Slow Yule Part 2 – Pre-Reformation Celebrations.

Written by on December 6, 2008

12daysofchristmas-main_fullWell, my apologies for not getting the next part up until today. 

Last time I was talking about how Christmas really went pear-shaped around the time of the reformation and the rot continued to set in until today it is little more than a celebration of consumerism (again, I repeat, I am not totally against consumerism, I like nice stuff, it’s all about balance, I promise to write a quick entry on that very soon).

Now, I don’t want to descend into a lecture about the origins of Christmas, was it a Christian festival? Is it an ancient Pagan one? That is all a little murky and no one really knows.

The fact is that we are going to celebrate it. And in my humble opinion, the old Pre-Reformation celebrations were much more “Slow” than our current celebrations.

And to be fair, a lot of the things I am going to talk about are still done in some places of the world or have only declined quite recently. So I am not necessary going all misty eyed for a “Merry England” Arcadia…

(Although I often go all misty eyed about the idea of a Merry England Arcadia. But that, again is for another post…)

The idea here is to introduce (or re-introduce) you to some choice Pre-Reformation Celebrations that you may find will add to or replace what you are doing now and reduce you Christmas stress!

Firstly, lets look at the length of the celebrations. Forget the stingy 2 (or if you are lucky 3) day holiday we are used to. That really came into effect in the Victorian era and was a side effect of the increasing industrialisation and urbanisation. It was to encourage productivity and it was difficult to generate the community spirit in the now sprawling cities, so the festival started to focus more on just the immediate family.

I am sure you are all aware of the song “12 Days of Christmas’”…

“Fiiiiiiiiiiivvvveeeee Gooooooolllllldddd Riiiiiinnnnggssss….” And all that.

We that was because Christmas would last 12 whole days! It would start on the 25th December and finish on the 6th January (12th Night). Originally Christmas Day was celebrated on January 6 when presents were given in honour of St.Nicholas.

It was a time of merriment, feasting and general festivity (but still a holy day, with 3 masses on 25th December to start the ball rolling), with plays, processions and merry-making. It was not the family orientated affair.

Now I am not saying you have to celebrate the whole 12 days really But the idea is to recognise that you can pace yourself a little, it is not about that mad rush to fit it all into the 2 or 3 days that we have and then feel a bit lost until New Year…

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PS, Yes, I am posting on a Saturday. It is because I have had a few technical difficulties in posting this week…

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Slow Yule. Part 1

Written by on December 2, 2008

scrooges_third_visitor-john_leech1843Hello,

I have to admit to being a bit random with my journal up until now, just writing what has been on my mind and what I have been up to. Which means I have promised to talk about things in more depth in later entries and then got myself totally distracted and wandered off on tangents, never returning to the subject.

So, I have decided to put a bit of order into the chaos and am going to follow a theme for a while. So, the theme running up to Christmas will be (predictably) about Christmas and how being Slow can make your Christmas much better.

And then, after that is all out of the way I will talk about you can make some really useul

Probably. Assuming I don’t get distracted…

So, Christmas.

Hmmm, I have to be blunt. Christmas has probably become the most un-Slow of all festivals. It has been taken over by excessive consumerism (I don’t have anything against consumerism as such, but excessive consumerism – like excessive anything – is not good. But that probably is a subject for a post of it’s own) leading to unnecessary debt, the pressure and stress of getting the right presents for the right people and going to visit people you don’t really know or like just because you think you should (even though you don’t bother the rest of the year)…

It is has become far removed from the original festival that is was.

In these first few posts I am going t explore the history of the Christmas festival and so we can start looking at ways we can get that back and rekindle the proper spirit of Christmas (which is very slow indeed!).

The Christmas we know today (with the 3 days – Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day) was really an invention of the Victorians (with a bit of help from Charles Dickens) to reduce the festive period into a manageable 2 day holiday so we could all get back to work (this was in the midst of the Industrial revolution), which really goes against the Slow ethos of the work/life balance and is therefore really doomed to be stressful from the get go!!

But the rot set in a long time before that, around the time of Reformation, when Martin Luther (as an enemy to Slow as Benjamin Franklin) created the Protestant Church (and the gave name to the dreaded “Protestant Work Ethic”) and started to cull the Pre-Reformation holidays and festivals as they deemed them “hedonistic” and “superstitious” (Christmas was even BANNED in Britain in 1647!!). Before this Christmas (or Yule, or Christmastide, or the festival of Epiphany, or the Winter Soltace!) was a time of revelry, of community spirit, of celebration and feasting that lasted days (some sources say they started in November!), ending on 12th Night, or the Feast of Epiphany on the 6th January. It combined pre-Christian traditions and Christiam elements to give thanks and distract ourselves from the cold, dark winters!

In Part 2. We will look in more details at these Pre-Reformation festivals and how we could include some the ideas into our modern Christmas to reduce the stress and make it a Slower festival…

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