CHARLIE BROWN: CHRISTMAS AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

There’ll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago

It’s the most wonderful time of the year
There’ll be much mistletoeing
And hearts will be glowing when loved ones are near
It’s the most wonderful time of the yearⁱ

I believe that Christmas is a magical time. It is my favorite time of the year. I love the lights, the songs, the foods, the presents, mistletoe, holly (which remains green and oddly bears fruit in the winter), Santa, reindeer, snow, elves, holiday films, and the bringing of trees indoors. I am aware that from a cynical post-everything perspective, I would be seen as a sappy sucker for my naïve appreciation of the holiday. I can only plead guilty to being sappy and to loving Christmas. I agree that it is commercialized and that capitalism perverts everything it touches. But I also believe Christmas is too resilient and in tune with the human spirit to be completely subverted.

So, below all the accouterments listed above, what do I think Christmas is really all about? I believe it is about the promise of new life. Further, I believe it is a holiday. A Holy Day. I take it that the ‘holy’ represents an aspect of our experience where we feel the transcendent breaks into our ordinary world, shining light upon its ultimate meaning and purpose. In that sense, Christmas might just be the holy day. In what follows, I will attempt to look a little more deeply at what is holy about Christmas and also look at Christmas as a thing we do (an old expression speaks of ‘keeping Christmas’, i.e., celebrating it) which means that it is a social practice that has the power to shape us in various ways.

New Life

Winter Solstice

I suppose that the natural basis of the holiday lies in the winter solstice. Of course, that marks the shortest (darkest) day of the year. Everything on earth is dependent on the sun. As such, it is the dividing line between the time when life/light is ebbing out of the year and the transition to the part of the year where life/light waxes stronger. That already has profound significance. In this sense, ancient pagans could see it as the rebirth of the sun. Hence, plants losing their leaves and much of life going into dormition in the Fall is transformed on that special day with the ‘rebirth’ of the sun and the promise of new life to come with the Spring and the lengthening days.

Saturnalia

The more immediate substratum of the holiday was the ancient Roman celebration in honor of Saturn, the agricultural god, in the form of the Saturnalia festival. Like many festivals, this included the turning of the world upside down with masters serving their slaves and many moral prohibitions being openly transgressed and probably a decent amount of debauchery. During part of the ritual celebration, an idol of the god was placed amongst the worshippers, so that the god was present with them. There was also a custom of gift giving. More in tune with the unflinching insight into nature possessed by many ancient pagans, there were also gladiatorial games in which the recently slain were offered as a blood sacrifice to the gods of the nether world. Nothing can be renewed without sacrifice. In later Roman times, December 25^th was marked out as the holiday in honor of the god Sol Invictus (undying or undefeated sun).

Christmas

For Christians, Christmas marks the incarnation of God. God will dwell with us; as if to say, ‘we’ll do this existence thing together from now on.’ Literally, new life comes into the world (as it always does with babies). Jesus is heralded as the ‘light of the world’. He is the awaited one. Now, while everything remains the same, everything is also different. There is the hope of ‘salvation’, of ‘all things made new’ (again, as they always are with the cycle of the year).

On my view, Christmas is not one or the other of these things, but all of them rolled into one (preferably with a minimum amount of gladiatorial contests).

Social Practices

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre explains it, echoing Aristotle, all forms of human society come together to achieve some good. For instance, we might form a bowling team to achieve the goods associated with bowling: athletic competition, bonding, etc…. As he explains in more detail: “What the objectivity of moral and other evaluative standards amount to is to be understood only from within the context of and in terms of the structure of certain types historically developed practice, in which the initial interests of those engaged in such practices are transformed through their activities into an interest in conforming to the standards of excellence required by those practices so that the good internal to them may be achieved.”ⁱⁱ

To further illustrate from the example of bowling, we should think of bowling as an ‘historically developed practice’: it’s a thing humans have been doing for some time. Further, it will have certain ‘internal goods’ and certain ‘external goods’ associated with it. The internal goods are the things we wish to achieve that are innate and inseparable to the practice: throwing the ball down the alley, knocking over pins to get points, certain team dynamics, etc… External goods, things that we might desire to get from bowling, but which can be got in other ways and which don’t enter into the practice of bowling, per se, might be things like earning money for giving endorsements to a sports company or enjoying a few beers with ones friends while the match goes on. According to MacIntyre, it will be the goods internal to the practice that define what will count as ‘excellence’ and provide standards of evaluation: the skills of rolling the ball in certain ways, gaining a ‘feel’ for the lane conditions, etc…. Perfecting these excellences will make one a good bowler. They are objective in that the practice of bowling wouldn’t be the practice of bowling if these didn’t hold (rolling of ball, knocking over of pins, winning).

I think we can understand a bit more about what ‘keeping Christmas’ is about if approach it from this perspective. To that end, we would want to nail down what the internal goods associated with this practice would be and then what excellences we would associate with the pursuit of those goods. I think we can get a better handle on that by looking at one of my holiday favorites, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965).ⁱⁱⁱ

Charlie Brown

The beloved children’s classic tells the story of a group of school kids trying to figure out how to put on a Christmas show, and, more importantly, figure out what Christmas is supposed to be about in the first place. The story opens with Charlie Brown talking with Linus about the holiday season and confessing that “I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.” That’s a profound line. It suggests that Charlie Brown, like most of us, is having trouble connecting with the holiday (with the holy), yet there is an echo from somewhere inside him about how it’s supposed to be. He goes to see a psychiatrist, ‘Doctor’ Lucy, because that’s what we moderns do when the world no longer speaks to us as we know it should. She advises him to get to work doing holiday things, specifically, directing their Christmas play—sound advice.

Charlie, and the others, though they don’t sense the problem with the same sensitivity he does, have several hurdles in the way of pulling off a good play and experiencing the holiday. One is commercialism. Lucy, the worldly-wise diagnostician, points out that “Christmas is a big commercial racket” that is “run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know.” Charlie’s little sister is focused on the presents that are “due” her; she mainly wants cash; “how about $10s and $20s?”

The second big hurdle is the desire to make Christmas glitzy. Charlie’s dog, Snoopy, is putting up gaudy lights on his doghouse to win a neighborhood prize. The play starts a long way from a nativity play, though it seems to mainly have the characters you would expect in a nativity play: shepherds, animals, a baby Jesus, Mary, and all. They want rockin’ music, flashiness, and they tell Charlie to go buy an aluminum tree, which they can then maybe paint pink. When Charlie gets to the tree lot, he sees a small, scraggly little tree and asks, “do they still make wooden Christmas trees?” At a kid’s level (or even an adult level) that is a pretty good way to allude to our alienation from the sacred and from nature.

Of course, Charlie buys the little shabby real tree. It is speaking forth the ‘realness’ of the holiday just as the little voice inside him is that lets him know how he ought to feel. Apparently, Linus has known the secret all along. At the story’s climax, he launches into an extended monologue where he recites much of the nativity story as presented in the Gospel of Luke which includes the lines about the blessing attending the nativity, “on earth peace, goodwill toward men.” He says, “that’s what Christmas is all about Charlie Brown.” Having the light of the sacred shed upon the situation, the other kids go to cheer up Charlie when they come along the little tree with barely any needles left on it and decide that it’s not such a bad tree after all; it just “needs…a little love.”

Keeping Christmas

It is a simple and profound story—go Charles Schulz! (And curse you Apple TV for buying up the rights and helping ensure fewer kids grow up with this as part of their childhood). I think Macintyre can be of assistance in getting us to see further implications. From that perspective, the ‘practice’ in question is the keeping of Christmas. How do you do it? Why would you do it? The ‘why’ will turn on figuring out what the ‘internal goods’ are that it offers. As we have seen, the promise of Christmas cosmologically is the advent of new life: in nature and in supernature and in a way that we can somehow participate in it. In the Gospel telling, this also makes it possible for there to be peace and goodwill. Those are both born of hope. If those seem worth celebrating, then what would be the ‘virtues’ (excellences) necessary to achieve the internal goods of the practice; what’s the ‘how’? As the Charlie Brown story outlines it, it (a) first involves cutting through the deceptions of commercialism and glitz in the promise that there is actually something there. Then (b) it involves the ability to see, the spiritual vision, what is going on which Linus clues us in to. Finally, (c) it involves us all pulling together to make it work. That is, (a) hope, (b) faith, and (c) love. Hence, if we choose to join the community of those who ‘do’ Christmas, we can achieve goodness and increase in these virtues together.

Therefore, perhaps we should keep Christmas. Or, we can call it the Solstice, or Saturnalia, or Hanukkah, or Yalda, or Kwanzaa, or whatever we might term it. However that turns out, may you experience a goodly measure of peace and cooperatively bring about some goodwill this season. The main thing is that it involves a tree; the old-fashioned kind made of wood.

I wish you a very merry Christmas!

i Andy Williams – It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Official Music Video) – YouTube

ii Alasdair MacIntyre, The MacIntyre Reader, edited by Kelvin Knight, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998, p. 233.

iii Watch the flick for free here.

(Note: the links to ‘pirated’ versions of ACharlie Brown Christmas keep getting taken down. Even the Russian ones. I suppose Apple has an effective global reach. Curse Apple. It is surely still out there if you check your favorite sites).

This essay was first published on Winter Oak