be enjoyed by multiple people. But you want the average gift to be extremely modest.
5. Wrap and Label the Presents
This is the key—the most difficult, and also the most crucial step. It’s the labels that make the presents fun. The point is to obscure the recipient, and in some cases even the location, of the presents, using cryptic or even foreign language.
We label our presents in Greek or Futhark Runes, attributing their origin to Woden, Calvin & Hobbes, or the Snow Demons. You may want to be ready with some explanation (“Oh look, the snow demons got you an ice cube tray! Well they probably didn’t know you don’t want ice in your tea lately”) but you can just shrug.
Riddles, rhymes, clues to go look somewhere else, it’s all fair game—just don’t make the labels too difficult to decipher or it will start to feel like work for the people opening the presents.8
6. Do Not Allow Presents to be Opened Until they are Deciphered
Be firm on this! No need to take turns; just let everybody pick through the presents together trying to figure out to whom each present is really intended. But no present can be opened until the person opening it is confident they know it was for them.
What you’ve created is essentially a series of puzzles to solve, and the reward is finding out what’s inside. The anticipation and engagement is what makes it worthwhile.
“Cindy it’s for you, Oh it’s a scarf, Thanks” is the Christmas way, a process designed to maximize commercial throughput: Spend as much money, in as little time, as you can, with just a hint of awkwardness at the end (“I was really hoping for Kashmir...”) That’s Christmas.
The solstice way is to cast a glamour over the objects on display; to get everybody wondering what the hell these weird presents are before they open them.
Try it. You’ll see.
“Three quarters agree most Americans have forgotten the real meaning of Christmas.” Ipsos, 15 December 2022, https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/three-quarters-agree-most-americans-have-forgotten-the-real-meaning-of-Christmas. Accessed 20 December 2023.
Gottschalk, Ricky, and Sadie Boscher. “Has Christmas lost its meaning – THE MAIN FOUR.” THE MAIN FOUR, 19 December 2018, https://www.howellmainfour.com/11558/opinion/has-christmas-lost-its-meaning/. Accessed 20 December 2023.
Brown, Ida. “Have we forgotten the true meaning of Christmas?” Meridian Star, 21 December 2014, https://www.meridianstar.com/news/have-we-forgotten-the-true-meaning-of-christmas/article_40245f9a-88ce-11e4-b2f2-23a4e717aed9.html. Accessed 20 December 2023.
Ibid
Abruzzi, William S. "When Was Jesus Born." Academia. edu (2015).
For those of you in the southern hemisphere, get ready for the summer solstice and Australian Santa
We’re currently staying with our in-laws, who worry that mice might be using their chimney as a point of entrance to their house; their response is to forbid having fires in case the mice are too helpless to be able to escape the flames. I suspect they’re just using the story to politely cover up an allergy that one or both of them has to fire
I’ve never reached that point, but I think last winter solstice I came pretty close when I buryied a pair of presents underneath a pile of snow in the middle of the backyard
I wish I was as good as you at celebrating things.