Xmas piece

Christmas comes to Santa Monica.  (click for larger view)

Note: this piece was my Christmas Card for 1990.

The story is:  God’s only begotten son, destined to be savior for all humankind, was born in a barn on the outskirts of Bethlehem on December 25, 4 B.C.  The event was witnessed by three wise men who had traveled thousands of miles just to be there when it happened.  The wise men brought gold and incense as gifts for the baby.  The child was born in a barn because his parents could not get rooms at the inn.  He grew up to be a political activist, philosopher, psychic healer, prognosticator, and finally ended up, they say, executed by the authorities for crimes against the state.

Now, we could go on about this all night.  But to summarize:  the child was not born December 25.  This we know.  The early Christians scheduled Christmas near the winter solstice to attract pagans to their religion, and to duck the Romans, who supposedly wouldn’t notice one more drunken feast going on during the last half of December.  Setting aside, for the moment, the mountain of evidence that suggests Jesus never existed, or that he was actually someone else, or that he was a composite of a number of different historical personages, let’s just take it on faith (so to speak) that the rest of the gospels more or less reflect an accurate “history” of this interesting character.

The three wise men followed a star to Bethlehem.  They were told that the child would be born there.  They somehow got there seemingly within minutes of the blessed event.  Angels appeared to shepherds that night, too, telling them that the Messiah was born that night in a barn.  The Messiah, the Christ, the Savior, was named Jesus, although this was not at all a common Jewish name at that time or now.  His birth seems to be connected to angels and rays of light and mysterious announcements and lights traveling in the sky.  My first instinct, of course, is to suppose a UFO connection.  But, until further proof exists of flying saucers, let’s suppose there is some rational explanation for all this activity.

Many years ago, I was driving through Ohio one Thanksgiving in the middle of the night and I looked up at a cloudless sky.  I realized that the wise men had looked up at a similar sky, had most likely looked up at it night after night for months on their long trip to Bethlehem.  Now, there is a sensation anyone can feel when looking up at a cloudless night sky.  It’s a feeling of insignificance.  The black heavens are spangled from edge to edge with ineffably beautiful points of light.  Even with what we know about galaxies and atmospheric tricks of the light, the spectacle is so astounding the only correct response is silence.  One cannot look into it too long; one will go insane.  The wise men looked at this sky night after night for months and received a message: go to Bethlehem.  The savior is born.  Bring gifts.  It could happen.

And so we now celebrate Christmas.  We give gifts to our friends and family and loved ones, partly in imitation of the wise men, partly as a result of constant pressure from manufacturing and retail concerns.  We watch TV specials, we eat rich foods, we get drunk, we celebrate love and friendship and the fact that we are alive.  If we are able to, we donate money or food or shelter or time or toys or clothing to those who have strayed from the social order or who have gotten lost or fallen down and need help to get back up or for whom things have just not worked out right.  Because we have been told that Jesus was born to humble circumstances and hey, you never know.

But what do we celebrate?  The baby, if there was a baby, was not born December 25.  The wise men, if there were wise men, followed what star?  There is no record of such a star seen by anyone else.  So perhaps they were insane, or psychic.  There is evidence that suggests that Mary and Joseph were actually quite well-to-do, that Jesus really was born, if at all, as the king of the Jews, that the manger and the angels and the talking animals were all added to the story for dramatic impact dozens or hundreds of years later.  Let’s face it, folks, from beginning to end, the story just doesn’t hold up any more, if it ever did.

Then what do we celebrate?  We celebrate a lie.  A story.  A fiction.  We celebrate the birth of a fiction.  The birth of a story of a birth.  The birth of what?  Of our savior.  Of humankind’s savior.  We celebrate this story.  And what is the message of this story?  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

This message is so astonishingly simple it seems ridiculous to have to put it into words.  But look around, turn on the TV, pick up a newspaper, and you can see in an instant that people still don’t quite grasp this simple idea.

In the story of Jesus, the protagonist brings this message to a populace for whom it was big news.  And today we see that it is still big news.

December 25 (or thereabouts), back in the day, was the pagan holiday Saturnalia.  Saturnalia was a solstice holiday.  The days had been growing shorter and shorter, but around December 25 they finally started to get longer again.  Saturnalia celebrated the rebirth of the sun,  the confirmation that the sun would return.  Saturnalia celebrated the fact that the sun had chosen to come around again for another year and bring spring and summer and autumn, and food and warmth and rainfall and trees and flowers and animals and another stab at life.  It is now the day we celebrate this story of the birth of this baby Jesus, who, as the story is told, had an extraordinary career in religion, politics, medicine and philosophy, and whose message begins “Do unto others.”  What we celebrate is a rebirth of that spirit, that spirit of Jesus, whether a lie, a half-truth or a hallucination, we celebrate this spirit of love and kindness, the sort of spirit that could cook up a turn of phrase so instantly comprehensible and so difficult topractice.

The shepherds, watching over their flocks, were told that the savior had been born.  And I believe it, yes, that it is this spirit of love, compassion, tolerance, kindness, this spirit is the savior of humankind.  We celebrate that we’ve made it another year, that we can still conceive of these ideals.  That this spirit, it appears, has decided to drop by again and hang out for a bit, and give a hand to those of us who are slipping, and try to get us on the right track, or barring that, at least give us some good directions.