When you really think about it, a lot of things about Christmas don’t add up. How does an overweight guy fit down a chimney (and how does he get into people’s apartments or houses without a fireplace)? What does a snowman wearing a top hat have to do with the birth of the historical Jesus Christ? And what the hell is myrrh, for fuck’s sake?
And one of the most perplexing questions I always had was: why do we celebrate it on December 25? Does the church even know for sure that was the day Jesus was born? The Bible is not really that great on dates, and there’s practically zero historical record on the dude outside of scripture. Historians have guessed on every month from April to August as to when he was actually born. So why did we decide on one incredibly specific date to celebrate the birth of a guy who lived over 2,000 years ago?
Well, the date originally belonged to an even older tradition, from the pre-Christian Roman Empire. December 25 was the last day of a week-long festival called Saturnalia. And part of me still wishes we celebrated Saturnalia, because it was as fucked up as it was completely awesome.
Almost every culture has had some sort of holiday tradition spring up around the last few weeks of December. It was the time of the Winter Solstice, when the nights were longest and the days were the coldest out of the year. And in ancient societies, when winter was a dangerous and deadly ordeal, it helped people to celebrate a holiday in the middle of winter to keep their spirits up through the harsh coming months. The old Norse, for example, had the holiday of Yule, a twelve-day (!) festival in which livestock were killed and their blood was sprinkled over the people celebrating, because the Norse were fucking metal like that. The Romans had Saturnalia, a festival which started on December 17 and lasted through to the 25th. And as befitting of the people who literally had so much sex they drove a plant believed to work as a contraceptive to extinction, the Romans dedicated this holiday to drunken debauchery.
The Roman god Saturn was an agricultural god, and he ruled the world in the Golden Age, a utopian era where humanity enjoyed endless bounty and didn’t have to worry about things like war or pointless celebrity scandals. To honor him, all businesses were closed, grand public banquets were held, and gifts were exchanged, similar to our modern Christmas traditions. That’s about where the similarities ended, though. People would get horrendously drunk and gamble (which was normally taboo in those days). Some Romans sang songs out in the street, like our modern day carolers – only these people would do so bare-ass naked. There was tons of food, live entertainment, and oh, so much booze. The whole empire basically turned into a giant frat party.
What really interests me, however, was the Roman’s use of role reversal to poke fun of their own societal norms. Saturnalia was the one time of the year where slaves were not only free to do as they wished, but were actually encouraged to take on their masters’ roles. They would eat and drink first, and wear the expensive clothes their masters usually wore, and even make fun of their owners in what must have been a very cathartic satire. (Not that they could push their luck… on December 26, they all went back to being slaves again).
After the Republic transitioned to the Empire, a new tradition popped up known as the “King of the Saturnalia” in which one member of the household was chosen and could tell everyone else to do whatever he wanted – anything from “dump your head in a bucket of ice water!” to “carry one of the musicians on your back and run around the house!” It seems like the custom was a knowing satire on the absolute power of the emperor, and when you consider that Roman Emperors were sometimes guys like Caligula who once made his entire army collect seashells and called them “spoils of the sea”, it doesn’t sound too far fetched.
But the drunken merriment of Saturnalia couldn’t last forever. It had a big competitor holiday called Sol Invictus (which literally means The Unconquered Sun, which sounds like an amazing band name), which rose to prominence in the East. Eventually, Christianity took hold of the whole empire, and when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, rose to power, he decided that the birth of Jesus should be celebrated on the same day as the end of Saturnalia. Soon, Saturnalia would fade into obscurity, replaced by a much more boring holiday with no naked singing in it.
Even so, the holiday, and Christmas itself, still stand as days that celebrate life in the worst possible times. More than any gods or traditions, the Winter Solstice is about survival. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, hell, even Yule or Saturnalia, you’re celebrating a long history of people who were able to face war, famine, disease – the worst things human beings could ever go through – and come out swinging. And no matter what you call it or what you do on this special day, it’s a day we all can believe in.
Happy Saturnalia everyone!
And don’t let Donald Trump become emperor President next year!
marissatheterrible 