oligopsony (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
oligopsony) wrote2018-12-21 01:09 pm
oligopsony) wrote2018-12-21 01:09 pm
Christmasism for Halloweenists
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.)
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(Also also of course I can remove those tags, quoting you, &c., if you prefer.)
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We had drunk, buff, and mostly-naked Santas the other week for a not-even-a-race, though probably the Santas themselves had to cough up for the obligate charity. I don't think that's many steps away from what you proposed; someone needs to convince them after the race ends to drink and start fundraising more.
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Since we're on a web 1.5 platform, this is a perfect place to bring up the zombie apocalypse.
the zombie apocalypse isn't christmas, of course -- it's halloween! I was thinking this morning about how it might be a good idea to try to unite all souls/all saints, and Christmas, and new year, and the epiphany into a general darkling Gothic Season. I thought of some vague ideas:
The problem with Christmas, the reason why people hate it, is having to buy gifts all at once, because it is a signifier of everything. This appears to come down particularly hard on women, who end up having to do the work of buying presents for pretty much everyone, and it is very fucked up to create such pressure. In the Gothic Season, each of the high points is associated with a particular set of relations, and so the gift-giving pressure is spread out from November to January. This could make things worse, or better. I see halloween as the part of the festival in which gifts are given among friends.
b) Christmas is Correctly reduced to a minor, but important, part of the festival. It is the part where the zombie apocalypse is fought back again for another year. I see Christmas as being really about the children, who get to fight back the monsters who came into the world during Halloween and have been haunting it for a month. All the halloween decorations come down at Christmas, and the children take over for a while. Hopefully because it is just a smaller part of a bigger thing, people don't feel obliged to shoot their wad and drown children in plastic as a result.
c) after christmas, the festival becomes relatively sober (so to speak) and it is the turn of the adults. intimate partners give gifts at new years, and there are the usual parties and drinking and so on.
d) epiphany closes the festival -- the post-halloween, christmas and new year decorations come down in one last fit of High Culture. Epiphany is the time that monarchs give addresses to their nations, that companies make statements wishing people prosperity for the new year, that bosses give gifts to their employees and so on and so on. the underlying conditions that result in a zombie apocalypse inevitably re-emerging 10 months later reinstate themselves.
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(Also to be clear when I use terms like "absurd" and "merely unlikely" I'm more talking about qualitatively different aesthetic apprehensions of how interesting they seem, rather than different quantitative evaluations of how hard it would be to convince me that they happened. "Paradoxical" might be better than "absurd" because paradoxes often do have solutions, like how the sum of an infinite series being able to converge to a finite value in the case of Achilles and the tortoise.)
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I like this post
Halloween -- socialism -- demand presents from strangers/provide presents to strangers in the form of receive Generic One-Size-Fits-All Good (store candy)
Christmas -- capitalism -- provide customized presents to people you're close to, recieve customized presents from people you're close to, resulting possibility of uneven exchange makes things awkward
Re: I like this post
Christmas gift exchange (obligatory link) is a pretty classic example of this, where the size and the specificity of the gift show how close you are but also who's the patron and who's the dependent. Interestingly the origins and direction of unequal exchange are kind of the reverse of those normally occurring in capitalism: under capitalism those with greater bargaining power (due to ownership of capital, etc) can appropriate surplus, but in ritual gift-giving the richer party is typically expected to give more than they get back. The first kind of unequal exchange converts economic power into more economic power, while the second tries to convert economic power into prestige. (Although there are interesting incorporations of this kind of exchange into capitalism, like when a boss takes his employees out to dinner. You could have a socialist society with equal ownership of capital but unequal consumption budgets (say some people choose to work longer hours at less pleasant jobs, that kind of thing) and I have no doubt you'd see some similar dynamics.)
Then again, the Halloween gift-giving involves each household giving the same commodities to each other household, which is actually kind of odd if you look at it through the lens of Polanyian redistribution or reciprocity. Probably best looked at as a kind of feasting, maybe, where everyone is expected to engage in consumption, but the consumption is disguised as gift-giving is disguised as coercion. (Feasts can be Polanyian redistribution and reciprocity too, but here nobody is being marked out as generous, no differences in relationships beyond of course generational are acknowledged, and as far as modern economic ideologies are concerned there's neither a quantitative gain of profit nor a use-value gained from exchanging different goods.) So we're dealing with a more "premodern" kind of economic activity, but maybe one that's different from Christmas gift exchange.
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