7 times Christmas Day got political

Politics and Christmas Day should be kept apart. It’s a day when you should have your mind on higher questions, like why your sister always gives you socks, and how the Nimbo-Blaster 4000-X could possibly come without batteries.

Unfortunately, however, December 25 has sometimes been intimately interwoven with the grubby world of politics.

We take a look at seven colorful cases:

Pushing out pagans?

No date is given for Christmas in the gospels, and December 25 only seems to have been institutionalized in the calendar more than 300 years after Jesus Christ’s birth. Why? Is it significant that the Roman Emperor Constantine started to support Christians early in the fourth century? Is there a devious political machination behind the date?

There are two broad camps of historians who tackle this problem, and there’s often little seasonal goodwill between them. The first group argues Christians latched onto December 25 as they sought to muscle in on pagans, who had better mid-winter parties, with thrills-and-spills chariot races and seven-day-long debauches. Some experts say December 25 appealed because the Romans saw it as the winter solstice and celebrated a festival to the sun god Sol Invictus on that day. The solstice — with its mystical promise of brighter days ahead — was a perfect symbol for Christians too.

This theory about hijacking a pagan holiday to expand Christian influence across the empire goes down like a bucket of soggy Brussels sprouts with rival historians. They retort that Christians settled independently on the December 25 date via esoteric theological arithmetic that put the annunciation on March 25. (That means you can deduce the date of Christmas by counting nine months from when the Virgin Mary learned her baby was on the way, and don’t need to accuse power-grabbing Christians of stealing the winter solstice.)

Either way, no amount of mulled wine is going to settle this festive feud.

Charlemagne’s big day in church

The events inside St. Peter’s Basilica on December 25, 800, were supreme political theater. Charlemagne, the superhumanly tall, pot-bellied, meat-guzzling king of the Franks, knelt down to pray; Pope Leo III supposedly sneaked up and popped a crown on his head, while the Roman congregation proclaimed him emperor.

Many writers today are skeptical about the official narrative that Charlemagne was caught unawares, and was even annoyed. [“Guys! For me? Dominion over Christendom? You shouldn’t have. Otter furs or a nice ax head would have been fine.”] It was, in fact, a perfect deal for both men. Leo was weak and had almost died a year earlier when his enemies among the Roman nobility tried to poke out his eyes and sever his tongue. Accusations of adultery and perjury swirled around him. The coronation gave Leo a protector, and Charlemagne earned sacred legitimacy as the “Emperor of the Romans” for his incessant conquests.  

Twelve centuries later, the head of the European project is still anointed in a totally opaque backroom stitch-up of questionable legitimacy.   

William the Conqueror goes up in flames

The coronation of England’s conqueror, William, duke of Normandy, more aptly known as William the Bastard, took place in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1066. It didn’t go so well, as the Norman soldiers outside lived up to their numbskull stereotype in Robin Hood movies. Interpreting the roars of acclamation inside the abbey as an assassination attempt, the soldiers panicked, set fire to neighboring buildings and whipped up a dangerous mob. It was a fitting beginning to Norman rule.

By the Christmas Day of 1069, things had hit a nadir, with William walled up in York, ravening to unleash the “harrying of the north” in response to rebellion. Troops slaughtered people and livestock, burned villages and salted the soil so crops would never grow again. One monk records people were reduced to cannibalism (which is an utterly stomach-turning thought because Yorkshiremen are pretty stringy).

English relations with French-speaking administrators haven’t advanced much since then.

Christmas is canceled

History has few concrete lessons other than “Don’t get stuck in Russia in winter” and “Don’t mess with Christmas.” The puritanical parliamentarians on the winning side of the fratricidal English civil war of the 17th century made a grave misstep on No. 2. They shared the view that Christmas was a non-biblical excuse for carousing and tried to ax it. In 1647, the killjoys outlawed a hearty English Christmas of carols, yuletide ales, roast goose, mince pies, plum puddings and dancing.

Festive church services were banned, and shops had to remain open. Christmas was meant to be as dull as any other drizzly December day. Unsurprisingly, this triggered unrest across the country. In Canterbury, there was a full-blown riot in 1647, the mayor was beaten up and the furious populace pulled out their footballs in protest at attempts to cancel their traditional Christmas matches. Indeed, historian Bernard Capp has found evidence that defiant football playing became a major nationwide flashpoint between Englishmen and their theocratic overlords.

The ban on Christmas only deepened the unpopularity of Oliver Cromwell’s short-lived republic. His major generals came to epitomize military dictatorship and religious fundamentalism. Ironically, it was the godly Puritans who infuriated England’s religious mainstream by cracking down on much-loved holidays. Christmas simply went underground. By 1660, the monarchy was back. In 1661, Cromwell’s corpse was dug up, hanged, and clumsily decapitated in eight hacks. Don’t touch that mid-winter wassail. Just don’t.

Washington’s cold crossing

By the winter of 1776, fiery-tempered former tobacco farmer George Washington needed a victory that would rekindle wavering belief among his rapidly dwindling army that revolt against the British could succeed. It was a make-or-break moment.

In a last-gasp attempt to restore morale, Washington ordered the words of pamphleteer (and erstwhile corset-maker) Thomas Paine to be read out to his sick and shivering troops: “These are the times that try men’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

It all came good in a high-risk raid across the ice-choked Delaware River on the night of December 25, under the cover of flurries of sleet and snow. On the other side, Washington defeated a Hessian garrison of German auxiliaries fighting for the British. (The story that the Hessians were suffering from a few too many Christmas jars appears to be apocryphal.) On a roll, Washington went on to repulse British forces under Charles Cornwallis at the beginning of January.

Ceauşescu’s end

For many of us, the most dramatic political event over Christmas was the Romanian revolution and startlingly prompt execution of dictator (and erstwhile cobbler) Nicolae Ceauşescu, along with his wife Elena, on December 25, 1989. At the time, the outside world guessed this was a straightforward yarn about the failure of European communism, and about a despot with a taste for luxury being overthrown by a starving people ground down by one of Eastern Europe’s most paranoid and cruel police states.     

Over the years, however, Romanians have engaged in a bitter debate about what really happened that Christmas, and who was responsible for so many deaths. For many, there’s a murky picture that regime insiders and agents of the feared Securitate spy service pulled off an internal coup, stole the nation’s prize assets and continued to pull the strings. A full reckoning of those events and the aftermath still seems a distant prospect.

Bye bye, USSR

OK, we know we are cheating a little on this one, as Christmas Day in Russia is January 7, but this list would hardly be complete without the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev as the last Soviet leader on December 25, 1991. At 7:32 p.m., the Soviet flag over the Kremlin was lowered for the last time.   

It was a cantankerous, hard-drinking night on which, alarmingly, the never-wholly-steady Boris Yeltsin would finally be briefed on the workings of the country’s infamous nuclear trigger, the chemodanchik, or little suitcase.  

It’s also a night that today’s President Vladimir Putin is in no mood to celebrate. When asked in 2018 what historical event he would like to change, he immediately fired back: “The collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Merry Christmas to you too, Volodya.