Originally published in print December 2020.
There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
– A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
It is fitting that Ebenezer Scrooge’s Christmas journey of redemption begins with his gut. It is also fitting that I’ve never read A Christmas Carol. I’ve seen The Muppet Christmas Carol; I watch it every year, silently mouthing along the familiar songs and dialogue, like you would at mass – this coincidence is not wholly coincidental. One of the many facets of contemporary Anglophone culture that took recognisable form during the reign of Queen Victoria was the celebration of Christmas. Changes in the way people viewed the midwinter festival were the product of paradigm shifts in public attitudes towards religion, commerce, and the nature of time. Ireland today is firmly capitalist and increasingly irreligious; it follows that Christmas has overtaken Easter as our primary “religious” festival, particularly among younger generations and in urban centres.
Religious festivals have long been flashpoints for cultural exchange and transmission. Irish emigrants brought the festival of Samhain with them to North America, where it metamorphosed into Halloween and was reimported to Ireland with new rituals like trick-or-treat. Christmas in western Europe grew out of the nexus between Roman imperialism, Christian evangelism, and indigenous paganism.
“In the Bleak Midwinter”, Christina Rossetti’s beautiful carol, concerns what Robert Barron, prelate and Catholic writer, contends is the central comedic irony of the Christian faith: that Christ, the foundation for the Christian faith itself, was born in such inauspicious circumstances in a forgotten backwater of the Roman empire. Rossetti couches religion in the quotidian and holds the Christ child in all his ironic tension: heaven and earth “cannot hold him”, yet a “breast full of milk” sustains him. Victorian times, in which notions of muscular Christianity enjoyed their greatest popularity, saw an upsurge in interest in health and in the human body. Muscular Christianity is famously expounded in the novels of Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, while the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is often interpreted along the same lines. Against a backdrop of what we now refer to as a “crisis of faith”, many authors and poets tried to access the divine through their bodies, either by exercising or by feasting.
As Victorians came to know more and care differently about the human body, they in turn began to control it in new ways. Standardised rail time, first introduced in 1847, centralised people’s experience of time, and the modern “work day” was invented: instead of farmers working according to how many daylight hours were available, the new cohort of industrial workers “clocked off” at the same time throughout summer and winter. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is an account of the industrialisation of the north of England by southern business interests, and central to it is the tension between northern agricultural workers and the Greenwich mean time of the south, which comes to determine their lives. A set “dinnertime” was pushed to the end of the day, accommodating these new working habits (Gaskell, we’re told, ate her dinner between four and five o’clock). The time one ate dinner became a new indicator of socioeconomic class. As the protagonist of Living by Appearances (1855) says, “Tell me when you dine and I will tell you what you are.”
As with any paradigm shift in cultural consciousness, literature both chronicled and produced wider changes. Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. is, among many other things, a manifesto on Christmastime. Scientific developments in the 18th and 19th centuries had made time appear linear instead of cyclical, and as a result the perennial solar ritual on which festivals like Christmas are based began to seem irrelevant. In Memoriam identifies Christmas as an opportunity to escape scientifically determined “profane” time and to find solace in “sacred” cyclical time. The poem preempts those strange twelve days between Christmas Day and January 6th when time stops, bleeds, and vanishes. The once-yearly rituals of binging, singing, relaxing and not-working many of us engage in nourish a primal part of ourselves otherwise inaccessible by the necessary systems with which we govern our lives.
In 2020, our ability to measure our bodies and to hold them accountable has exploded. In my school, students didn’t just clock in before the 8:35 deadline in the manner of Victorian industrial workers, they did so by scanning our thumbprints at a terminal by the front door. Today, we each carry phones with GPS-accurate time, and many of us wear watches that track our movements and heart rate, and which calculate for us what we should eat in a day. The Victorian attitude to Christmas, as a sacred moment off the clock, could not be more relevant. Mr. Dickens, were he alive today, would tell you to turn off your phone, ungirdle your Fitbit, eat some gravy and get supernatural.
