A Bizarre but Believable Theory About Christmas
If there are any kids in the room, now is a good time to tell them to leave.
At some point, at an age largely dependent on how religious your upbringing was, you asked, “Why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25th?”
And if you weren’t in church you got a pretty reasonable answer: December 25th is not Jesus’s real birthday; but rather, a pagan winter solstice holiday repurposed in the 4th century by Pope Julius I. Shepherds wouldn’t have had their sheep out in winter, the Roman census was in spring — there’s all sorts of obvious evidence. These days, even die-hard Christians tend to acknowledge that the date is largely symbolic.
But, as with most things in life, it’s incredibly important to ask the right question. And to me, that question is:
Why did we keep celebrating Christmas?
Hold on to your seats, because I’m gonna get a little weird here.
I spent a bit of time studying folkloristics (yes, that’s a real thing) under Dr. Tok Thompson. It’s one of the most beautiful ways of studying people — the field examines much more than fairy tales; jokes, handshakes, slang, traditions, songs, recipes, anything you can imagine that’s unwritten and passed between people.
There’s an element of consent to folklore — jokes only exist because an unbroken chain of people keep telling them. Songs exist because we keep singing them. We choose to engage in traditions as much as they choose us.
And that choice says something about us; something about our deepest psychological needs.
For instance, there is an email was passed around for ages in various forms: “The Mexican Pet”.
A couple brings home a stray puppy from their trip to Mexico. The stray does something horrible — bites a baby for instance. They take it to the vet, and the vet concludes, shockingly:
Ma’am, this isn’t a dog — it’s a Mexican street rat!
Crazy, right? Fascinatingly, this same email went around Germany, but the rat wasn’t Mexican.
It was Turkish. Why? Because Germany has a Turkish immigration problem.
Even forwarding an email can speak volumes about our subconscious fears, anxieties, and desires.
Similarly, I believe there are deep psychological reasons for the global and historical prominence of winter solstice holidays. Christmas dominates, but there’s also Saturnalia (Rome), Dōngzhì Festival (China), Yule (Germany/Scandanavia), and Chanukah to name a few.
The most cited reason for these holidays is primitive people’s fascination with the shortest day of the year; the symbolic significance of the “return of light”.
However, I have a more orthogonal explanation.
Subsyndromal Seasonal Affective Disorder (also known as seasonal depression) is experienced by an estimated 14.3% of the US population. That’s massive. That’s 46 million people in America alone.
One can only imagine this was more severe hundreds of years ago. The onset of winter meant not just gloomy days but also potential starvation and death.
Is it possible that winter holidays are a societal response to seasonal depression? A culture-wide phenomena to improve mental health?
As a culture, we have many societal norms to keep us healthy — we wash our hands to prevent the flu. We cover our mouths to prevent the spread of colds.
Maybe we celebrate Christmas to prevent depression.
It’s society-wide behavioral conditioning. Let’s examine it through Charles Duhigg’s habit loop framework (from The Power of Habit).
In this case, the cue is feeling cold weather. When the “reward” (outcome) is short dark days and illness, the routine of depressive thinking exists.
However, add the “reward” of Christmas, Chanukah, or other winter holidays. The same cue of cold weather prompts, instead, that wonderful feeling one can only describe as “Christmassy”.
It dynamically replaces negative emotions with positive ones at a society-wide scale.
We’ve embraced a song called “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”. Without Christmas, we’d have “It’s Beginning to Look Cold and Depressing, Also my Toes are Numb and One of My Children Might Not Make it Through the Winter” (sung by Michael Buble).
Considering the fact that mental illness can increase mortality rates by 3x, fundamentally, Christmas is a survival mechanism. For hundreds of years holidays have brought us together and kept us alive. Maybe that’s the reason for the season.
There’s something exquisite about that, isn’t there? The very act of survival can engender beauty. It’s important to remember, sometimes, that our brains and bodies were not built for bauhaus and ballet; they were built for survival. That’s how evolution works. We make poetry to survive. We write symphonies to survive. We create art to survive.
We celebrate Christmas to survive.
Evolution produces flowers, and it also produces Mariah Carey.
