The Pleasure of Christmas

Christmas can be a hectic time of year. The expectations we have of it are very high and those expectations can so easily come crashing down around us in shower of tangled tinsel and shattered fairy lights.

The build-up to Christmas is busy, prolonged and often intense and when the great day comes it can slip through our fingers as swiftly as dissolving snow, leaving us feeling that we haven’t actually stopped to enjoy the day.

Yet whether we are religious or not, at the heart of Christmas there lies a pleasure and a mystery which we should try to capture. The tradition of a mid-winter celebration is older than Christianity itself, which changed its significance to a story about the birth of a child. Before that there were pre-Christian winter festivals such as Yule and Saturnalia.

For pagan cultures the festivities were as much about humanity’s relationship to the cycles of the natural world as with its links to the supernatural world - though the distinction between the two was less sharp than it was to become - and mid to late December marked the date of the winter solstice.

Winter was also considered a good time for festivals simply because there was a lull in the amount of agricultural work to be done at this time of the year.

Christmas was, in fact, given a lesser significance than Easter by the early Christian church. The prominence it has now may ironically arise from the importance given to the pre-Christian winter festivals. This is interesting to bear in mind in view of complaints about the increasing secularisation of Christmas and its decline into consumerism.

Perhaps, for good or bad, we are simply seeing Christmas in the modern era return to its pagan roots. In Roman times feasting, merry-making, drinking, singing and the giving of small presents accompanied the winter festival of Saturnalia.

The Scandinavian festival of Yule, was marked by the lighting of Yule logs, with the feasting going on for as long as the log burned, which could be up to twelve days. Other equivalent festivals in pagan Europe were filled with eating, drinking and partying.

The Christian story of the birth of Jesus is a story about the inter-connection between the human and the divine, or between the physical world and the world of the spirit.

Without meaning to be too grand about it, we, whether Christian, pagan, agnostic or otherwise can benefit from taking time out to experience the pleasure and the mystery which resides at the heart of the Christmas celebration.

This can simply mean giving ourselves a bit of time and space to reconnect with our inner selves and with the world of nature celebrated in the festivals of the winter solstice.

Feel the stillness of Christmas Eve, when others have gone to bed, the stillness of that moment of quiet, the glow of the Christmas lights, and the resonance of gifts not yet given.

On Christmas day open your front door and experience the quietness of the atmosphere, the lull in the amount of traffic on the roads, the feeling of people caught up in their own festivities, in their own individual and family lives.

This may sound idealistic, but it is simply about allowing ourselves a moment in which the true spirit and pleasure of the holiday can be appreciated.