Pope Francis attends the Christmas night mass at the St. Peter’s Basilica on December 24, 2013. Pope Francis celebrates the first Christmas of his pontificate. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images.
Author: Andrew Sullivan
Why Is Christmas On The 25th?
Considering the question last year, Andrew Santella offered a “less well-known explanation for the Dec. 25 date—one with appeal for anyone uncomfortable with a connection between Christmas and the old solstice festivals”:
According to some scholars, Christmas was set near the winter solstice not because of any pagan traditions but based on a series of arcane calendrical computations. This argument hinges on an ancient Jewish tradition that had the great prophets dying on the same dates as their birth or, alternatively, their conception. Thus, to follow this peculiar assumption, the first step in dating Jesus’ birth would be to date his death, which the Gospels say happened at Passover. The early Christian writer Tertullian calculated that the date given for Jesus’ death in John’s Gospel corresponds to March 25 in the Roman calendar. Many Christian churches came to celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation, marking the angel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary to tell her that she would become the mother of Jesus, on this date. Adding nine months to this date produces a Dec. 25 Christmas. This alternative explanation is sometimes deployed to dismiss the notion that the holiday had pagan roots.
How Do You Like Your Lights?
Kelly Faircloth favors multicolored:
At the risk of sounding treacly, there’s just something a little magical about bringing a big, riotous burst of color to a random corner of your living room, or your front porch, or strung across your kitchen window. It changes the whole look of the place. You dim the overhead lights and suddenly it’s all red, green and blue. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got landlord beige walls and Ikea furniture—suddenly it’s like you’re inside that Chip and Dale cartoon where they wreak havoc inside Mickey’s Christmas tree, or that Indian restaurant downtown.
Plus, they’re retro as hell. You can trigger your parents’ nostalgia by lightly evoking your grandparents’ living room, or you can go with those big fat bulbs if you want to deck your tree out in full Mad Men cosplay. It’s fun. It’s festive. It says go ahead, have too many cups of spiked hot chocolate and wear that Santa hat, we’re all friends here.
Kate Dries prefers white:
Even without a tree, white lights are entirely superior beast to their bastard cousin, the multicolored light strand.
White lights give off a soft glow that demands the age-old mantra, “Everyone looks better in the dark,” be updated to “Everyone looks better when lit by white Christmas lights.” There is a reason college students, who are otherwise idiots about decor, use white light strands to decorate their barren dorm rooms: they set an automatic mood of peace and tranquility. Not to mention, white lights are classy as fuck. They work with everything. They let your decorations shine. They look like snow. They look like ice. They look like candles. They look like Christmas.
I grew up in a household where white Christmas lights – which, I like I said, are the only Christmas lights – were treated with a degree of reverence normally reserved for a beloved figurine of the Baby Jesus inherited from a long-dead relative. To watch my mother (and her father before her) put lights on a Christmas tree is akin to watching a great sculptor like Bernini lovingly craft some of his greatest works. It takes hours upon hours. … For this is the Most Holy Part of Christmas.
Update from a reader:
OK, at the risk of jumping into what seems a very minor skirmish in the non-War on Xmas, let me say that both colored lights and white lights are correct – colored lights indoors, white lights outdoors. The simple elegance of white lights adorning a house’s architectural lines, and perhaps in the shrubbery or smaller trees in front, do the original cultural work of our European mid-winter celebrations: they fight the darkness, remind us that the days might still be cold, but there’s more light every day. The multi-colored lights inside transform our vision the way the foods we feast on transform our palettes and our waistlines: more kinds of light, visual calories. Comfort food, comfort lights.
Happy Christmas to one and all at the Dish. See you the 26th: I’m taking a day off from the Web as a present!
(Photo by Flickr user Christmas w/a K)
Christmas Hathos Alert
A final submission from a reader:
Holiday specials are a very particular version of hathos, and nothing, absolutely nothing, beats the Star Wars Holiday Special. It ran once only, before George Lucas ensured it will never see the light of day again. However, as always, the Internet delivers. Even the intro is enough to inspire a nearly toxic case of hathos.
All of our Christmas Hathos is here.
What You Shouldn’t Give
Daniel Gross argues that although gift cards can “signify a greater level of thought than cash,” purchasing one is “really making a free loan to big business”:
[L]ots of things could happen that would mean that the full amount of the gift isn’t used. In the retail trade, this is known as “breakage.” Breakage is a feature, not a bug, of the gift-card system, and it’s one of the most pernicious aspects of the trend. When balances aren’t used, they are simply pure profit for the retailer that sold the card. They get money upfront and never have to deliver any goods or services.
Even when recipients do use the full value of gift cards, retailers are still making out like bandits. Even in this age of low interest, idle money has value. When you buy a gift card, you are effectively making an interest-free loan to the company for the period until the card is redeemed – a week, a month, six months, a year. Large companies like Starbucks have very efficient treasury operations that sweep all available cash into interest-earning savings instruments. Cash is a resource like any other, and companies hate to see any resource go to waste.
Other drawbacks of playing it safe:
When we asked the gift givers to rate how much they expected recipients to enjoy the gift, and contrasted this with the actual level of enjoyment of the person getting the gift, we found three systematic biases:
- First, gift receivers rated the gifts as more exciting than gift givers; in general, gift givers underestimated how much joy their gifts would bring.
- Second, gift receivers preferred the riskier gift and wished that gift givers took more chances.
- Finally, the underestimation of how much people would like the gifts was particularly large for risky gifts.
A Very John Waters Christmas
In an excerpt from Crackpot, the twisted director shares his favorite films of the season:
Forget White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life and all the other hackneyed trash. Go for the classics: Silent Night, Bloody Night, Black Christmas or the best seasonal film of all time, Christmas Evil (“He’ll sleigh you”). This true cinematic masterpiece only played theatrically for a few seconds, but it’s now available on videocassette and no holiday family get-together is complete without it.
It’s about a man completely consumed by Christmas. His neurosis first rears its ugly head as he applies shaving cream to his face, looks in the mirror, hallucinates a white beard and begins to imagine that he is Santa Claus. He gets a job in a toy factory, starts snooping and spying on the neighbourhood children and then rushes home to feverishly make notes in his big red book: “Jimmy was a good boy today,” or “Peggy was a bad little girl.” He starts cross-dressing as Claus and lurks around people’s roots ready to take the plunge. Finally, he actually gets stuck in a nearby chimney and awakens the family in his struggle. Mom and Dad go insane when they find a fat lunatic in their fireplace, but the kids are wild with glee. Santa has no choice but to kill these Scroogelike parents with the razor-sharp star decorating the top of their tree. As he flees a neighbourhood lynch mob, the children come to his rescue and defy their distraught parents by forming a human ring of protection around him. Finally, pushed to the limits of Clausmania, he leaps into his van/sleigh and it takes off flying over the moon as he psychotically and happily shrieks, “On Dancer! On Prancer! On Donner and Vixen!”
I wish I had kids. I’d make them watch it every year and if they didn’t like it, they’d be punished.
Face Of The Day
Vincent Herman waits in line during the Father Woody money giveaway at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver, Colorado. Herman said, “I’m having a rough time trying to find a job, this is great.” More than 1,000 people, some of them homeless, all of them struggling, circled a Capitol Hill block Friday morning, waiting in the gray, freezing cold so they could pocket $20 in an annual Christmas event started by the late Monsignor Charles B. Woodrich. By Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post/Getty.
The Misery Of Materialism
Just in time for the very last round of Christmas shopping, George Monbiot has issued a cri de coeur against consumerism. He notes that there “has long been a correlation observed between materialism, a lack of empathy and engagement with others, and unhappiness”:
[A] series of studies published in the journal Motivation and Emotion in July showed that as people become more materialistic, their wellbeing (good relationships, autonomy, sense of purpose and the rest) diminishes. As they become less materialistic, it rises. In one study, the researchers tested a group of 18-year-olds, then re-tested them 12 years later. They were asked to rank the importance of different goals – jobs, money and status on one side, and self-acceptance, fellow feeling and belonging on the other. They were then given a standard diagnostic test to identify mental health problems. At the ages of both 18 and 30, materialistic people were more susceptible to disorders. But if in that period they became less materialistic, they became happier. …
Another paper, published in Psychological Science, found that people in a controlled experiment who were repeatedly exposed to images of luxury goods, to messages that cast them as consumers rather than citizens and to words associated with materialism (such as buy, status, asset and expensive), experienced immediate but temporary increases in material aspirations, anxiety and depression. They also became more competitive and more selfish, had a reduced sense of social responsibility and were less inclined to join in demanding social activities. The researchers point out that, as we are repeatedly bombarded with such images through advertisements, and constantly described by the media as consumers, these temporary effects could be triggered more or less continuously.
Mental Health Break
Festive Foliage
Americans prefer real Christmas trees to artificial ones:
Rick Dungey, of the NCTA [National Christmas Tree Association], dismisses the artificial sort as “plastic tree-shaped decorations”. Americans tend to agree, buying more real trees than fake ones. Of 35m sold every year, 70% sprout from the ground. Despite a rise in sales a decade ago, fake trees have lost their sparkle since the financial crisis. But according to the American Christmas Tree Association, a trade group that claims to represent both types of tree, 83% of homes have a fake shrub.
Leslie Horn insists on authenticity:
[U]nless you’re a slight scrooge or suffer from severe seasonal allergies, you must go with the real thing. Douglas Fir, Blue Spruce, Scotch Pine—pick your pleasure. The smell is part of the fun, and car air fresheners or kitchen candles just don’t give the same seasonal effect.
Last year, Timothy Taylor reviewed research on how real and artificial trees affect the environment:
One artificial tree has greater environmental impact than one natural tree. However, an artificial tree can also be re-used over a number of years. Thus, there is some crossover point, if the artificial tree is used for long enough, that its environmental effect is less than an annual series of trees. For example, the [2009] ellipsos study [pdf] finds that an artificial tree would need to be used for 20 years before its greenhouse gas effects would be less than those of an annual series of natural trees.
Taylor considers other factors:
[T]he environment effect of the ornaments on the trees may be as large or greater than the effect of the tree itself. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that America imported $1 billion in Christmas tree ornaments from China (the leading supplier) between January to September 2012, but only $140 million worth of artificial Christmas trees. Thus, spending on ornaments is something like six times as high as spending on [artificial] trees. The choice of what kind of lights on the tree, or whether to drape the house and front yard with lights, is a more momentous environmental decision than the tree itself.
The Dish 