Merrie Christmas

Catholics should be good at having a party. Celebrating feast days not only with liturgies, but also with parties, processions, and generally chaotic merrymaking. This is something which has a long tradition in the Church; we know this because a lot of people have complained about the excesses throughout history, often getting quite upset by it.

The culmination of outraged reaction came in the form of the Puritans’ carte blanche rejection of feast days, including their famous ban on the celebration of Christmas. Without a doubt, there were many dubious practices over the years, but one thing is clear, it is good to have fun. As we near Christmas, it’s not unusual to hear complaints that the religious feasts are too secular, or that all the partying undermines the religious nature of the festival.

It is true that the Christian nature of Christmas has been undermined, particularly in countries such as the United States. Yet I would venture to say that most people, probably everyone, still know what Christmas is really about. No one has managed to obliterate that message completely. At least not yet.

Whilst we may worry about many of the secular festivities overshadowing the liturgical meaning of Christmas, it’s worth casting our eye over the history of the liturgical year, and the traditions of celebration and festival that shaped generations of Catholics. What we would now consider ‘secular’ elements maintain a recurring presence. This is because the celebrations of major (and many not so major) festivals have often been the area where the intertwining of the lives of ordinary people and the liturgical life of the Church has taken place.

I have previously argued that the development of spirituality should be organic. The same goes for inculturation. A lot has been said about inculturation in recent decades, but often what has been said comes from a bureaucratic mindset, imposing ideas from above, chopping traditions to pieces, and telling people what is important to them. Genuine inculturation has always been part of the Church’s tradition and has included the way festivals have been celebrated. Ideas and liturgical language have been taken and used outside the inner sanctum of the liturgy and used in more profane settings. Christmas is a superb example of this.

After all, Christmas carols adapted words from the liturgy, taking the celebration of one of the most important feasts of the Church’s year and incorporating it into the joyous non-liturgical festivities. Latin phrases were lifted from the different liturgical Offices as well as Masses from the Advent season. What could be a better example of interweaving the liturgical life of the Church with the real life of ordinary people?

Even today, in the most secular of eras, modern Christmas pop songs still incorporate the liturgical. After all, a song that uses the word ‘Christmas’ is incorporating the liturgy into its lyrics. The strange, to European ears at least, ‘holiday season’ language of American secularism still fails to wipe away references to Christmas even after several decades of strenuous effort.

Medieval Europe was probably the epoch of the feast and festival Church. It was not a coincidence that one of the earliest major rebellions in England against Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the Pilgrimage of Grace, listed in its demands a return of the Church’s feast days alongside the restoration of the monasteries and the traditional faith. For ordinary people, the feast days of the Church gave days of rest and a chance to celebrate with friends and family.

To the protestant, often wealthy middle class, reformers, this was a great waste of laboring time for those we would now call the working classes (though ‘working class’ is an anachronistic phrase). Not only that, the celebrations around feast days gave too many opportunities for sin, which could not be allowed in a nation that aimed for godliness.

Nowadays our non-liturgical Christmas celebrations involve a man in a red suit delivering presents to children, those aforementioned, mostly average pop songs dusted off from the years before and played on repeat (at least, that is one of my guilty pleasures) and of being reunited with family. In the past, non-liturgical celebrations included huge banquets, such as a royal one held in 1377, when twenty-eight oxen and three hundred sheep were eaten.

For ordinary people, it was party time as well. Feasting, dancing, and the playing of games such as football or dice. Fun also included the practice of yule mumming, which took place across northern Europe. In this tradition, young men would wear masks designed to look like the devil and spend their time trying to scare passers-by.

Another practice involved the election of boy bishops, who would perform mock ceremonies, often in the presence of monarchs. Both Edward I and Edward II are known to have enjoyed taking part in the festivities around the election of a boy bishop. After Christmas day, the young lads of a parish would take part in ‘plough ceremonies’, where they would take the role of a horse pulling the plough, pulling it around the village, and ploughing up soil in front of any home that failed to offer some form of tribute.

No matter the time of year, sacred and profane were intertwined in the life of a parish. It will come as no surprise that liturgical services were occasions where the opposite sex would eye each other up, and there are a few ribald poems that survive from the medieval period observing some of the consequences of keen young men following through on their attraction to the ladies. The profane impacted the processions associated with Corpus Christi, as blood would be drawn in fights between rival guilds, often due to arguments over the order of seniority in the procession. On one occasion in 1399, the city of Chester saw a full-on riot break out due to arguments over the Corpus Christi procession.

Every feast day involved merrymaking of some kind. The most important time of the Church’s liturgical year would obviously have huge festivities. Whilst processions and ceremonies abounded, one of the great traditions of the medieval period is associated with Holy Week, they are the ‘mystery plays.’ These were re-tellings of biblical stories, often filling out those parts not addressed in the Biblical accounts. They would fill in the back story of individuals such as Pontius Pilate, as well as acting as a sort of sequel to the Bible stories, telling their audience what happened next to such figures. Again, they could include some extremely profane entertainment, designed to make their audiences laugh as well as think on the higher things.

I will finish this short article by saying Merry Christmas to all my readers. And, if I can be pedantic, I mean merry, not happy. Over the years some people have assured me that Christians should not say Merry Christmas, as it implies excessive drinking and all that goes with it. But that is just wrong. Merry means to enjoy the sweetness of life, to have a good spirit, and have fun. A merry Christmas is greater and more meaningful than a happy Christmas. As we have seen, Catholicism has always enjoyed feasts and festivities.

Before the Reformation tore the heart out of Christendom, England was known as ‘Merrie England,’ due to the people’s enjoyment of feasts and celebrations. These were the feasts and celebrations of the liturgical year. It was ‘Merrie England’ that rose against tyranny in the Pilgrimage of Grace. To say Merry Christmas is to tap into that ancient Catholic tradition of joy, celebration, and happiness. So, once again I wish you all a Merry Christmas.