Christmas Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Zwarte Piet Is a Racist Abomination

Zwarte Piet (whose name means “Black Pete” in Dutch) is a figure in the folklore of the Low Countries (i.e., the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) who is said to accompany Saint Nicholas or Sinterklaas. In the weeks leading up to the feast day of Saint Nicholas, which is celebrated in the Netherlands on 5th December, he is traditionally portrayed by white actors or volunteers wearing blackface, along with thick red lipstick, a black wig of afro-textured hair, a large gold earring, and colorful faux-Renaissance-style clothing. These “Zwarte Pieten” traditionally take part in parades, entertain young children, and pass out cookie-like confectionaries known as pepernoten and kruidnoten.

Zwarte Piet has been a widely beloved figure among white people in the Low Countries for generations, but, for decades, some people (mostly people of color) have criticized the character as racist (because he is). Over the course of the past decade, and the past few years in particular, there has been something of a sea change, as a deracialized version of the character named Roetveegpiet (“Sooty Pete”), who wears light soot makeup instead of blackface, has eclipsed the traditional blackface version of the character in popularity.

Some white people have tried to defend the traditional Zwarte Piet by claiming that the character can’t be racist because he (supposedly) has no connection to the U.S. tradition of blackface minstrel shows. In this post, I intend to explore the real history of Zwarte Piet and demonstrate that the character does, in fact, owe very much to blackface minstrel shows and is, in fact, racist. Needless to say, readers should be forewarned that this post will discuss some truly deplorably racist material, including both historical and contemporary derogatory visual portrayals of Black people.

No, Santa Claus Is Not Inspired by Odin

I’ve spent a lot of time debunking the perennially popular misconception that modern Anglophone Christmas customs are of ancient “pagan” origin. My most thorough article on the subject remains this one I originally posted two years ago. One of the more popular claims associated with this misconception is that Santa Claus is actually somehow inspired by the “pagan” Norse god Óðinn, who is closely associated with wisdom, war, death, and the runic alphabet. I already debunked this claim in this article I posted two years ago about the history of Santa Claus, which I highly recommend reading, but I did so only briefly and I feel that this notion is so common that it deserves a more thorough rebuttal.

Jackson Crawford, who has a PhD in Old Norse studies, spent many years teaching the subject at various universities, and is now a professional public educator on the subject, posted a video on his YouTube channel last year explaining why Óðinn is not Santa Claus. Crawford’s video is excellent, but it is, for the most part, merely a simple comparison of Óðinn and Santa Claus and it does not take into account the history of Santa Claus. In this article, I intend to give this misconception the proper, in-depth refutation it deserves—one that fully takes into account Santa Claus’s complicated history.

No, “Xmas” Was Not Invented to Advance a Secularist Agenda

We are now well into the month of December. This obviously means that there are already people going around promoting nonsense assertions that twenty-first-century Anglophone Christmas traditions are of ancient “pagan” origin. (I already wrote an article back in December 2019, in which I thoroughly refute the most common “Christmas-is-secretly-pagan” arguments and I’ve addressed some of the other arguments in various other articles.) The time of year also, however, means that there are tons of conservative Christians promoting absurd conspiracy theories that evil leftists are staging some kind of “War on Christmas.”

One aspect of this whole conspiracy theory about the supposed “War on Christmas” is the misconception that the name Xmas was invented by atheists as part of a secularist attempt to remove Christ from Christmas and turn it into a secular holiday. The assumption is that the “X” represents an attempt to literally x-out the word “Christ.” Because of this misconception, some Christians regard the name “Xmas” as downright blasphemous. In reality, the name Xmas was not invented by atheists at all; it is, in fact, merely a harmless abbreviation that was originally invented by Christians and has been in continuous use in various forms for nearly five hundred years.

A History of the “Common Era” (BCE/CE) Dating System

I functionally stopped believing in the existence of God sometime around late 2018 or early 2019. It’s difficult to say exactly when it happened, since it was a gradual process of realizing that all the theological arguments to which I had clung to support my belief in the existence of God were fundamentally flawed. Long after I became an agnostic, though, I still clung to many of the cultural trappings of Christianity. One of these trappings was the BC/AD dating system, which numbers the years from the supposed year of Jesus’s birth, with “BC” standing for “before Christ” and “AD” standing for “anno Domini,” which is Latin for “in the year of the Lord,” referring to Jesus.

For nearly two years after becoming an agnostic, I continued to use this dating system in all my articles. I felt that the alternative BCE/CE dating system (which uses the exact same numbers for the years, but with “BCE” standing for “before the Common Era” and “CE” standing for “Common Era”) was a relatively recent invention of atheists seeking to advance a secularist agenda by taking the Christian dating system and making it superficially “secular” by removing the explicit Christian references while retaining the years numbered from the supposed date of Jesus’s birth. I wondered why secularists didn’t just create a dating system that was actually secular and not based on the supposed date of Jesus’s birth.

Well, it turns out that the history of the “Common Era” dating notation is a lot more complicated and fascinating than I realized. In fact, it is not a recent invention of atheist secularists in any way; it is both quite old and originally Christian. Christians first began using the “Common Era” notation in the early seventeenth century and they have been using it continuously ever since. Jewish people widely adopted the notation in the nineteenth century so that they could use the Christian dating system that everyone around them was using while still upholding their religion by not applying the titles “Christ” and “Lord” to Jesus. The notation is now widely used among scholars and academics, primarily out of respect for followers of religions that don’t regard Jesus as Lord or Christ.

How Was Saturnalia Celebrated in Ancient Rome?

Saturnalia is an ancient Roman holiday in honor of the god Saturnus that began on December 17th. The Romans believed that, in very ancient times, before Iupiter became the king of the deities, the cosmos had been ruled by Iupiter’s father Saturnus. They believed that the reign of Saturnus had been a “Golden Age,” in which all human beings had lived together in harmony and simplicity, and that Saturnalia was a temporary restoration of Saturnus’s reign on earth that could only last until the end of the festival.

I’ve written about Saturnalia before—usually in the context of debunking popular misconceptions about it being the source of modern American Christmas traditions. This year, however, I’ve decided to write about it again, focusing on what we know about how the holiday was actually celebrated.

Here Are Some of the Most Ancient Christmas Carols

One of my favorite Christmas traditions is singing carols with my family. Nowadays, we tend to think of many of our carols as being extremely old and traditional. After all, as I discuss in this article I wrote about the history of Santa Claus, even the song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—arguably one of the least traditional Christmas songs—is over seventy years old. Nonetheless, most of the songs we know today are actually relatively young compared to some of the other songs that have been sung historically. Few of the songs we know today were composed before the nineteenth century.

Here I have collected a few of my favorite extremely old Christmas songs, some of which date all the way back to the Middle Ages. I have gathered songs from places as diverse as the Byzantine Empire, late medieval Spain, Renaissance Finland and Sweden, and Early Modern England. All of these songs were composed before the nineteenth century and nearly all of them were originally composed in languages other than English. Enjoy!

Just How Pagan Is Christmas Really?

The Christmas season is upon us and, if there’s one thing I know I’m going to get for Christmas, it’s spurious claims about modern Christmas traditions supposedly having ancient “pagan” origins. Most of my readers are probably already familiar with the sorts of claims I am referring to; it is popularly believed that Christmas is really an ancient “pagan” holiday that was hijacked by early Christians and that modern, twenty-first-century, secular American Christmas traditions are actually of ancient “pagan” origin.

Well, I’m here to tell you that, although there was a time when Christmas did indeed incorporate some pre-Christian traditions, virtually none of the traditions associated with Christmas in the United States today are actually of ancient pre-Christian origin. In fact, virtually all of the Christmas traditions that you usually hear people going around claiming are “pagan” are actually traditions that only arose within the past two hundred years or so, within a Christian cultural context.

The Long, Strange, Fascinating History of Santa Claus

Have you ever wondered where the story of Santa Claus comes from, why he is said to bring presents to children at Christmas, why he is said to live at the North Pole, or why he is said to have a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer? Well, as it turns out, the history of Santa Claus is an incredibly long, twisted, and strange one.

It involves a building project by a Byzantine emperor, a story about a father preparing to sell his own daughters into prostitution, a hoard of stolen human bones reputed to have magical properties, armies of Crusading knights, Protestant zealots, the author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow,” a poem you probably read as a child but didn’t realize how influential it was, a “Nast”-y nineteenth-century political cartoonist, and Coca-Cola.

This may seem like a bizarre assortment incredibly disparate things, but I promise you, everything I just mentioned is actually vital to the development of Santa Claus as we know him today. Let’s go all the way back to the beginning of it all in late antiquity and embark on this odyssey together to discover the origins of Santa Claus!

When Was Jesus Really Born?

Most people assume that Jesus of Nazareth was born on 25 December 1 AD. Superficially speaking, this assumption makes a great deal of sense. After all, Christians today celebrate Jesus’s birth every year on December 25th and our modern Anno Domini dating system, which is ostensibly based on the year when Jesus was born, begins with the year 1 AD.

Unfortunately, things are never quite so simple. The truth is, we genuinely have very little idea when Jesus was born. There is no mention of the exact date of Jesus’s birth anywhere in any of the earliest surviving Christian writings and it was not until around the fourth century AD that December 25th was settled on as the day on which Christians would celebrate Jesus’s birth. Even the year of Jesus’s birth is uncertain; all we can say is that he was probably born sometime between c. 10 BC and c. 4 AD.

The Origins of the Christmas Tree

Decorating Christmas trees every December is a time-honored western holiday tradition, one that almost everyone has fond memories of. According to the USA Today, in December 2017, approximately 95 million households had Christmas trees in the United States alone. Strangely, though, few people actually know where this tradition originally comes from and most people who think they know where it comes from have been misinformed. Decorating Christmas trees is not nearly as old of a tradition as many accounts would lead one to believe.

Continue reading “The Origins of the Christmas Tree”