Most of our Christmas traditions we taken/adopted/stolen from the pagans. Actually most Christmas traditions aren't original at all. Look into Yule.
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Some holidays are strange
- Thread starter stratovani
- Start date
Unrepresented
Something Borderline Offensive
+1. There's been more assimilation in your average American holiday than in a Borg attack.[/nerdiest metaphor ever]
slobake
resident ... something
A lot of our traditions and holidays are weird. I don't think too much about it. I just try and enjoy myself and have fun. In the past when I was really struggling a few people took the opportunity to show me kindness during the holidays. I will always remember those people fondly and try and carry on that tradition. This year is no exception. Some of you are bound to say we should do that every day. That is true but the holidays often provide unique opportunities. It can be something as simple as making sure that a struggling nephew is welcomed and not rejected. Beyond that the opportunities are endless. For instance I could take the money it would spend on gifts that will likely be unwanted and give it to a neighbor who is struggling.
This one is possible but VERY doubtful. It comes of 19th-century folklorism. The assumption was that any traditional practice you found that you couldn't document the origin of must go back indefinitely into the pagan mists of time. So if you observed what the peasants were doing in the villages in the 18th century at Christmastime, and it didn't come from the Bible or official church teaching or anything elite and documentable like that, you assumed that what the peasants were doing must be age-old tradition from pre-Christian times.
None of that holds up to historical examination. Western Europe was Christianized between the 4th and 9th centuries, eastern Europe by the 11th except for a few pockets (Lithuania, etc.) which took till the 14th. The kinds of allegedly "pagan" holiday traditions we're talking about are generally first documented in the 15th or 16th century or even later. Now, it's possible - possible - that they were handed down in the illiterate peasant population unchanged for 500+ years. It's possible that this happened without the literate church elite noticing the practices or thinking they were worth recording. It's not very likely. Oral traditions can survive a long time, but not unchanged. Also, medieval churchmen were highly worried about any conduct among the peasants that might smack of paganism. One need only read the penitentials to get plenty of material on that; but lighting Christmas trees and putting gifts in stockings don't show up in the penitential literature.
The whole "pagan holiday" construct also rests on one HUGE assumption - that the peasants were incapable of being creative. If they were doing something the elites hadn't taught them, they must be mindlessly continuing ancient traditions, right? They couldn't possibly have developed new traditions and practices and celebrations over the years - after all, they're only peasants! Again, that assumption is manifestly false. We have plenty of evidence that people of any social class and education level can invent new practices and make traditions of them, and also that they can reinterpret and reshape practices given them by the elite into new meanings. St. Valentine's Day, for instance, celebrates a martyrdom; but it falls when people believed birds' mating season began, so it came to be associated with lovers. One church Holy Day was the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, but commoners in England were particularly struck by the use of candles in the church on that day; so it got renamed "Candlemas" and the light/candle imagery took on a life of its own that had little to do with the Virgin Mary or anything else it officially celebrated.
I'd like to know if it's truly universal that Mary Anne is better liked than Ginger.
It's those shorty shorts she wore. And that "good girl" facade...deep down you knew she was a bad girl... a very... bad... girl. *AHEM* so where was I?
Oh yes, you don't have to be religious to be grateful, as someone said previously. And you can also be a vegetarian and still celebrate Thanksgiving.
Both Christmas and Thanksgiving Day can and have become for many, days on which you take a break from your normal routine and get together with your family - not to borrow money, bicker, gossip, open old wounds, ask for favors, but to just catch up, enjoy each other's company, show love, bond with one another.
It's a time to be positive and grateful for all the good in your lives. Both those holidays come at the end of the year so it's also a good time to start leaving behind the negative of the current year and start looking forward to a better next year. It shouldn't be about the food and presents... those are just icing (good icing indeed for those getting new basses under those trees!) - family and love are more important than material things and those are what make the "holidays" a great time.
Not going to discount the present-exchanging though... come on, some of us are old farts (or getting there) and this time of the year still brings out our inner child and it's even more special when we share it with our own children. Who here still doesn't get excited and full of joy when opening a present or seeing a loved one opening theirs?
Yeah, sure - it's a commercial holiday, sales and ads everywhere, Black Friday... but commerce makes the world go round - those purchases are paying the wages of millions of employees world wide (let us forget for a moment that CEOs may be disgustingly overpaid) and helping economies.
That be cool to see. " Hmmmm. They worship a mouse and wear copies of his scalp on top of their own heads.."
As someone unfamiliar with the historical period, I'm genuinely curious what "Christianized" actually meant. Does that just mean in some cases that there was an abbey somewhere within 100 miles? Does it mean the majority of the population regularly participated in a Christian mass? Was it something in between or some other qualifier I can't think of?
I don't disagree with your assessment, as someone with no historical savvy I'm curious to know if most of those Christianized communities had a heck of a lot of pagan activity going on in them, and if so, how much the two religious practices blended together.
"Christianization*(or*Christianisation) is theconversion*of individuals to*Christianity*or the conversion of entire peoples at once."
They were usually pretty friendly about it too.
"Christianization*(or*Christianisation) is theconversion*of individuals to*Christianity*or the conversion of entire peoples at once."
They were usually pretty friendly about it too.
Yeah, but how do you qualify "converted" and how many converted individuals does it take to apply the label to an entire community or region?
Yes, that is the million-dollar question. It's a very complex phenomenon, and studying it is all the more complex because for the critical period (400-1000 AD in Europe, or so), you have very limited literacy (almost exclusively Christian clergy) and the written sources pose all kinds of interpretive challenges. It certainly does NOT mean that entire populations had some kind of intense, personal "conversion experience" that made them into devout Christian believers. A LOT of ink has been spilled on trying to sort it all out (including my own dissertation), so I won't try to cover it all here, but to survey:
In general, what we mean is that the authorities of a given society, with the more or less tacit compliance of their populations, adopted a Christian framework ideologically. Most obviously, that meant building churches and monasteries and getting baptized, but also things like attributing their right to rule, victory in battle, etc., to the Christian god rather than something else. Sometimes this was violently imposed from the top down (e.g. Charlemagne in Saxony), more often it was a more gradual process of cultural assimilation and consensus. In some areas there seems to have been a cohesive pagan "religion" to resist the change, but in many such did not exist or had already disintegrated before the rise of specific Christian institutions (such is the case in Bavaria, my own special focus).
It's easy to track rulers getting baptized and churches getting built. What's hard - nigh-impossible - is assessing how much impact all this had on the general population. You can try to get at it by looking at church councils and the aforementioned penitentials and seeing what churchmen thought needed doing, or looking at records of donations to churches and monasteries and seeing what kinds of people are giving, or at miracle stories in saints' lives and seeing what kinds of social classes figure in them. There are never any usable statistics, so the evidence is impressionistic and qualitative. In some contexts, it seems likely that the new religion was accepted readily and uncontested. In other areas, it was probably a long slow evolution by which people started to see their lives through Christian lenses.
But in any case, it's almost impossible to use the existing evidence to support a scenario of a specific pagan practice surviving fully 700, 900, 1000 years (if we're talking Germany, England, or Italy, respectively) from the initial Christianization of the area's authorities before any mention of that practice surfaces in any text. Which is generally the case with concrete candidates for "pagan survivals" like Christmas trees, Halloween trick-or-treating, or Easter bunnies.
There are some common denominators to all celebrations, of course. Practically every society in the world celebrates with feasting and gift-giving. Practically every society has harvest festivals, winter festivals (time to slaughter the livestock), and springtime festivals. So you'll always be able to find similarities - lo and behold, two different societies both have a holy day around the winter solstice, and both societies practice feasting and gift giving! Doesn't mean there's any specific connection.
