Authors: Christian Rätsch
Traditions, Rituals, and Customs
Rituals are the key to understanding the inner constitution of human society.
VON WELTZIEN 1994, 9
Nothing is more frustrating to the ethnologist than the fact that informants cannot always provide answers for certain questions. When I asked the Lacondon Maya of Chiapas, Mexico, why they strung up the skulls of the animals they shot, I received the curt answer, “Because that’s the way it’s done.” Clearly, the sense and meaning of many ritual activities are forgotten with the passing of the centuries. This is exactly what would happen if an ethnologist were to take a survey among modern people to ask them why they celebrate Christmas, why they put up a Christmas tree, why they use a certain evergreen to decorate their rooms, and why certain scents are associated with Christmas.
Ethnobotanical Plant Categories in the Christmas Feast
Symbolic and decorative plants
Wintergreen
Christmas tree Floral arrangements
Blossom wonders
Oracular Plants
Incense
Aromatic essences
Spices
Food plants
Intoxicating plants
Rituals are like theatrical plays or operas. With the passage of time, their content is continuously reinterpreted and imbued with contemporary meaning. Rituals are ideal surfaces for projection. They consist of symbols that are interpreted unconsciously or personally. Christmas is such a ritual. The way we celebrate it remains constant; individual approaches and interpretations, on the other hand, are always variable. Christmas is a complex ritual with elements of tree and forest cults, agricultural rituals, magic customs, applied folk botany, rites of sacrifice, mystery plays, feasts, and all kinds of social exchange. Christmas is also a “feast of love” involving symbolic plants; nearly all the plants of Christmas have a historical association with fertility, love magic, or aphrodisiac effects. Thus, for ages, Christmas plants have provided a safe haven and domain of contemplation on dark and cold midwinter nights, with their blessings and their dangers.
The forest is a theater of strange beings, friendly and unfriendly. What are those creatures crawling around underneath the elder tree? It is the old one and her troop of mandrakes, woodruffs, goblins, and wights? Are these ministering angels or threatening demons? The friendly and unfriendly dance merrily beneath the witches’ weed; they smoke devil’s tobacco and light up the underworld with the magic sparks of their druid’s dust. Plant spirits appear in visionary consciousness as anthropomorphic beings that can speak with anyone, in any language. You need only ask—talk to them—and they will reveal the secrets of the normally invisible natural world to those eager for the knowledge. The shamanic world laughs and sings.
“On the Way to Reality” is the name of this episode of the cartoon series Alef-Thau by Alesandro Jodorowasky and Arno. (©1993, Carlsen Comics, Hamburg)
Christmas in the fairy forest: Father Christmas drives his sleigh through the world of fly agaric mushrooms, in the snow. (From a German children’s book, circa 1920)
THE CHRISTMAS CALENDAR
The usual dates supplied for the traditional Christmas season start with November 11 and end on February 2. Here is a small survey of the most important dates in the Christmas calendar.
November
11. Martini or St. Martin’s Day
Old start of winter; first slaughter feast after harvest time
25. St. Catherine’s Day
Time to start Christmas baking
30. St. Andrew’s Day and Night
Start of the new church year. Day of fortune-telling for love matches and weather for the coming year. Astrological lucky day.
December
1. Beginning of the Advent season and the Advent calendar. Start of the klaubaufgehens (wood gathering).
4. St. Barbara’s Day
Time to sow the “Barbara wheat.” In Provence, wheat is germinated in a saucer on Saint Barbara’s Day. The higher the wheat grows, the greater the prosperity it foretells. On this day, one creates Barbara’s boughs by bringing in branches of fruit trees and putting them in vases to force them to bloom. When they blossom, one can foretell an individual’s luck in love as well as the quality of the fruit harvest for the next year.
6. St. Nicholas Day
End of klaubaufgehens. St. Nicholas brings presents to the children. Mexico: Houses are decorated with Flor de San Nicolás.
7. “Bad luck day”
8. Mary’s conception
11. “Bad luck day”
13. St. Lucy’s Day
Old winter solstice (before the advent of the Gregorian calendar, this was considered the shortest day of the year). Night for driving away ghosts and witches.1 Perchtennacht (blackest night); time to cut the hazel wood rod.
Start of the Saturnalia in Rome.
19. End of the Roman Saturnalia (pre-Caesarian times)
21. St. Thomas Day3
Astronomical winter solstice. Most common beginning of the raw nights and start of the smudging nights during which house, court, and stables are smudged in purification rituals.
22. The sun enters the zodiacal sign of Capricorn
23. End of the Roman Saturnalia. (Saturday takes its name from “Saturn day.”)
24. Holy Night. Night of Christ’s birth; Christ’s night. More modern beginning of the raw nights.
25. First day of Christmas.
Sun day. Winter solstice and rebirth of the sun (sol invictus) in Roman times. Birthday of Mithras, ancient Persian god of light.
26. Second day of Christmas.
Boxing Day. St. Stephen’s Day. Ilex (holly) bushes are carried from village to village.
“The time between the years.” Oracle nights, lot nights.
27. Third day of Christmas.
Fudel (women beat men with life rod branches). St. John’s Day (farmer holiday).
28. Fourth day of Christmas.
The day of the innocent children.
Turning of the year, named after the holy Pope Sylvester I (ca. 314–335 CE). Night of St. Matthew.
January
1. New Year’s Day
Start of January. January is named after the Roman god Janus.
2. End of the raw nights (in more modern traditions the raw nights end on January 5).
5. The last day of Christmas. The children plunder the Christmas tree.
In the night before January 6, Befana, the Italian Christmas witch or three king fairy, comes down the chimney and fills children’s boots with sweets. To children who were not well behaved during the preceding year, she brings ashes, coal, and garlic.
Epiphany. Baptism of Christ. Birthday of Dionysus, Greek god of wine, vegetation, and ecstasy. Old change of times.
7. Old St. Valentine’s Day4
February
Official end of the Christmas season. Time of light processions (grounded in Celtic Candlemas). Rituals performed for the security and protection of the fertility of the fields.
Christmas Songs of the Hard Winter
Listen closely to Christmas songs and you might be able to feel a really cold breeze coming into your centrally heated home. These songs speak out not about joy and celebration but instead about deprivation, the pitiless harshness and cold of winter that freezes stone and bone. A Christmas song composed by Karl G. Hering (1766–1853)5 tells us, “It is a very hard winter when a wolf eats another wolf.”
Today, it seems we seldom see a white Christmas. We yearn for a white Christmas as if for a winter fairy dream, and are happy when we hear the weather forecast predicting good skiing and sledding. While we glide down the hills in the cold and snowy weather in modern skiing gear that keeps our fingers and toes from freezing, it’s hard to imagine that somewhere else (in Russia, perhaps), heating and water pipes are bursting in the cold. In lovely Switzerland, long before ski tourism began, the people were well acquainted with “Jack Frost”—the righteous man of winter described in these verses written in 1782 by Matthias Claudius:6
The Winter Is a Righteous Man
The winter is a righteous man
Strong like stone and enduring
His flesh feels like iron
And he does not shy from sweet or sour
Flowers and bird’s songs
He does not like at all
He hates warm drink and warm songs
All the warm things
When stone and bone break from the frost
And ponds and lakes crash
He likes that sound, he does not hate it
He is dying from laughter
His castle of ice is far away
On the North Pole on the beach;
But he also has a summerhouse
In lovely Switzerland
Soon he is there or here
To govern, to lead us,
And when he walks around we stand around
And look at him and freeze
Jingle Bells, Good King Wenceslas, and other famous Christmas carols played during the Christmas season in department stores and markets sound sentimental or kitschy to our ears. Who actually listens when caught up in the stress of shopping? The usually schmaltzy violin arrangements and the sweet bells fool us into believing that the content of these songs actually derive from “the good old days”—when, in fact, the real context of the times was anything but romantic and sentimental. These songs actually evoke experiences of deprivation, as in the following folk melody.
In the Middle of the Night
Oh, let God reign!
It is so cold!
Someone is likely to freeze
And lose his life
So cold goes the wind!
I am sorry for the children.
Oh, God have pity!
The mother is so poor
She has no pan
To cook for the little child,
No flour and no grease,
No milk and no salt.
It was much easier for our grandparents and great-grandparents to identify with the infant Jesus, nestled on hay and straw in the poor stable in Bethlehem, than it is for those of us living in an affluent society. In their time, they were content when their basic daily nutrition—sometimes just a mash of flour, grease, and salt—was secure. Only three or four generations ago, winter was the time when the infamous “Thin Jack” was the chef in poor households. Work in the fields was over for the year. Many farms were snowed in. Farmers and their farmhands gathered closer around the hearth fire and settled for provisions stored since the fall, foods that could endure the frost and the winter. Porridges, preserves, salted foods, gepökeltes (salted meats), and smoked and dried foods were on the table.
For people living in town, the days became shorter and the nights longer. Whoever lacked warm clothing and had no wood for a fire could—until the middle of the twentieth century—truly feel the harshness of the winter. One yearned for warm socks and a warm jacket, a merrily crackling hearth fire, hot soup, and something good tasting—like the apples, nuts, and almonds mentioned in numerous Christmas songs. In these times of darkness and scarcity, on what is practically the shortest day of the year, comes Christmas Day. Our modern celebration of the birth of Christ, with all its glowing lights, continues the pagan traditions of the winter solstice, during which the people celebrated the return of the sun. Christ, the Savior, is also the one who makes the land whole again, who saves the land7 and bears the hope of a new greening of nature, as expressed in this verse from the song “Oh Savior, Tear Open the Skies:”8
A fir tree as in a fairy tale. (Postcard)
Oh earth, break into leaf,
Break into leaf, oh earth
So that hill and valley may become green
Oh earth so this little flower brings
Oh Savior out of earth springs
The Christian feast of love and joy was intertwined with the birth of the Savior. It inspired in believers a feeling of charity for the poor and the beasts. For the poor, it nourished hope and a belief in the gracious generosity of those more fortunate. For children, Christmas promised the hope of Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, who brought ginger nuts, currants, and maybe even exotic colonial goods—like oranges from the Orient—in his sack.
Soon Christmas Comes
Melody: Hans Helmut; Lyrics: Karola Wilke
Soon Christmas comes
Now Father Christmas is not far away
Listen, the old man is knocking on the gate.
With his white horse, he is waiting …
I am putting hay in front of the house
And Ruprecht, Santa’s helper, is taking the sack out
Ginger nut, little apples, almonds, and currants
All that he gives to the good child …
The verses of enduringly popular Christmas songs carry these experiences—the hard winters and the longing for warmth, food, and charity that our grandparents and great-grandparents knew so well—into our modern living rooms.
A PAGAN FEAST
In the feast one finds the holy dimension of life in all its richness; in the feast we experience the holiness of human existence as a godly creation.
ELIADE 1957, 52
The feast that takes place between December 24 and December 26 is what we normally call Christmas. In the countries of the high north, in Scandinavia, this time is called Julfest. To our ancestors, this time period was known as “raw nights” or “smudging nights.” What does this mean? Where do these words come from? Entries in etymological dictionaries—those that clarify the origin and meaning of words—are no help. For example, in its 1963 edition, the Grosse Duden by Paul Grebe and Günther Drosdowski tells us that jul comes from the Nordic and described the winter solstice in pagan times, and that the word “went on, after Christianization, to indicate the Christmas feast.” But there are no entries that explain what jul actually means.
Very few authors took the trouble to search for answers in sources from earlier centuries. One who did was the famous folklorist, Adolf Spamer. His detailed and informative book Christmas in Old and New Times1 provides us with many interesting clues. According to Spamer, in the early eighteenth century the word jul carried the connotation of “shout for joy” or “hurrah!” Later on, it was associated with the Old Nordic êl (snow flurry) or jek (to speak), as well as with a Middle High German word for “invocation of the sun.” And this is a very logical explanation, considering the fact that in the north the sun never even reaches the horizon in midwinter. Spamer concludes: “It is clear that jul is the characterization of a long wintertime period.”