Christmas burns. It’s an inferno that would consume the entire world, if it could: a riot of color and fantastical shapes, like the ballerinas of flame that dance in a fireplace. Just a flicker that starts around November to lick at the season’s kindling, building to a blaze by early December, and roaring up into the wildfire of the week before Christmas.
It’s all too much, isn’t it? The lights stapled on the houses, like amateur efforts to guide down to earth the invasion of an alien space fleet. The fruitcakes dense as black holes. The trees drooping like tired porters under the weight of their decorations. The Advent candles, the poinsettias. Those silly inflatable reindeer out on the lawns. The ridiculous attempts to keep the holy day’s feeling alive while masking its festivals under the vagueness of nonreligious language: a Winter Cavalcade! A Holiday Party! A Season’s Greetings Gala! And still, however much all this ought to put out the flame, dash some water on the conflagration, Christmas resists being smothered.
Santa Claus. Rudolph. Frosty the Snowman, may God forgive us. The Nutcracker and the Advent carols. The pop songs leaking from the tinny speakers in the supermarket: everything from Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby to Joan Baez and Burl Ives, Ariana Grande and José Feliciano, Elvis and Mariah Carey, until our aural sense overloads and our ears want to bleed.
But still the season roars on, with the soaped storefront windows and the Salvation Army bells begging for change. The Christmas cards and the productions of A Christmas Carol. The Rockettes in their skimpy Santa’s Helpers costumes. The cookies and the candy. The wreaths and pine garlands and rolls of wrapping paper: They join in the grand bonfire of the holiday, to rage and blaze. They blind like beacons, stabbing at the sky.
In the 17th century, shovels in hand, the Puritans tried to root out Christmas, squaring their shoulders to take on the titanic task. And sometimes, in the fever of the season, I understand why.
The celebrations, wrote William Prynne in his 1632 Histriomastix, were “amorous, mixed, voluptuous, un-Christian,” filled with “drinking, roaring, healthing, dicing, carding, Masques and Stage-playes.” In celebrating the birth of Christ, they made the Savior seem “a glutton, an Epicure, a wine-bibber, a Divell”—a god “of all dissolutenesse, drunkennesse and disorder, since his Nativitie is thus solemnized by his followers.” The misrule of those days, the “dancing, masks, mummeries, state players, and such other Christmas disorders,” Prynne insisted, “should cause all pious Christians eternally to abominate them.”
And what to do with all this pagan, popish folderol? This madness of medieval festival? The Puritans had an answer: Abolish the celebration, clean up the holy day, and reduce the season to its purity. It wasn’t till the Victorian explosion of Christmas trees and Christmas sentimentality that the yuletide recovered much of its old insanity.
Curiously, there eventually came along another group of Christmas purifiers. These are the modern rich and elite—the in-vogue and the in-style, with their pricy clothes and fashionable rooms, elegantly decorated. They, too, want to clean up the season. You can see their aesthetic in glossy magazines: House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, House & Garden. Or the color ads in the November and December issues of the New Yorker and the urban newspapers’ Sunday magazines. Sophisticated trees and stylish fabrics. Understated, with just a few touches of decoration, and yet somehow also overstated, each of those expensive decorations tied with a glittering gold ribbon. So exquisite. So refined.
So un-Christmassy.
Whatever else the swanky and tony may have in mind, they set themselves against the yuletide mess and the uncontrollable bonfire of it all. An elegant Christmas looks to tame the madness and prettify the season. Just as the Puritans tried to tamp down the holiday in the name of superior religiosity, so fashionable people try to tamp down the holiday in the name of superior taste. A graceful little woodfire in the grate might be acceptable, but let’s not let the flame get out of hand. That would be vulgar.
The thing is, Christmas by its very nature wants to get out of hand. Wants to be vulgar. Wants to be neither puritan nor tasteful.
Christmas became associated with the pre-Christian pagan winter festivals—absorbing, reforming, and expanding them—because it did what they did, only better. Winter poses a problem for human existence: the cold that seems to want life not to be. The shortened days. The dark that eats at the psyche, gnawing on our bones. And to this contraction of our being, the pagan winter festivals conjured up the answer of Yule or Saturnalia.
In the Christianizing of Europe, the Near East, and North Africa, Christmas took over these holidays to show what they actually mean—to reveal what an actual solution to the winter would be. Every one of the old cultures saw that we need something joyous near the winter solstice. We need a light in the darkness, a flame in the cold.
And at the Nativity, God himself entered the world to illuminate the way and warm the ice that forms on the edges of our souls. Christmas burns because it was meant to. All those traditions, all the messy medieval festivals, all the vulgarity, all the hunger to consume the world: They begin when a child was born in a stable and laid within a manger. The Burning Babe, who came to cast fire on earth and warm the world in the bleak midwinter.
Joseph Bottum is a writer in the Black Hills. His most recent book is the new collection of fiction and essays, Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh: A Christmas Chrestomathy, and he is a founder of the daily poetry Substack newsletter, Poems Ancient and Modern.
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