What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (7 page)

God’s Family Tree

To prove Jesus had a royal pedigree, both Matthew and Luke offer a genealogy of Christ’s bloodline. But there are two problems here. First, the genealogies don’t match. Second, they both end with Joseph—who wasn’t the father of Jesus if you believe the virgin birth story. Jesus had none of Joseph’s DNA, so the genealogies are basically moot.

To get around this problem, folklore claims that Mary was also descended from the same noble bloodline. But this is an add-on; nobody saw fit to include it in the Bible.

The Road to Bethlehem

“But you Bethlehem of Judea shall be the birth place of the savior…” [Micah 5:2]

 

Jesus’ biographers have another predicament. Mark establishes that he is from Nazareth, a city in the province of Galilee. But the Hebrew Bible never mentions Nazareth, and instead requires that The Messiah be born in Bethlehem—the city of David—some seventy miles away. What to do?

Luke comes up with a solution. The author claims Emperor Augustus decided to take a census of the Roman Empire for the purpose of a tax, and this required that everyone return to their place of birth to be counted.

The idea is nuts. Yes, the Romans did take the occasional census. But not at the time of Jesus’ birth and certainly not with the requirement that everyone drag their butts back to their home town. It would have glutted the roads and disrupted the entire economy. Nor are there any records of such a mass migration. But it’s a whopper that gets Joseph and a very pregnant Mary on the road to Bethlehem, so stop looking for evidence or common sense.

Born in a Manger

And the angel said to them, “Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, which is Christ the Lord.” [Luke 2:10]

 

As everyone knows, Mary and Joseph wander into Bethlehem one night and, when there are no rooms left at the inn, they settle for a stable. (You’d think the innkeeper would have accommodated an expectant mother and made someone else sleep with the animals.) There, Mary gives birth to Jesus, who is wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger (basically a food trough). It’s an image with a nice populist touch, like Abe Lincoln’s birthplace log cabin. It’s a sweet scene of Jesus’ humble origins, and it looks good on a suburban lawn at Christmas.

Unfortunately, too many folks run off the end of the earth with this idea. They claim Jesus was born poor and homeless. Not so. Joseph had a job—he was a carpenter. They had a home back in Nazareth. They only wound up in a stable because the night they blew into Bethlehem all the hotels were booked. Jesus was born to a working class family, not to poverty.

As for the Nativity scene we imagine today, it was actually the invention of Francis of Assisi, who came up with the classic tableau in 1223. In a town in central Italy, he assembled villagers and their animals to stage the scenario; a kind of medieval street theater. The idea caught on, and it’s been a staple of Christmastime ever since.

A Brief History of Christmas

Most of us love Christmas—the smells, the colors, the carols, the sentiments. And what else could move intelligent people to put a big, dead tree in the middle of their living room and create a fire hazard for several weeks? Good thing nobody came up with the Christmas buffalo.

Despite the recent habit of advertisers calling it “the holidays,” (they gotta sell Hanukah gifts, too, ya know), and despite my home town of Los Angeles feeling about as Christmassy in December as a skateboard competition in May, Christmas
is
a magical time of year. The notion of everyone setting aside their differences and recognizing our mutual humanity has universal appeal—except for shoppers outside of Best Buy around 6:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving. In that case, all bets are off.

Even if you don’t take the birth story of Jesus literally, Christmas is awash with sounds and emotions that resonate with the best days of childhood. You’re even free to flaunt your bad taste in everything from schmaltzy music to garish broaches to hideous sweaters bearing giant snowflakes or reindeer. You have to wait for July 4
^th
and American flag sweatshirts to witness as many fashion crimes. But whether Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic, atheist, or Wiccan, there’s something about Christmas most of us can appreciate.

The explanation for Christmas we get as kids is pretty straightforward. Jesus was born on December 25, 0000 and we commemorate the holy event with gift-giving. This reenacts the Wise Men offering gifts to the Christ child, and it expresses Jesus’ spirit of generosity and love. It also makes you wonder if he felt cheated celebrating his birthday on Christmas every year. But the real story of Christmas is a lot more interesting, and more complicated.

If Jesus was a real historical figure, the day and year of his birth are unknown. This would be understandable if he was the usual great man of history. We don’t know the birthday of many ancient heroes because nobody knew they were going to be great when they were born. But if you believe the believers, this wasn’t the case with Jesus. The angels knew. The shepherds knew. His parents knew. The Wise Men knew. King Herod knew. Even the Little Drummer Boy had a clue. If anyone had doubts, the Star of Bethlehem should have tipped them off. But somehow nobody made a note of it on their calendar.

Some folks can’t resist trying to calculate Jesus’ birth date using clues found in Scripture. Among the first was a sixth century Catholic monk named Dionysius Exiguus, who calculated Easter dates as well. He also came up with the idea of
Anno Domini
(In the Year of Our Lord) as a way to reckon the years.

Dionysius began with a passage from
Luke 3:23
, which says Jesus was “about thirty” when he started his ministry in the 15
^th
year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. This means A.D. 29. That puts Jesus’ birth at 1 B.C. But other passages say he was born during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C. A lot of experts now think this was Jesus’ birth year.

It’s highly unlikely that Jesus was born at the end of the year, and equally unlikely that he was born on December 25
^th
. There’s certainly no evidence of it. The story has shepherds tending flocks nearby—not something you usually do in the dead of winter. Dionysius decided it was March 25
^th
. April 17
^th
was another popular guess. Nobody knew for sure, and changes in the calendar over the centuries made calculations even more iffy. But the early Christians didn’t care. It was Jesus’ death and resurrection that mattered most, not his birth, which is why Easter rather than Christmas is the most holy day of the Christian calendar. You can tell it’s more holy because it’s a lot less fun.

So why did we settle on December 25
^th
? Well, almost every culture has a big blowout of some kind around December 21
^st
during the Winter Solstice—the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year.

The Roman solstice festival was called Saturnalia—named for the god of agriculture, who’d be back in business as the days got longer and spring approached. The week-long celebration was everything you’d expect from a civilization that wore sandals to work, rooted for gladiators, and held board meetings in public baths: parading mobs, raucous drinking, and lavish dining, along with gift exchanges, and a Vegas-style sense of anything goes. The entire civilized world went on Spring Break. Gambling was legalized and courts were shut down. Even social roles were reversed—slaves dressed up like their masters and ordered them around. Try fielding this idea at your office holiday party.

Naturally, the straight-laced Christians were appalled by all this. There was nothing in the commandments about enjoying yourself and, for a long time, they resisted the impulse to party on the solstice. But as the faith vied for more converts, the Church had to deal with it. So, instead of a festival, they decided to observe the solstice in a Christian way, with a church service—Christ’s mass. Christmas.

It was their way of turning all that debauchery, which was bad for you, into a spiritual message that was
good
for you. Rather like giving trick-or-treaters a box of wheat germ instead of Hershey bars. The Church also fudged a bit on the meaning of it all by replacing the popular worship of Mithras, the sun god, with worship of the “Son of God,”…another savvy marketing ploy.

From its earliest days, Christmas was a two-track event—a pagan rite of fertility and a season of spiritual renewal. And as all of Europe was Christianized during the Middle Ages, Christmas acquired a lot of local pagan trappings.

In Scandinavia, Norsemen called their Winter Solstice the Yule, and a huge log was burned to keep the house warm and free of dark spirits. An evergreen was brought inside as a symbol of survival through the cold months. Livestock were slaughtered and the occasion was made a feast. In Germany, the god Odin was said to fly through the nights deciding who would have good luck in the coming year and who wouldn’t.

In Christian homes, apples were hung from evergreens to recall Eve in the Garden of Eden, and these evolved into tree ornaments. The holly shrub’s prickly leaves and red berries represented Christ’s blood-dappled crown of thorns.

In England there was a tradition of drunken revelry akin to Mardi Gras. Christmas became a kind of Halloween for grownups. The poor would knock on the doors of the rich and demand goodies. Today, of course, they’d only get a restraining order.

When Protestants broke from the Catholic Church about 500 years ago, many rejected Christmas as a papist holiday. In 1645, England’s Puritan leader, Oliver Cromwell, overthrew the corrupt monarchy of Charles I, and instigated a wave of religious reform that made almost everyone miserable. In 1652, he outlawed the observance of Christmas. Shops stayed open but the churches shut down.

Even so, people continued to celebrate in private. (After all, there was
drinking
involved and this was
England
.) Then, when Charles II restored the English throne in 1661, Christmas was revived by popular demand.

Meanwhile, in the Protestant-dominated American colonies, Christmas took a holiday. The ultra-orthodox Puritans launched the original “war on Christmas” and, by 1659, Bostonians could be fined for observing it. Other towns outlawed it for decades. Down in Jamestown, Virginia, it was celebrated unofficially, and they managed to add eggnog to the tradition.

But right up through the American Revolution, Yankees largely ignored Christmas. This included the Founding Fathers. During its first seven decades, the U.S. Congress held sessions on December 25, and the famous painting of George Washington praying in the snow at Valley Forge on Christmas of 1777 depicts what is likely a fictional event.

By the early 1800s, Christmas was reworked into something more acceptable to Protestants. The Industrial Revolution created a growing gap between rich and poor, and nobody did much about it because poverty was seen as a character flaw or a deliberate choice. But now the urban poor were becoming violent in the streets. Reacting to this, social activists and writers made Christmas an occasion to help the needy.

In 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, who was German, and thus popularized the Tannenbaum—the Christmas tree. The first Christmas cards appeared in 1843 and were an immediate hit. And while the days of boozing it up in the streets were over, a touch of naughtiness was preserved through the Scandinavian practice of kissing under the mistletoe—probably the most action Victorian men got all year.

In England, Charles Dickens crowned the sentiment of helping the poor in 1843 with
A Christmas Carol
, providing us with Tiny Tim, the first cutesy child star that everyone wanted to slap. Charity also became fashionable; it fit the Christian message of being your brother’s keeper. Even so, Protestant churches only reluctantly held Christmas services, mostly to keep up attendance.

Americans didn’t catch the Christmas spirit until well into the 19
^th
century, but once they did, they couldn’t leave well enough alone. They made it a family event. This was the era when technology allowed mothers to leave the fields to become the domestic goddesses we idolize today. Up until then, childcare manuals were aimed at Dad, and childrearing was more about fatherly discipline than motherly love. But with Mom now in charge, the modern nuclear family emerged. Children now deserved affection, and Christmas was the time to indulge the little darlings. This meant making a bigger fuss about the holiday and spending more time at that great new innovation, the department store.

All of which brings us to the patron saint of the shopping mall, Santa Claus, or, as they call him in France and England, Father Christmas. The real Saint Nicholas was a 4
^th
century bishop in the Greek Orthodox Church. His reputation as a traveling gift-giver made him popular throughout the Middle Ages. December 6
^th
was deemed St. Nicholas Day, when the good children would be given presents while the naughty ones came up empty handed. Santa became training wheels for their relationship with God—an unseen, supernatural dispenser of rewards for those who obeyed the rules.