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    Christmas Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Christmas
    Christmas Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Christmas
    Christmas Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Christmas
    Ebook225 pages2 hours

    Christmas Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Christmas

    By Jonathan Green

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    About this ebook

    Wouldn’t it be great to understand all our Christmas traditions? Here, Jonathan Green offers the fascinating history behind our most beloved holiday traditions. For example, myrrh is incense made from the resin of a North African bush and was a special gift during biblical times. To the Romans, mistletoe was a symbol of fertility, so today we are encouraged to kiss when it is near. The Yule log was originally used to brighten homes during the dark, cold Scandinavian Christmas season. Packed with all manner of delightful surprises and delicious morsels, A Christmas Miscellany demystifies the origins of familiar festive customs such as caroling and Christmas cards, and entertains with fun, little-known facts. This is the perfect gift or stocking stuffer for the curious-minded during the holiday season.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateNov 1, 2009
    ISBN9781628732320
    Christmas Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Christmas
    Author

    Jonathan Green

    JONATHAN GREEN is an award-winning writer of speculative fiction with more than eighty books to his name. He has written everything from Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to Doctor Who novels, by way of Sonic the Hedgehog, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Judge Dredd. He is the creator of the Pax Britannia steampunk series for Abaddon Books, and the author of the critically-acclaimed, YOU ARE THE HERO – A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks.

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      Book preview

      Christmas Miscellany - Jonathan Green

      At Christmas play and make good cheer,

      For Christmas comes but once a year.

      The Christmas that we celebrate today is a creation of the past as much as it is a thing of the present. The customs that we keep are an amalgamation of the practices of other times, cultures, religions, and countries. Such diverse groups as the Romans, the Vikings, the peoples of Medieval Europe, and the Victorians, and such faraway places as Germany, Holland, and the Middle East have all had as big an impact on the creation and evolution of Christmas as have the birth of the baby Jesus, the Bible, and the Holy Land.

      Indeed, many of the Christmas customs we keep today have their origins thousands of years before Jesus Christ was even born, when people worshipped the sun as the giver of life. And yet, most of us keep these customs without knowing, or even wondering, why.

      Why do we put up Christmas trees, send Christmas cards, stuff ourselves with turkey, and hang up stockings on Christmas Eve? You might answer by saying that it’s traditional, or simply because it’s Christmas. But how have these traditions come about in the first place?

      And then there are the fascinating facts about Christmas that have been forgotten in this modern age. Did you know that the first Christmas lights used to adorn a tree belonged to Thomas Edison, or that Santa Claus’s official post office is in Finland?

      To give you an example of the sort of thing we hope to enlighten you about during the course of this little delight of a book, and to quote the classic Monty Python’s Life of Brian, What is myrrh anyway?

      Everybody has heard of gold, frankincense, and myrrh in the context of the Christmas story. They were, of course, the gifts brought to the baby Jesus by the three wise men. There probably isn’t anyone who doesn’t know what gold is (a relatively rare, shiny yellow metal, chemical symbol Au), but what of frankincense and, in particular, myrrh?

      Of the two, frankincense is the better known. It is a type of incense made from the aromatic resin of the Boswellia tree. It was introduced to Europe by Frankish crusaders (hence its name) and used lavishly in religious rituals. When blocks of the hardened resin are burnt, the frankincense gives off a sweet-smelling smoke.

      Myrrh is also a type of incense. Commiphora myrrha is a thorny shrub native to Somalia and the eastern reaches of Ethiopia. Today, it can also be found growing in other parts of the world, particularly the Arabian Peninsula, as it has been introduced to these regions over the years. However, at the time of Christ’s birth, part of what made myrrh so valuable was the distances that had to be traveled to get ahold of the stuff.

      Myrrh, as it would have been given to the infant Jesus, is the dried sap of the shrub, a resinous material, reddish-brown in color. The clearer the resin and the darker it is, the better the quality. The scent of raw myrrh is sharp and pleasant but also slightly bitter. The smoke it produces when burnt is also quite bitter, but with a sweet, tarry odor and notes of vanilla.

      Its enduring connection has always been with funerals and cremations, hence its prophetic significance as one of the gifts given to Jesus. Up until the fifteenth century it was used as an embalming ointment.

      Did you know …?

      Each of the three gifts given to the Christ child by the wise men had symbolic significance. Gold was a symbol of kingship and glory, but also of Christ’s divinity. Frankincense, as the perfume used in ritual worship, stood for both purity and ascending prayer, and spoke of Christ’s godhead and godliness. Myrrh, the fragrant burial ointment, was a symbol of Christ’s mortality, foretelling his death on the cross, and ultimately his resurrection.

      Both myrrh and frankincense are collected in the same way. Delicate incisions are made into the bark of the tree using a special tool. The milky sap that exudes from these incisions hardens as soon as it comes into contact with the air, forming tears that are then collected two weeks later. This process is called tapping. Once collected, the resin is stored for twelve weeks, giving it time to harden completely. The globules of resin are then sorted and graded, a process usually undertaken by the merchant buying it from the collector.

      Gum resins were first collected in this way in Arabia, a region that one ancient chronicler, Diodorus Siculus, described as exuding a most delicate fragrance; even the sailors passing by Arabia can smell the strong fragrance that gives health and vigor.

      Myrrh was highly prized in ancient times and was literally worth more than its weight in gold. In ancient Rome it cost five times as much as frankincense, although the latter was by far the more popular.

      Did you know …?

      The Romans burned myrrh at funerals to mask the smell of burning bodies, cremation being their favored way of seeing a person off into the afterlife. The less-than-entirely-rational Emperor Nero burned a year’s worth of myrrh at the funeral of his wife Poppaea in AD 65 (having possibly killed her himself).

      Myrrh’s connection with Christ doesn’t begin and end with the gifts given by the wise men. According to the Gospel of Mark, it was also offered to Jesus mingled with wine as he hung in agony from the cross at his crucifixion, the intention being to numb the pain he was feeling. This practice of using myrrh as an additive to wine was common in the ancient world and has even lasted to this day in certain parts of the globe. Myrrh was also used to anoint Jesus’s body after his death.

      Did you know …?

      Myrrh is put to a wide variety of uses in traditional Chinese medicine. It is supposed to help alleviate toothaches, and is used as a liniment for bruises, aches, and sprains. It is also prescribed for rheumatic, arthritic, and circulatory problems. However, most amazing of all, according to Western herbalism, it is supposed to have the power to make you younger looking!

      You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that something so rare and highly valued in ages past is much more widely available today. However, you might be surprised to discover that it is quite possible that you have some lying around the house yourself. It is found in everything from perfumes and lotions to toothpastes and mouthwashes; its antiseptic properties help treat and prevent gum disease. Nursing mothers have known of its analgesic properties for a long time as well, rubbing it onto babies’ gums to relieve the pain they feel when teething.

      As well as its connections with Christmas through the story of the Nativity, myrrh also has a link to Santa Claus—or at least the fourth-century bishop Saint Nicholas, who inspired the festive gift-giver. It was said that healing myrrh flowed from the saint’s sacred relics. Pilgrims seeking such miraculous healing at his shrine would pray to Saint Nicholas as follows:

      With divine myrrh the divine grace of the Spirit anointed thee, who didst preside as the leader of Myra, and having made the ends of the world fragrant with the myrrh of virtues, thou holiest of men, through the pleasant breathings of thine intercessions always driving away the evil stench of the passions. Therefore, in faith we render thee great praise, and celebrate thine all-holy memory, O Nicholas.

      Did you know …?

      In Russia, in 1998, two icons associated with Tsar Nicholas II were reported as streaming myrrh, letting off a gentle flow of it each day. When this curious phenomenon was investigated further, both icons were found to have once been kept at a church dedicated to Saint Nicholas.

      Let’s clear one thing up before we go any further. Why is Christmas celebrated on December 25? Well, it’s because December 25 is the date of Jesus’s birth, isn’t it? No, it isn’t. Contrary to popular belief, December 25 is not Jesus Christ’s birthday. Oh, and he wasn’t born in AD 0 either.

      In AD 525, Pope John I charged the scholar Dionysius Exiguus with the task of producing a feast calendar for the Church. Dionysius also estimated the year of Christ’s birth but, due to a number of mistakes in his math, he arrived at a date that was a few years shy of the actual event.

      So, let’s look at the facts.

      First of all, the year of Jesus’s birth. He was probably born in 6 BC—that’s six years before the birth of Christ, believe it or not! Historians have worked this out from the fact that Jesus was born at the time of a Roman census, when [a] decree went out from the Emperor Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.

      The Romans were meticulous about record-keeping, as well as making sure that their taxes were collected, and we know that they carried out censuses of the Empire in 20 BC, 6 BC, and AD 8. Cross-referencing these with other historical facts, such as the reign of King Herod, it is most likely that 6 BC was the year of Christ’s birth. But what of the actual date?

      We can’t be certain of that, but the best guess that scholars can make is that Jesus was probably born in the spring. The Gospel

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