Yulophobia

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church in Wakefield 
	December 5, 1999



This year, I'm hearing a lot of people saying they feel trapped by the
holidays.  As Sue Spence, the minister in Weston, put it, the motto
for the season is "Rejoice, rejoice you have no choice."

Francis Anderson writes:

Christmas has no right To burst upon us suddenly And loudly from afar
Lighting up Right where we are With nylon trees And a long-life
plastic Star.  It is a lonely road to bethlehem That must be walked
slowly And untalked ?  Where no bright light or angel song Intrudes
ahead of cue To wrongly claim Arrival of the dawn Before the night is
walked By each of us On through.

If you are a little overwhelmed at this season, if you have more
things on your "to do" list than can possibly get done by three people
working round the clock, if you're looking at your waistline and
thinking that you didn't get around to losing that ten pounds before
the heavy eating season is upon us, if you're looking at your bank
account and wondering how its ever going to get you through all you
have to buy, if your shopping list is nagging you in the wee hours but
the prospect of actually doing something about it is even worse, if
you're planning a big family gathering but remembering how those
gatherings bring to the surface all the unresolved conflicts your
family has avoided dealing with over the years, or if you're facing
the prospect of not getting together with your loved ones, if you
don't see how you're going to grab time for celebrating from your work
duties, if the whole prospect of the holiday season doesn't completely
fill you with comfort and joy, my friends, you may be suffering from
Yulophobia, fear or loathing of Christmas.

Now, from a historical perspective, we have only our religious
ancestors to blame.  Let me explain.  This is all laid out in a
fascinating book called The Battle for Christmas by historian Stephen
Nissenbaum.  By the time of the ascent of the Puritans in England and
New England, the celebration of Christmas had taken on a riotous air.

The two scriptural Nativity stories we have are silent on what season
Jesus was actually born; indeed, if shepherds were sleeping overnight
with their flocks, that would suggest spring or summer.  But the
Church had set the celebration in late December as an accommodation to
the pagan solstice and Saturnalia festivals already happening around
that time.  In the modern times, we take it for granted that food is
available throughout the year, but this has only been true for the
last two centuries.  In the days before refrigeration, December was
the only time when Europeans ate fresh meat, and it was also the time
when beer and wine from the harvest were available in greatest
abundance.  It was also the season when no productive work could be
done on the farm.

So the early winter has been given over to celebration in the northern
latitudes for a long time, and before the Puritans, the celebration
was marked by great consumption of food and drink, sexual license,
social inversion, by which the masters waited on the servants, the
rich on the poor, and a system of controlled chaos summed up in the
phrase, the Lord of Misrule.

The Puritans were highly critical of the excesses of the holiday.
Here is Rev.  Increase Mather's version of Yulophobia circa 1687:

The generality of Christmas-keepers observe that festival after such a
manner as is highly dishonorable to the name of Christ.  How few are
there comparatively that spend these holidays (as they are called)
after an holy manner.  But they are consumed in Compotations, in
Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revelings, in excess of Wine, in
mad Mirth..."

And Increase Mather's son Cotton Mather observed in 1712:  "The feast
of Christ's Nativity is spent in Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking
and in all Licentious Liberty ...  by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by
hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Reveling..."

Reverend Henry Bourne, an Anglican minister in Newcastle, England,
writing in 1725, complained that for Englishmen of the lower classes,
Christmas was merely 'a pretense for Drunkenness and Rioting, and
Wantonness.'  Two practices drew his especial scorn:  the singing of
Christmas carols, and mumming.  Mumming usually involved ' a changing
of clothes between men and women; who, when dressed in each other's
habits, go from one Neighbor's house to another ...  and make merry
with them in disguise."

The Puritans attacked not only the excesses of Christmas but any
celebration at all.  In England this attack was short-lived, for the
Restoration of Charles II brought back Christmas in its wake.  But in
Massachusetts, it lasted longer.  It was actually illegal to celebrate
Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.  For many decades
after that, December 25 was an ordinary working day for most
God-fearing folk.

But the urge to celebrate was never completely suppressed, and
surfaced again by the middle of the Eighteenth Century.  Ben Franklin
in his Poor Richard's Almanac advocates a temperate celebration.
Franklin was a closet Unitarian - he attended the Unitarian church in
London, and helped start one in Philadelphia - but our religious
ancestors get more directly involved in the next era.

"With the turn of the nineteenth century," Nissenbaum writes,

the reappropriation of Christmas took on a more concerted form - a
move to hold church services on December 25.  This move was led by
both evangelicals and liberals.  In the forefront of the evangelicals
were the Universalists.  Largely a rural sect, Universalists openly
celebrated Christmas from the earliest stages of their existence in
New England.  The Universalist community in Boston held a special
Christmas Day service in 1789, even before their congregation was
officially organized, and in the early nineteenth century it was this
denomination that proselytized for Christmas more actively than any
other.

Nissenbaum goes on to observe,

"The Unitarians were close behind.  Compared with Universalists,
Unitarians were more genteel, and (for all their theological
liberalism) more socially conservative....  Unitarians were calling
for the public observance of Christmas by about 1800.  They did so in
the full knowledge that it was not a Biblically sanctioned holiday,
and that December 25 was probably not the day on which Jesus was born.
They wished to celebrate the holiday not because God had ordered them
to do so but because they themselves wished to.

In 1817 the Unitarians in Boston began a two-pronged campaign to
increase the celebration of Christmas - they encouraged churches to
hold services on December 25, and for businesses to shut down.

The movement succeeded in the first years, but it quickly succumbed,
and by 1820 only a handful of churches were holding services on
Christmas Day and only a handful of business closed.

Well, from there the story of Christmas moves to New York, where a
small knot of wealthy conservative high-church Episcopalians called
the Knickerbockers set out in the 1820's to create a mythical New York
Dutch past that had never existed, centered around a Saint whose day
had been celebrated December 5 by the giving of presents.  The most
celebrated of this set was Washington Irving, but the one who most
shaped Christmas was Clement Clarke Moore, and the vehicle by which he
did this, in 1822, was the rhyme that begins "'Twas the night before
Christmas and all through the house."  This poem seems to commemorate
a custom of Santa Claus visitation and Christmas Day gift exchange
that was generations old, but in fact it did not commemorate the
custom, it created it.

This in conjunction with other social factors, started the domestic
Christmas that is still with us.  The social inversion that in former
times had been practiced between master and servant or rich and poor
was now practiced between parent and child.  The children of the
household became the focus of the holiday, and in a real sense, the
modern conception of childhood was launched with this idea of
Christmas.

This domestic Christmas, taken into a culture of affluence and an
economy based on created wants through advertising, gives us the
commercial monster we confront today.  Yulophobia for most of us means
that we dread having to enter a department store or shopping mall at
this time of year.  We know that the highways and subways will be
clogged, that the clerks will be rude or indifferent, that the item we
came for will be sold out, that the post office will be jammed, and
through it all we know that the most irritating versions of all our
least favorite Christmas tunes will be playing incessantly in a vain
attempt to foist on us a cheer we do not feel.

What is to be done?  I don't know what's going to work for you, but I
want to simply throw out some suggested strategies for coping with the
weeks ahead.

First, you can go to the library and check out a book by Jo Robinson -
no relation - called Unplug the Christmas Machine which is full of
strategies for coping with the holidays.  You can take her Christmas
pledge:

Believing in the beauty and simplicity of Christmas, I commit myself
to the following:

1.  To remember the people who truly need my gifts; 2.  To express my
love for family and friends in more direct ways than presents; 3.  To
rededicate myself to the spiritual growth of my family; 4.  To examine
my holiday activities in light of the true spirit of Christmas; 5.  To
initiate one act of peacemaking within my circle of family and
friends.

Another tried and true strategy is getting out of town.  One of the
best Christmases in my memory was when I took my family on a sailing
vacation in the Virgin Islands.

You can even go to places where they don't celebrate Christmas at all.
One December my son Luke, whom I had always regarded as the least
religiously-motivated among our family, found himself in Bali, a Hindu
enclave in the middle of a Muslim country.  One day it dawned on him
that December 25th would come and go just like any other day, and this
prospect was not tolerable to something inside him so he cut short his
visit to the place I consider probably the most beautiful in the world
and moved on to Singapore, where they do celebrate Christmas.  So even
if you go somewhere where you get away completely from other people's
Christmas clock, you can't get away from the one inside you.

The opposite approach, is to get away inside yourself, where you can
contemplate your Christmas motivations directly.  Make some time to be
alone without the phone ringing or the TV set on and wall out your
nattering obligations for a time - this is important, too.  You might
try meditation, trying to keep your concentration on your ingoing and
outgoing breath for 15 minutes.  Or you might simply let your mind
wander.  Or you might get out pictures of Christmases past.  You might
deliberately try to ask yourself where the hurt places are, and to
name them.

You might try a mantra.  Here's one that can be said or sung while
you're waiting in traffic or waiting for the Internet screen to
download - even shopping online involves waiting:

[Tune:  Soulcake, soulcake]

Brother, sister, Take your time go slowly Take a look inside yourself
Simple things are holy.

My final suggestion is one of Jo Robinson's - examine your holiday
activities in light of the true spirit of Christmas.  But of course,
that begs the question of what the true spirit of Christmas is.  It is
easy for Orthodox Christians to decry Christmas excess - as we saw,
they have been doing it for centuries.  They want to "put the Christ
back in Christmas."  Most of us, on he other hand, are deeply
ambivalent about who Jesus of Nazareth was, and while we will lustily
sing the Messiah, few of us believe that the baby born in Bethlehem
2004 years ago was uniquely sent from God to redeem humankind from
sin.

I will be wrestling in more detail two weeks from now with the
question of what exactly we are celebrating on December 25, but in
this Advent season, which some would call the last Advent of the
Millennium, I want to suggest that we focus on the coming birth of
hope.  Someone said, "Every baby comes with the message that God is
not discouraged."  I have two acquaintances that have had babies in
the last week; though I haven't seen either of them, my spirits are
lifted at the thought.

So here's another thing you might do:  go into the maternity ward at
your local hospital and look at the new babies being born among us.
They keep on coming.  Amid all the horror and all the discouragement
of the world, they keep on coming.  Men and women keep on producing
them, not just because it's pleasurable and fun, but because they have
faith in the future.

When you think of it, you could do worse for an image of God than a
little baby.  You know, the old man in the white robes and grey beard
on the cloud might have been fine for Michaelangelo and his cohorts,
but that God looks a bit judgmental to me.  One thing a baby is not is
judgmental.

Here is perhaps the ultimate social inversion of the season.  Instead
of the omnipotent being, let us picture God as the most helpless of
creatures.  God, like a baby is needy.  God like a baby is a hungry
being who wants all the love and care and devotion we can show to her.
God like a baby will try our patience at times, but will reward us not
by doing anything but simply by being here.

James Luther Adams, the most notable Unitarian Universalist theologian
of the late Twentieth Century, wrote a famous essay called the "Five
Smooth Stones of Religious Liberalism."  Adams' fifth smooth stone is
this:  "Finally, liberalism holds that the resources (divine and
human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change
justify an attitude of ultimate optimism."

For many of us, the holidays are a difficult time.  They bring up to
us our losses, our griefs, our loneliness, our discouragements.  For
those fortunate enough to be relatively free from these problems, the
holidays still will not measure up to the Norman Rockwell image that
we think they are supposed to.  But if you look hard enough, if you
strip away some of the tinsel, you can usually find some basis for
hope lurking there in the bottom of things.  And you can reach out to
others.  You don't need to go it alone.

Deck your soul as well as your halls.  This holiday season, let us
realize there is love beneath the tinsel.  Let us be there for one
another.  Let us find a basis for hope.

Amen.