| Topic: |
Sociology > Depression |
| User: |
"Noon Cat Nick" |
| Date: |
22 Dec 2007 10:06:45 PM |
| Object: |
"Santa, Yule and Me" |
http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/santa%2C-yule-and-me-0
Ole Anthony
11.20.2007
Santa Claus is indeed an ontological puzzle.
His existence, that is. Let me explain.
The image and style of Santa as we know him today was etched into our
culture by two works; first the ubiquitous poem "The Night Before
Christmas" first published in 1823 and second by Haddon Sundblom's
depiction of him in an advertisement for Coca-Cola.
Santa's enduring presence on the cultural scene raises many questions.
Is Santa just an effort to contextualize the mythos of "the sacred gift"
in a global cultural setting?
Is the North Pole a theological "holy habitus" that provides the field
in which the dialectic of "giving and receiving" can be played out as
the cosmic agon? Could a historico-critical examination of "The Night
Before Christmas" bring some hermeneutical clarity to the "Rudolph" problem?
Popular culture has forever changed our way of seeing Santa. Even as
Heideggar overthrew the Cartesian trajectory of modern philosophical
reason, so has "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" transposed the Santa
archetypes from children's books to everyman's psyche.
It has became apparent that elves, reindeer and a cup of hot chocolate
on the mantlepiece can never be understood merely in a linguistically
mediated arena. The accepted Wissenschaft cannnot contain the whole
tale. It requires a world-disclosive synthesis of understanding.
Hermeneutically, it's simply a...uh....well, I seem to have lost my
train of thought.
(I hate it when I run out of jargon.)
....
I don't remember, even as a small child, ever believing in this Santa
Claus thing. I remember wondering, even with a magic sleigh and
reindeer, how could he deliver presents to every kid in the world in one
night? And since when did reindeer fly? And how did that
very-fat-jolly-old-elf fit down the chimney at our house in southern
Minnesota that was about half as big as his waistline?
I once got in a whole lot of trouble with my father for telling my
little sister that Santa Claus was a fake and then expanding my audience
to all my first cousins (who were legion). I had become an evangelist
for de-mythologizing the Santa story.
Saint Nicholas of Myra (now part of Turkey) is generally credited as
being the archetype for our present Santa Claus. But my background gives
me a different perspective.
Coming from a Norwegian family, I don’t equate Yule and Christmas. Yule
is a pagan winter festival celebrated in Northern Europe since ancient
times. The word comes from the Old Norse hjol (silent h) which means
"wheel." Some speculate that it celebrates the moment on the wheel of
the year when it is at its lowest point. For some it was the time of
human sacrifice to bring back the sun.
Scandinavian folklore contained stories about the god Odin, who would
each year at Yule have a great hunting party accompanied by his fellow
gods and the fallen warriors residing in his realm. Children would place
their boots, filled with carrots, straw or sugar near the chimney for
Odin's flying horse, Sleipnir, to eat. Odin would reward them by
replacing Sleipnir's food with candy.
Odin's appearance was often similar to that of Saint Nicholas, being
depicted as an old, mysterious man with a beard.
An early folktale tells of a holy man's enounter with a demon that takes
place in December. The land was being terrorized by a monster that at
night would come down the chimneys and slaughter children for its food.
The holy man, sometimes St. Nicholas, sought out the demon and tricked
it with magical shackles. The saint ordered him to go to each house and
make amends by giving gifts to children.
It is somewhat troubling to me as a Norwegian American that many of the
symbols associated with Christmas were derived from the traditional
pagan Scandinavian "Yule" celebrations.
Christian missionaries must have found it convenient to provide a lame
Christian reinterpretation of the popular pagan holiday instead of
confronting the evident idolatry.
English historian Bede's "Ecclesiastic History of the English People"
contains a letter from Pope Gregory I to the abbott Mellitus, who was on
his way to England to conduct missionary work among the pagan
Anglo-Saxons. Pope Gregory suggested that converting heathens would go
more smoothly if they were allowed to keep the outward forms of their
traditional pagan traditions, recasting them in a Christian context, "to
the end that, whilst some gratifications are outwardly permitted them,
they may the more easily consent to the inward consolations of the grace
of God." Many pagans were converted, but were they converted to a
neutered Christianity? Only God can sort that out.
But today, where is the simplicity of the impoverished Joseph and Mary
finding no room at the inn? The best scholarship seeems to point to his
birth in the early fall, around the time of the Jewish Rosh Hashanah
festival, not at the Christmas season at all. How can we "put Christ
back in Christmas" when He wasn't there in the first place?
I see Pope Gregory's point: "For there is no doubt that it is impossible
to efface everything at once from their obdurate minds."
But God's been putting up with Christians' "obdurate minds" for 2,000 years.
Isn't it time we gave this whole Santa thing a rest?
.
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