The Feast That Stole Christmas

By now you’ve hopefully perused the pages of canvas—both in print and online—and perhaps you’ve read our winter solstice coverage. What you may have come away with is the fact that most winter holidays have their basis in the ancient tradition of the solstice.

Take Christmas, for example. Once upon a time Christmas wasn’t the biggest of Christian holidays. Some scholars say that, if anything, the day of Christ’s birth would be sometime in spring—the only point in the calendar when the Star of Bethlehem is visible in the Nazarene’s part of the world.

So how did Christmas come to be December 25th?

Here’s my thought: Converting the pagan world to Christmas was really all about the feast.
It was Pope Julius I who, in the 4th century AD, got the brainstorm that the best way to convert Romans still practicing their ancient pagan religion would be to meld their major holiday with a Christian one. That holiday was held on December 25th during the month-long Saturnalia feasting and honored the child-god Mithra, who represented the all-powerful sun.

Soon enough the new holiday spread to Egypt where the Coptic priests readily adopted it. Slowly, it made its way to Europe where it was celebrated alongside traditional winter harvest festivals such as the Yule, ultimately usurping them.

This bait and switch would mark just the beginning of food influencing Christianity and vice versa. In fact, were it not for the strong and often-violent evangelical theme of the new religion, many of the foods we enjoy today would not be with us. It was the crusades, for example, that brought European Christians into the Middle and Far East where they encountered the bounty of foods, spices, and drink that had already been traded for centuries along that great trading route—the Silk Road–as well as other smaller spice tributaries stretching from Asia to the Near East and eventually to Europe.

For these religious expeditions, modern day organizations like Starbucks should get on their knees in thanks because those crusaders brought the west, among other things, coffee and tea.
Fast forward some four hundred years and it was Christianity that brought the first intrepid settlers to the New World where they encountered things like potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and chocolate, all of which was dutifully shipped back to the European continent for great chefs to turn into delicacies.

So, I guess religion is not just about what you put in your soul but what you put in your mouth as well.

With that food for thought I’m making a holiday plea to canvas readers to think about what you put in your mouth this holiday season. Does it support sustainability? What about local farming? Is your holiday table an environmentally friendly one? Let me know by commenting below.