Friday, December 19, 2003
(12:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Christmas Time is Here. Happiness and Cheer...
I am sorry to be away from my blog for so many days (two). At this time of year, when Jesus Christ is so relentlessly commercialized away, the insightful critical commentary that only blogs can provide is more necessary than ever.
I have two posts planned: one book review and one on Christmas carols. This will be the one on Christmas carols. The book review might have to wait until Monday, but it will be more than worth the wait once you see what book I'm reviewing.
At work, we have been listening to Christmas music for the last few weeks. Normally, I would be annoyed about it (as the doctor is), but this year I'm listening differently. I'm asking, as I listen, how it came to be that we have such a small set of Christmas carols. Beyond that, I wonder why it is that so few new Christmas songs are successful -- have we lost the ability to write new Christmas carols?
This question seems to me to be related to canon formation, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition (in traditions where the entire canon falls from the sky, such as Islam or Mormonism, this doesn't seem to apply). There was some classical era of the Christmas carol when most of our current carols came out -- I don't know when this is historically, but it seems like it was probably in the modern period. Some of the older ones are now incomprehensible to us, such as "12 Days of Christmas" or "Here We Go A-Wassalling (sp.)," but we keep them because they have been grouped in with the other Christmas carols. More ancient ones seem to be more "authentic," and they are more universally popular -- "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" (technically an Advent song, but just go with it) and "Greensleeves" are the best examples of this phenomenon.
Some carols just barely sqeaked in, and there is some debate about whether they are really Christmas "carols" at all. These are primarily the ones surrounding Santa Claus, and many of them were either written for or popularized by television specials. They are relatively late, and they do not have a lot to do with the main tradition of Christmas carols (namely, talking about Jesus), but they are still grouped together in the popular mind, even if they don't appear in hymnals. Other songs, such as those that talk primarily about the weather or about bells or some such thing, are also more peripherally related to the main tradition of Christmas carols, but they are still part of the main group in the popular mind.
This process seems to be more closely related to the formation of the Hebrew Scriptures than the New Testament, since Judaism is a combination of an ethnic tradition and a religious tradition in a way that early Christianity wasn't, and in a way that contemporary Christianity is. The "writings" section of the Hebrew Bible corresponds to the more marginal Christmas songs, in that many rabbis have wondered whether, for example, Song of Solomon really belongs in the Bible, just as many might wonder why we're singing about how the weather outside is frightful on a day celebrating the birth of Christ. But since we generally celebrate the birth of Christ during the winter, it's related to the main tradition of Christmas music, albeit indirectly -- the Santa tradition, too, is related primarily through the time of year when Santa Claus was supposed to have given his gifts, although now obviously it's taken on a life of its own and produced such other characters as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Since Christmas carols aren't very important, no one has ever sat down and written out a canon of carols, but it took a long time before anyone wrote down a canon of Scripture, too. I don't think people think nearly enough about how we came to have the Bible -- they assume it just fell out of the air -- and thinking about how we came to have a priveleged group of "Christmas songs," many of which are not directly related to Jesus at all, might help us understand at least how the Hebrew Bible came about, in general terms.
The New Testament probably requires a different model, since strictly theological concerns seem to have been more prominent, given that early Christianity, in contrast with rabbinic Judaism, represented a decisive break with all extant cultural traditions. We might ask, however, how so many spurious attributions came to be believable -- might the Pastorals (attributed to Paul, but almost certainly not written by him) have been included in the canon because it reflected the general Roman morality that many Christian thinkers had consciously or unconsciously come to think of as "Christian"? Since the Hebrew Bible is understood as a group of concentric circles, with Torah at the center, Prophets (the Deuteronomistic history and what Christians call prophets) outside of that providing commentary, and the Writings (miscellaneous category) being even more marginal, maybe we can understand the New Testament in the same way -- the Gospels are at the center, the authentic Paul provides the privileged interpretation, and the remaining materials in the New Testament (Acts, other letters, Revelation) provide more marginal, perhaps "optional" perspectives.
Yes, I came to these conclusions from thinking about Christmas carols. In addition, I think that this is more of a question for a theologian rather than a biblical scholar, because I still don't think that Christians really know what to do with the Bible -- the dominant evangelical model, whereby we are supposed to "base" things on the Bible, is logically incoherent and, I would argue impossible.
I will follow up on these thoughts in my book review. I'll try to include more humorous materials in my next post. Well, here's a little something to reward those who made it this far: BOOBS!
