IS NOTHING SACRED?

There are three hoary old chest­nuts that never fail to get rolled out in the weeks be­fore Christ­mas, about the same time as the tor­rons and pan­netoni – typ­i­cal Yule­tide foods – are stacked up in in­dus­trial quan­ti­ties on Cata­lan su­per­mar­ket ta­bles. Chest­nut one, re­peated by every­one ex­cept chil­dren, is that Christ­mas is re­ally for chil­dren. Chest­nut two is that it is a fam­ily oc­ca­sion (as ex­em­pli­fied by the Cata­lan say­ing ’Per Nadal, cada ovella al seu cor­ral’: ’For Christ­mas, every lamb to its own pen’). And chest­nut three, which was prob­a­bly al­ready doing the rounds within a year of Jesus’s birth, is that Christ­mas has be­come so com­mer­cial this year.

Let’s start with chest­nut one: chil­dren un­doubt­edly get a mag­i­cal kick out of Christ­mas which has long been out of the imag­i­na­tive reach of adults (un­less they drink an un­seemly amount of cava). As is by now pretty well-known, in Cat­alo­nia this magic con­sists of feed­ing a log until, on Christ­mas morn­ing it­self, it pro­vides a large num­ber of small pre­sents from its un­der­belly after it has been whacked by stick-wield­ing in­fants who sing songs urg­ing it to defe­cate. My part­ner and my­self, how­ever, wanted to com­ple­ment this Cata­lan tra­di­tion with those from our re­spec­tive coun­tries (the Nether­lands and Eng­land). So we cel­e­brated the big Dutch Xmas fes­ti­val, which takes place on De­cem­ber 5 (the day of Sint Nico­laas) by get­ting to­gether with some Dutch and Dutch-Cata­lan cou­ples so that a page in black­face – yes – who works for a king who comes from Madrid – yes – could dis­trib­ute gifts to the young­sters pre­sent. I my­self wanted to keep the Eng­lish cus­tom of hang­ing a sock at the end of the bed on Christ­mas Eve so that Santa Claus could pop in and fill it to the brim. We ended up doing all three things, but our chil­dren made it clear that what they liked best was beat­ing seven shades of ex­cre­ment out of a de­fence­less piece of wood, so we stuck with that.

As for Christ­mas being a fam­ily event, that’s quite tricky if you’re a for­eign res­i­dent and what’s left of your fam­ily live in the coun­tries of your birth and a per­sis­tent pan­demic makes it un­ad­vis­able to travel.

And as for Christ­mas being com­mer­cial, that’s as ob­vi­ous as the sun in Au­gust. Why else do all those ads for toys, per­fumes, cava and – once again – tor­rons pop up, Ground­hog Day-like, year after year at this time of year? After all, Christ­mas is all about giv­ing and re­ceiv­ing. Which in­volves going into shops – or on web­sites – and pay­ing money. So there we have Christ­mas in a nut­shell: a bit of magic if you’re under eight, a bit of fam­ily (de­pend­ing on your cir­cum­stances) and lots of com­merce.

But wait, I hear some­one pre­dictably say, isn’t it also a spir­i­tual fes­ti­val? Well, less than 10% of Cata­lans are reg­u­lar church goers, which isn’t much of a start. On top of which, there have long been doubts about the au­then­tic­ity or even the phys­i­cal – as op­posed to myth­i­cal – ex­is­tence of the Christ: all his mir­a­cles are re­peat per­for­mances of ones which are in the Old Tes­ta­ment (to give just two ex­am­ples among many: the vir­gin birth is in Judges, 13; and story of the loaves and fishes, in 2 Kings; etc.). It’s not sure ei­ther where Jesus was born, given that Nazareth doesn’t ap­pear in the his­tor­i­cal record until 4CE, and the Bible’s other op­tion, Beth­le­hem, the birth­place of King David and the bur­ial ground of the Greek god of wheat Ado­nis – Beth­le­hem means ’the house of bread’, in He­brew – seems too sym­bol­i­cally con­ve­nient. We also don’t know when Jesus was born, given that the 6th-cen­tury monk who fixed the year cur­rently used made a seven-year slip-up; and as for the date, in 200CE the Cop­tic Chris­tians of Egypt de­clared he was born on Jan­u­ary 6 – they still do – but in 300CE the Roman Chris­tians sub­sti­tuted this for that of the win­ter sol­stice, cel­e­brated for cen­turies by the Roman pa­gans and later by the fol­low­ers of Mithras: De­cem­ber 25. In short, in re­li­gious terms, Christ­mas is the cel­e­bra­tion in the wrong year on the wrong day of the birth of a per­son who might or might not have ex­isted. But faith, after all, is all about be­liev­ing things that can­not be proven.

My­self, I don’t buy into (any) re­li­gion, but I do enjoy buy­ing, when I can af­ford it, and now that the kids are old enough to no longer be­lieve in magic and my sur­viv­ing Eng­lish fam­ily is un­reach­able, buy­ing is all that’s left: pre­sents, food, wine and – yet again – tor­rons. In­deed, I love the com­mer­cial side of Christ­mas, maybe be­cause each time round it’s like a last-gasp shop­ping spree, a kind of money-dri­ven carpe diem. So: Pret­tige Kerst! Happy Christ­mas ! Bon Nadal!