Everyone Loves A Good Story

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land / Hard Working man and brave / He said to the rich, "Give your goods to the poor" / So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

Poor working people, they followed him around / Sung and shouted gay;/ Cops and the soldiers, they nailed him in the air/ And they lay Jesus Christ in his grave.  Woody Guthrie

Take a tale of subversion with a universal chord and flip it to a hierarchical system in an edifice of opulence and awe and the next thing you know....

I’ve got an idea, said Pope Julius circa 350 A.D., let’s turn this pagan Saturnalia and solstice festival into Jesus’ birthday. I think it has legs. It will quell the unrest and absorb their old ways. The peasants want their holiday, and we’ll declare it a holy-day. It’s a win-win. We can keep the gift-giving, candles and merry-making and sanctify the whole thing. God knows.

Fourteen hundred years later Charles Dickens provided a more secular twist with merry and jolly and Ho, Ho, Ho. Most of all, he went back to the ancient roots of the dying of the light as in Scrooge and the notion of renewal and good will, which aligns the human experience with the winter solstice.

What’s lost in all this myth-making is that it only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. For the other half of our planet the days are longer and brighter. Hold those candles till June 21^st.

Along the way we have Handel’s Messiah, Hallmark cards, Hark the Herald Angels Sing and other hymns, harvested and hacked spruce and Douglas fir (about 35 million in this country, alone), Irving Berlin, funky ornaments, record sales and lots of hallelujahs.

Who’s complaining? Not I. It also comes with an occasional cease fire. Warriors turn into normal human beings for a day or two and then return to their bellicose state.

The darkening days and then a lengthening suggest a sort of backdoor monotheism as a shared human experience. Could it be that one god is in cahoots with the other gods?

Bottom line: We bring in the light to hasten the turning toward the sun and metaphorically toward human possibility. If Jesus is born new, so too, can we be. And you too, Tiny Tim.