Christmasism for Halloweenists

[oligopsony]

discoursedrome suggests that we (or many of us) prefer Halloween to Christmas because (1) Halloween has embraced peasant carnival aspects and (2) the ability to embrace life's darker side:

Over the course of my lifetime Halloween has transmuted very noticeably into a kind of peasant carnival. I think this is because its colonization by commercial forces focused entirely on trick-or-treating, and its religious associations are nonexistent here, so above trick-or-treating age it was left completely to "the folk" to do what they wanted with.

Basically there's two distinct elements to modern Halloween: the first is that it acts out, and thereby creates, a sense of mastery over and comfort amidst the anxieties of life - death, and monsters, and horror, and so forth. These are several steps removed from the actual sources of people's fears, but they represent them. The posture of being at home, amongst family, in the company of death and horror is a way of grappling with the senseless horror of life.

The second aspect is that Halloween flouts the pieties of conventional society, whereas Christmas embodies them. Therefore, Christmas is the anti-Halloween. Since it's America, bland corporate pleasantries and hyperconsumerism are themselves pieties, and as more and more of the population shifts into the service sector, the number of people who experience those things like an imposition from on high increases. The reason everyone starts celebrating Halloween as early as possible, yet dreads when the same thing happens at Christmas, is because Christmas is a "high" holiday that embodies the norms and culture of the upper-middle-class. Halloween is a vulgar party whereas Christmas is a genteel sermon; the commercialization of Christmas only changes the church and God.

This suggests ways that Christmas could possibly be (re-)engineered into something more human-friendly. Indeed, Christmas actually has a very carnivalesque past, and in some ways the parallels between it and Halloween are almost overliteral.



Have you ever listened to that overplayed carol, "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" in full?

Oh, bring us some figgy pudding,
Oh, bring us some figgy pudding,
Oh, bring us some figgy pudding,
And bring it right here.
Good tidings we bring
To you and your kin;
We wish you a merry Christmas
And a happy New Year!

We won't go till we get some,
We won't go till we get some,
We won't go till we get some,
So bring it right here.

That's trick-or-treating, my dude. Wikipedia draws out the analogy explicitly:

Although wassailing is often described in innocuous and sometimes nostalgic terms—still practiced in some parts of Scotland and Northern England on New Years Day as "first-footing"—the practice in England has not always been considered so innocent. Similar traditions have also been traced to Greece and the country of Georgia. Wassailing was associated with rowdy bands of young men who would enter the homes of wealthy neighbours and demand free food and drink (in a manner similar to the modern children's Halloween practice of trick-or-treating).[10] If the householder refused, he was usually cursed, and occasionally his house was vandalized.

The article on mummering is maybe even more on the nose:

Also known as Triton p Felix, it typically involves a group of friends or family who dress in disguise and visit homes within their community or neighbouring communities during the twelve days of Christmas. If the mummers are welcomed into a house, they often do a variety of informal performances that may include dance, music, jokes, or recitations. The hosts must guess the mummers’ identities before offering them food or drink. They may poke and prod the mummers or ask them questions. To make this a challenge for the hosts, the mummers may stuff their costumes, cross-dress, or speak while inhaling (ingressive speech).[1] Once the mummers have been identified, they remove their disguises, spend some social time with the hosts, and then travel as a group to the next home.

Importing the most literal parallels between historical Christmas practice and Halloween would be unprofitable - we already have Halloween, even if it killed Christmas and took its stuff - but the crucial elements of carnival are all there: booze, ritualized redistributive demands with just a hint of violence behind them, dressing up.

A modern implementation of these traditions (I'm not stuck on this particular idea, even if I do quite like it, consider it a proof of concept) might involve grafting a charitable aspect onto festivals like Santacon. Not just "price of admission goes to charity," but letting them all raise money like a big roving bell-ringing Salvation Army Santa, which is also already a recognized social role. (Ignore any complaints you might have about SA specifically for the moment.) The operative aspect is that passersby (presumably especially in rich parts of town?) get asked for charitable "donations" by a large crowd, containing many burly young men, all incognito and rather plastered. Modern police wouldn't let the most blatant implementations of this fly, but if the threat of violence is covert enough and santas scrupulously police each other to avoid misallocating funds, you've got a nice socially sanctioned but also socially-inverting carnival on your hands. I suspect that most people getting mugged by santas in this way would enjoy it greatly, just as most people enjoy giving out Halloween candy. Needless to say the marauding band of santas would need to carry extra santa suits to incorporate people joining in.

One thing that would be harder to change would be the fact that Christmas is upbeat, which makes it bad for confronting the darkness, at least in the particular way that Halloween does. But the world is big enough for a negative-aspects-of-life carnival and a positive-aspects-of-one carnival, isn't it? And I think there is something to nab here about the other aspect of what DD mentioned - not the negative aspects of life specifcally, but the sense of metaphysical eerieness whose exploration has so often been in the domain of horror, and which contributes to the sense of a suspension of normal rules. And the theological content of Christmas here seems to be especially conducive to this, I think. As literary Christians like Kierkegaard and Chesterton have emphasized, Christianity is based on an inherently absurd contradiction: the doctrine that God is both immanent and transcendent. If you're a different sort of Christian than Kierkegaard and Chesterton, maybe you might want to de-emphasize how contradictory this is and can explain why it, like the Trinity itself, it actually makes perfect sense, but for present purposes I hope you can see why it might be at least a little weird that Impassable, Eternal First Mover was-Is also a guy who lived at a particular time and farted, got morning wood, &c. And if you're not any sort of Christian you should be able to appreciate the same thing - I don't need to believe ghosts are really real to appropriate the aesthetic for mood, and the same should frankly apply to God.

This is obviously subjective, but I don't think it's a coincidence that there's almost no good secular Christmas music. Pretty much the only modern Christmas albums I like are Sufjan Stevens' (especially "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing") and Bruce Cockburn's, and those are both embracing the religious side. I suspect this partially reflects that the secular mythology was implemented when the carnivalesque aspects were getting pushed out of the holiday, and partially the fact that they're just a lot less interesting than Christianity.

(A lot of Bad Christmas Culture movies do embrace a sort of cod metaphysical eerieness, where it's kind of stupid to believe in Santa but morally good (and coincidentally correct) to do so anyway. This is like a parody of what atheists believe about what religious people believe. The Santa mythology isn't interestingly absurd, like the Incarnation, just kind of unlikely, like the Resurrection.)

So: I think we can build a better Christmas! There's a lot of finnicky implementation details, but those should be fun!

(And there's the Secular Solstice stuff, which I think is also good if taking things in a much different direction.)