How the Messiah stole Christmas

[davywavy]

Well, it's coming up to that time of year again. The lights are up on Oxford Street, the thundering hordes are rushing to buy presents, and we'll soon be hearing from every pagan and their dog that Christmas is actually a pagan festival that has been stolen.
The way it's told it sounds like two thousand years ago, Jesus, dressed in a domino mask and carrying a bag marked "swag", broke into every other religion and nicked their festivals before nipping away into the night whilst laughing like The Hooded Claw.
When you think about it, though, it's not really surprising that the early pagans queued up to convert. With Christianity in charge of the midwinter festival, the worst that you can expect is a touch of indigestion, James Bond films on the telly and a rather nasty knitted jumper off your aunt. When the druids were running the show the worst you could expect was ritual disembowelling to make sure the sun came up tomorrow.
Put like that, I think the druids had a pretty rough proposition, PR-wise.

The question is, if the pagans hadn't been foolish enough to leave their festivals visible on the back seat of their car when Jesus was walking past, would the midwinter festival still have been the jolly singsong it is now?
Of course it would:

On the twelfth day of Yuletide,
Odin sent to me
Twelve Einherjar feasting
Eleven vikings raiding
Ten Valkyrie Reaping
Nine annual sacrifices
Eight legged horses
Seven Aesir sons
Six swords of Wayland
Five andvaranaut*!
Four grazing stags
Three weaving norns
Two ravens
And a hanged god in the world tree.


And for the celts...

Lughdolph the silver-handed
Had a very shiney hand
And if you ever saw it,
You would have to "that's grand!"
All of the other Tuatha De
used to laugh and call him names
But they all knew deep down
That was just to hide their shame.
Then one foggy yuletide eve
Cuchulain came to say
"Lughdolph with your hand so bright
Won't you come and slay Fomors tonight?"
Then all the Tuatha De loved him
And they start to dance and sing:
Lughdolph the silver handed
Won't you come and be our king?


^{*That's the gold ring of the ring cycle, trivia fans.}

Comments

[adventink.livejournal.com]

Around this time of year I usually like to post a copy of that old, classic letter "Yes Virginia, there is a Great Chtulu."

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

re-reading it, I suspect that the scriptwriters of Pick of Destiny may well have ripped it off in the 'Satan lives in your heart' speech.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, but the pagans really are celebrating Christmas, they just don't realise it, like the early Saint who cuts down a huge but rotten oak to reveal a tiny evergreen sapling growing at its base.

H

[(Anonymous)]

Yup, start telling 'em they can't go home early on Christmas eve along with the devout, and they soon rediscover their connection with the good old C of E!

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

We don't get Yule off either. Paganity is teh suck in terms of holiday entitlement. 8 religious festivals, and not one of them a public holiday. Pfeh.

Anyone saying "actually May Day is Beltane" will get slapped. It doesn't happen on Beltane, now, does it?

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, but looking on the bright side, Christy, four of them are quarter days upon which your rent becomes due.

H

[dmwcarol.livejournal.com]

Well I'm a pagan and I make no claim whatsoever on Christmas, we have our own festivals to worry about and don't need to lay claim to any others.

Sure you can rant about how half the stories and customs are similar to this that and the other (I believe Mithras is teh current favourite but I don't pay that much attention these days) but Christmas has never been pagan and never will be - the clue is in the name!

[gwaunquest.livejournal.com]

Here hear! I like to call myself pagan as it provides numerous excuses for all manner of things, but Christmas is celebrateing the birth of christ and was acuratley calculated by people who knew how to do it(?). Slapping it in the middle of winter was a good marketing ploy in the northern hemi-spere but not so handy when the christians headed south as all Australian traditionalists know well.Personally I think that we should all celebrate all religious festivals as a mark of inter-theological unity. Plus we'd get masses more time off.

[the-mendicant.livejournal.com]

>>Splutters<< I read the first poem to say 'Nine Anal Sacrifices' and am trying to rid my overwrought mind of the image that conveys!

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I say we need a neopagan revival around that concept.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

In our coastal folklore, the relevant pagan celebration was called the Blood Night, or Blood Feast, or something to that effect, and it apparently revolved mainly around killing and eating/drying up everything you couldn't feed for the rest of winter. There were probably supernatural spirits of some denomination involved, but we had them lurking about under every nook and cranny all year anyway, so it wasn't that big a deal.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

With a local folklore and a festival name like that, I'd hazard a guess that you live in Innsmouth.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I checked it up. Apparently the proper Swedish name is Midvinterblot, Mindwinter Blood, or jólablót, Christmas Blood, and the word seems limited to the Swedish-speaking part of the country. I think whenever I'll send yuletide text messages from now on, I'll just wish everyone happy Midvinterblot. At least as long as it's amusing.

Close but no cigar. I picked this up from southern Ostrobothnia. The Innsmouth folks are all about Cthulhu and Dagon, whereas the locals are more into Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, and Yog-Sothoth, who, of course, is the Key and the Gate.