Christmas and myth

Christmas is now officially over I guess. We have been struck by the difference over here. We have found things more commercialised, yet somehow less socialised. It seems less of a national shared celebration than in the UK. Partly this is the effect of having only one day's public holiday (which makes taking the entire week off rather more difficult especially when you typically only have 10 days annual leave a year), partly the greater prominence of competing festivals (Hannukah and Kwanzaa) and the promixity to Thanksgiving.

I managed to skype the family on Christmas day and we were all struck how Christmas has managed to be barnacled with more and more traditions and myths. The gospel narratives are remarkably thin really - sparse and urgent when present (and Mark doesn't mention the nativity at all). But it's interesting how quickly traditions attach - not least ones that are outwith the initial story. It's also interesting to speculate which will still be attached in one hundred years and which, like Morecambe and Wise specials and Noel Edmonds up the Post Office Tower and truly, utterly, revoltingly, emetically ghastly Last Christmas by Wham will be barely remembered in 30 years time.

Here one of them is the annual Christmas Eve broadcast of It's a Wonderful Life. An emerging one in the UK is ye olde Christmas Documentary on A Fairytale of New York. Leaving aside the possibility that the emergence of the latter is entirely due to a national astonishment that Shane MacGowan is somehow still alive, the reason for both of these phenomena may be that both have at least a resonance with the gospel. It's a Wonderful Life seems to me to be about the importance of compassion and the worth of individuals, while Fairytale majors on grace being found in squalor and the possibility of redemption - what could resonate more clearly with the nativity than that? Together they are my favourite pieces of Christmas art, and both will, I suspect, last decades if not centuries.

I suppose that they might be called modern myths if one was to be pretentious. Generally I'm dubious about myth, remembering Pratchett in Small Gods where the psychotic inquisitor Vorbis taunts the profoundly unwilling Messiah, Brother Brutha (Pratchett never really lost a taste for schoolboy puns) about the difference between truth (what actually happened) and Truth (what ought to have happened to fulfill a prejudice of how the world is).

Increasingly debate on politics, particularly where it touches upon religion, would gain Vorbis's approval, and my last post on the war on Christmas was really a reflection on this, but I could add Political Correctness Gawn Mad, Londinistan, and the inherent superiority of the private sector in every conceivable situation to the list of Vorbisite "Truths". To be fair, my side contributes a tedious refrain of Tony B.liar, the inevitability of American perfidity and the imminent and egregious privatisation of all public services, to this barren landscape.

Perhaps the key test is whether myths illuminate a fact, or are used instead of facts. My Calvinist prejudices show through, but this is the distinction between Communion and Mass, is it a symbol or an ensnaring magic? Myths are powerful tools, and thus need careful handling.