First, the comings and goings outside a public library, and then we’re inside: check-out counter, a librarian wheeling a cart people hunched in scholarship or just dozing, then a sneaky glide across books in the stacks. We see Carson through an aisle, sitting at the end of a long wooden table absorbed in one of several large books. A shot you see in BBC history shows a lot, with a rumpled, engrossed pedant ignoring the camera. Only here you wonder who’s holding the camera.
Still – we move out of the stacks and join him tableside. He turns to the camera, trying to stay quiet: “It’s not like I expect to find the, single, underlying, ur-meaning of Christmas. If there is one. And I really don’t want to find subversive plots, or Free Masonry or Dan Brown conspiracies.” Someone shushes him. “Though they’re probably there.”
He returns to his books, just as we cut to public domain video of the chilly holiday streets around Rockefeller Plaza: people shopping, walking, and otherwise interacting or not with the Christmas season in New York.
“Instead, Christmas seems to me tangled, lopsided and really confusing. When the season arrives, it comes to town and takes over like an ancient, unwieldy carnival with broken and amazing attractions. Arcane, pigheaded, banal, sentimental, exhaustively cloying, vividly religious, or charlatan attractions. And the townspeople are delighted, annoyed, suspicious, rambunctious or desperate to avoid it altogether.
“Assuming they even understand what they’re looking at. And I don’t think we the townspeople really do, because the attractions were made up, assembled, decreed, amalgamated from all over the place, in say 2000 BC Assyria, or 900 AD Saxony, or 218 BC Rome, or 300 AD Turkey or 1843 England, all light years away in culture and consciousness. Without any attic cleaning in 4000 years, the attractions are unpacked and set up with bewildering non-meaning every year, even in the 21st century. And they will be again, this year.“
He gets up from the library table, walks behind a bookcase, and we track along the shelf with him. When Carson and camera emerge on the other end of the bookcase, we are suddenly not in the library any more but in a rotoscoped, animated world of the academy: with books, stained glass, an oak desk, and a rotoscoped, talking head professor: K.L. Wolfram of Parson’s Christ College, East Anglia. Sleepy eyes, tall seacliff forehead, mismanaged hair and a pirate’s beard. And, as we’ll hear, sporting exceedingly elongated, excruciatingly precise Oxbridge sibilants.
This is Why Do You Hate Christmas’ animated history segment.
“Religions love – even demand – holidays,” Prof. Wolfram says. “Not just to celebrate. They punctuate important events and principles of their belief. Because beliefs are abstract. They need a signifier or a meaning to point to in the corporeal world. And usually this is something that doesn’t change or is large in scope, like a mountain. Or, on an even larger scale, the seasons.”
A time-lapsed but rotoscoped treatment of live action photography: budding fruit shouldering their way out of pods; wheat fields of green wiggling shoots that run tall into mature golden strands, before crumpling and collapsing into fallow gray; a river swelling, meandering messily over plains, then shrinking to a single cold blue artery; the skirt of sunlight drawing across the deserts, hills, plains and ocean of the tumbling earth.
“The seasons are the most profound force, other than death, that affects humans, and because they exist without any involvement from us, our helplessness and our gratitude become expressed as religion. Their aloofness mirrors our relationships with divinities. Because we construct religions, we understand these events better, even become mollified.”
As the tumbling earth finishes its revolution we drift up into space and behold! our animated world turns truly animated, anthropomorphized in orbit, warming itself la-de-da in the sun. It spins, do-si-dos elliptically, leans axially forward and back, its face assuming different colors for the seasons: white, green, yellow, orange. Our spinning, gavotting earth beams like Leslie Caron.
“The earth spins in one direction. Tilts up part of the time, tilts down another part of the time. These are occurrences we can’t do anything about it. But we can rely on them, when everything else is seemingly chaotic. Such dependability was, maybe still is, a great relief to humans. A cause for celebration.”
We’re back on Wolfram: “Thus, most religions find a way to relate their eternal beliefs to the eternal events of nature: See that tree blossoming again?” He reverently lifts his face to the sky and opens his hands solemnly. “It’s like ... God.”
A sun draped oak on a pastured hill. Clouds come and go.
“Over time, religions have grown more sophisticated than simply celebrating nature, not that nature is a simple thing. Our understanding was simple. But our religions turn conceptual. They ascend the heavens, designing wondrous moral abstractions, while our calendars... they stay firmly on the ground.
“What happens in the case of Christianity? At its earliest point, its big bang, you have a narrative religion, like Judaism. But more so. In this case there is a fixed starting and possible ending point in chronology, in visible, living history. It is a religion that commemorates and expands upon a single historical and, for that matter, political event. Christianity is powerful enough to overtake the forces of history, of time, but is it powerful enough to overtake nature? To do so, it has to become very creative to spread its roots into the eternally cyclical cosmos.”
“Why?” asks a rotoscoped Carson.
“Because the cosmos, the life and death, ebb and flow of the universe appears to us, on the human level, to be eternal. It is the only phenomena with greater power than religion. Its facts can compete for attention against any religion because religion, fundamentally, is only a metaphor, a narrative laid over that reality.
“Remember: if one of the purposes of religion is to understand and transcend the reality all around you, pairing or assigning divine energy to the ways of nature is a good place to start. Nature is eternal and therefore so is the power of your divinity.
“But when your religion is Christianity, historical narrative comes first. Fixing of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus into reality, the historical record, was one of several radical revelations of the early Christians. God was here, at this time and place, and here’s the proof. But to make the narrative, which is the religion, thrive and live in the hearts of its believers at all times, it must be correlated to the ever renewing present. It needs to account itself to the reality people are used to. It shouldn’t be surprising this process took hundreds of years to work out.
“So what does it do?” Professor Wolfram holds up a finger. “First it has to acknowledge that events like solstices and equinoxes occur, even though they are outside of Christian influence. Then it has to accept that these natural events are, and have been, causes for celebration and reflection. And then, once you allow these events into your thinking, you still must apply your new religion’s interpretation of them to the calendar. Give these dates a second reason for celebration. Or if you will, a doppelganger of doctrine.
“This way, the vernal equinox is no longer just an occasion signaling that spring is here. Which by itself should be enough for a happy occasion. The feast you hold should be reflective, perhaps on the deaths which may have recently occurred during the winter, hallowed with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Such is Passover.”
“And Passover is a story,” Carson adds.
“It is, one of many. But Judaism isn’t explained or demonstrated by it. In Christianity, all stories need to articulate the main narrative: that Jesus was born, walked the earth and died for us. When Christianity ascended, they applied a third layer of meaning to events like vernal equinox which already had a second layer, Passover, laid on top. Remember, Passover, commemorates the deaths of the first born in Egypt, but can be used for any deaths of the previous winter. So you have a celebration of life after death. That becomes Easter. Aka, the coming of the growing seasons.”
“So with Christmas ....?”
Wolfram answ
ers over an animated parade of Terry Gilliam-esque cut outs of paintings by Botticelli, El Greco, Titian, of annunciations, births, madonnas and child: the angels don’t just hug the humans in the foreground of Botticelli’s bucolic Mystical Nativity, they clasp desperately to their human brethren to keep from lifting away, their white rumps rising indecorously above their beating wings; the manger animals emit green drifting gasses disturbing all but the ethereally enamored Madonna; while the heavenly hosts above the nativity get carried away in their own loony joy as they start swinging and rocking gleefully, trying to spin the dome of heaven they’re dangling from until they break free and whirl away like tassels on a lampshade. They spin loopily across the background interrupting Titian’s Annunciation, where Gabriel’s legs kick at the ground like he’s underwater, tangling in his lineaments while Mary swats away the divine light poking at her eye. All of this while Wolfram gamely elucidates.
“In the case of Christmas, you have a celebration of the virgin birth. An event to celebrate if there ever was one. But it is an abstraction, a spiritual concept fundamental to your narrative of God becoming man and man approaching God, so locating a date on the calendar to commemorate or explain this is tricky.
“The day theoretically could be anything: May 11th or August 19th or February 2nd. And at first, the early church ignored the question of when exactly Christ was born. It took almost 300 years to consider it worthy of adding to the calendar. But when they did, the early theologians chose decisively. December 25 is marksman precise: exactly nine months from the day of conception, which they established to be March 25. That is the key date, as far as the early church was concerned. Less so those existing Roman holidays already assigned to December 25th.”
Botticelli’s freewheeling hosts whoop and laugh and trumpet past other Renaissance-whimsical, quasi-Italian countrysides until they pass outside the window of a dark ruminative garret. A withered hand closes the curtain and we see the monkishly hunched body of old Roman scholar as he shuffles from the window through his ancient library at night, frescoes illumined by candle along the way to his cabinet of scrolls. As Wolfram continues, our scholar grabs a spindle from its cradle in the cabinet and then shuffles to his tiny desk, around which the stone floor below is littered with tossed aside and partially unwound vellum of auxiliary scrolls. We are in the library, supposedly, of St. Hippolytus.
“So why March 25th [Wolfram continues]? In the early second century, St. Hippolytus, a believer, like the author of the Gospel of John, in the Logos or the transmission of divine God to mortal man, sought to define the chronology of these alternately divine and earthbound events and legitimize the date of the first Easter. The by product of that accomplishment was reinforcing the date of Christmas.
“According to his research, March 25 was the date of genesis, the creation of heaven and earth. In the Julian calendar he used, this was the vernal equinox. Today, according to our Gregorian calendar, that would have been March 21. But in either case, the vernal equinox is a suitable time for the genesis of anything, be it the world or its savior.
“Hippolytus then traced seventy-one generations or 5502 years since Adam to the date of Jesus’ conception on March 25 and along the way establishing, retroactively, the inevitability of Christ. March 25 has additional relevancy for, according the depths of his research, it was March 25 in the year 29 AD that the Passover occurred in which Jesus was killed. This was his goal. To the religious mind, in search of harmony, divine wisdom, and a narrative to express his ecstasy, the death of the savior of the world could only happen on the anniversary of his conception which could only have occurred on the date of the birth of that world. And oh yes, secondly, it is followed nine months later by his eternal birth, December 25, in Bethlehem. On a Wednesday, in fact, in the years either 2, 3 or 4 BC. Hippolytus was less certain of his math at that point. Nonetheless, locating the conception, and the birthday, in reality-based chronology was a necessity for a religion forming itself around the concept of the divine presence in the reality of man.
“Correspondingly, according to Luke, the Virgin Mary was told of her conception, the Annunciation, exactly six months after St. John the Baptist was conceived, providing another fitting calendrical puzzle piece.”
Gone is Hippolytus to his measurements and back on rotoscoped Carson. “Because John the Baptist has to be born first.”
“Circular reasoning, indeed,” Wolfram answers. “So note when these events occur.”
“Conception of John the Baptist, September 25. Conception of Jesus, March 25. Nativity of John the Baptist, June 24. Birth of Jesus, December 25. Close, but not exactly the dates of equinoxes and solstices, are they?”
“No,” Carson agrees. “And I’m compelled to ask why.”
“Of course. And I shall try to answer. Though fair warning: here is where we encounter the folly of man when he tries to fit the precision of his religion to the indifferent movements of the cosmos.
“Noted,” Carson replies.
We are back to the animated, sparkly lineaments of space. As the earth orbits the sun, a running chronometer trails behind. Moving in closer, the numbers turn into lines of 1s and 0s, which duplicating and squaring in size, overtake the width of the screen, finally morphing into the letters and symbols of computer code. Amid the expanding code, some lines turn red and die with little dead faces and x’s over their eyes.
“When computer programers encounter leftover code buried among the new they call the obsolete code cruft. Cruft may be obsolete but at one point it was put there for a reason now unknown by unknown programmers. Perhaps for good reason, but no one knows why. The dates I mentioned are cultural cruft.”
“Cruft?” Carson states, asks, dubiously.
“Yes! What is a calendar, but a system to help us plot the rise of the sun or the passage of the moon through its phases? To our great frustration, however, orbits of the earth and the moon follow their own paths, trailing fractions of time behind them. As we’ve gotten more precise with our calculations, we updated our calendars, inventing leap months, leap weeks, leap days, from Julius Caesar to Pope Gregory to make up for what seems to us the maddening imprecision of the universe.”
Picking up from the Gilliam worldview of animation, the gently painted icons of the early saints, gilded with halos and adorned in lapis lazuli, break from their frames, scuttle two dimensionally into groups and start hurling insults and condemnations at each other.
“According to the Julian calendar, for instance, which plots a solar year, the vernal equinox is March 25, as best as they could determine. The early Christians lived in a Julian calendar. But many of them also lived according to the Jewish calendar, which is a lunar calendar. Thus, Passover occurs on 14 Nisan, also known as the full moon of the Jewish month of Nisan. So, even while Christians pulled away from Judaism, they were still tied to the crucifixion occurring on or around Passover. No less than the Gospel of John states that Jesus was crucified on 14 Nisan. Or maybe it was 15 Nisan. Then, no one could decide which. And that made for disturbing arguments among the faithful, which led to accusations of heresy and even more infighting.”
“Because ....”
“Early Christian fathers did not relish the idea of plotting Easter on a lunar calendar because they believed Easter, as it perhaps did in 29 AD, should always occur on a Sunday. Thus the work of St. Hippolytus to scientifically verify this in real, chronological time. And provide evidence, however scant, in the disputes between those who believed in following the Jewish calendar for the celebration of Easter and those who decided that Easter should be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, better known as Passover.
Back to Wolfram. “Only to have the date of that fateful first Easter change again from March 25 to March 21 because of the updated reckoning of the Gregorian calendar. But by then Christmas, which was not as critical as Easter for locating the time and place where the divine met the earthly, had been placed at December 25. There was no
ecclesiastical reason to change it.”
* * *