In Great Britain our
history is a fusion of many people’s histories, and our faiths are fusions of
many different faiths. Christmas is a festival set against a Jewish
cultural background, brought to these islands by Romans and grafted onto the
original pre-Christian earth-spirit beliefs.
In these islands it
was a pre-Christian practice to hold a festival in the middle of winter to mark
the turning of the year, the lengthening of the days, and hope for the future; called
Solstice. It is Solstice today,
and people gathered at Stonehenge to see the rising sun at the start of the new
solar year. Near the Solstice,
pre-Christian people here celebrated their ancestors in a festival called Yule. We still talk of Yule logs, though today
these tend to be chocolate cakes rather than a smouldering log on the fire.
And brought to
Britain from the Middle East, there is a Jewish miracle story from 2000 BCE of
an oil-lamp, low on oil, burning continuously for eight days on no more than a
drop of oil in the besieged temple of Jerusalem, though it should have gone out
long before. Coming in the dead of
winter, Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, of
purity over contamination, of spirituality over materialism. Jewish people the world over have just
celebrated Hanukkah on 16 December.
And of course some
of the later Romans to arrive here told of the Jewish baby whose mother was
turned away from the inn and who laid him in a manger: the baby who as an adult
went on to teach that we are loved into being, we are supported throughout our
lives by love, and at our ending we are received in love. Jesus’ good news was that each of us and all
of us are loved, and we must pass that love on.
The birth of the baby Jesus is what we celebrate at Christmas.
So all these
festivals, and others such as Diwali from Hinduism and Eid from Islam, which
also sometimes fall in winter, are what
have fused into our British cultural celebration at this time of year.
