Decolonising Christmas: The Sunday Twilight show with Maud

In the spirit of decolonising education, I turned my gaze to our modern celebration of Christmas in Western societies. It is very enlightening to look back on the origins of this event, back to its celtic, norse and Latin origins.

Akin to a festival of light, an ancient pagan event, during the Winter Solstice was when the Norsemen or celts would bring a Yule log into their hearth and party in the night. This was later supplanted by the Roman saturnalia which consisted of a banquet and the offering of gifts in the honour of the God Saturn and then finally by Christianity with the superimposition of the nativity.

When an empire conquers a land, religious sites are not always systematically destroyed in order not to antagonise its people too much. The smoothest way of conquering the minds is to overlap one’s religious events with the previous ones, thus making them obsolete without causing too much offence or rioting. 

The Christians added the birth of Jesus Christ to what Midwinter signified, that is, in its pagan form, a celebration of the longest night. Thus, associating the birth of a baby to the rebirth of nature in the coming months of Spring.

Therefore, the history of our modern Christmas is a study of the accretion of religious and pagan habits with a contemporary sprinkle of our common newest altar: consumerism.

For instance it is fascinating to see how an american brand, Coca Cola, fashioned the mediaeval antithetic pair formed by Saint Nicholas and his antonym, Père Fouettard in France and Krampus in Austria into a benevolent and charming, rosy-cheeked and debonnaire Santa Klaus.

As a result, in an attempt to decolonise Christmas, it is important to peel its onion-like layers until we reach its core: _ a celebration of the brutal change of seasons and the human conquest of our most important technological advance which originates from the neolithic time: the mastery of fire.