Do Good Design

A large part of what makes something special or magical for me is the story behind it, and that’s why I’ve gone on a quest to discover the story behind Christmas.

It’s a very big story, with a lot of misinformation — especially on the Internet where all the top Google listings are quoting each other without any actual references.

Today I’m just talking about a small part, one of the original holidays behind our modern Christmas.

Peel back the layers of Christianity applied over the 25th of December and what you get is a far, far older holiday: Saturnalia, or Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Birthday of the Unconquered Sun.

Saturnalia sounds like one big party, so it’s no wonder it took a while for Christmas to catch on. Being Roman, naturally Saturnalia was all about eating, drinking and being merry.

My book sources got sketchy at this point, so here’s what the University of Chicago’s Encycolpaedia Romana has to say about Saturnalia:

“The Saturnalia was the most popular holiday of the Roman year. Catullus (XIV) describes it as ‘the best of days,’ and Seneca complains that the ‘whole mob has let itself go in pleasures’ (Epistles, XVIII.3). Pliny the Younger writes that he retired to his room while the rest of the household celebrated (Epistles, II.17.24).

“It was an occasion for celebration, visits to friends, and the presentation of gifts, particularly wax candles (cerei), perhaps to signify the returning light after the solstice.”

It was also a time for the servants and lower classes to turn the tables on their masters:

“During the holiday, restrictions were relaxed and the social order inverted. Gambling was allowed in public. Slaves were permitted to use dice and did not have to work.

“Within the family, a Lord of Misrule was chosen. Slaves were treated as equals, allowed to wear their masters’ clothing, and be waited on at meal time in remembrance of an earlier golden age thought to have been ushered in by the god.

In the Saturnalia, Lucian relates that ‘During My week the serious is barred; no business allowed. Drinking, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of frenzied hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water—such are the functions over which I preside.’ “

Hm, I’d like to be the Lord of Misrule, more for the title than for the gambling and drinking which I don’t do much of.

But of course, like pretty much every other major holiday, the Christian church co-opted this one, urging people to turn from worshipping Saturn to celebrating the birth of Christ.

I’ll do some more digging on Saturnalia and references to even older celebrations of Mithras, from the Persians. If you do some Googling, you’ll quickly notice everyone’s quoting the same few sources such as the one above, so I’m off to the British Library to see what I can find.