An American Christmas

One surprising fact about the Roman empire is that Roman religious rituals were not much observed outside the city of Rome itself. You wouldn’t have turned up in Britain in late December 150 CE and found the Saturnalia in full swing everywhere. By and large, official religious rituals were tied to their places of origins.

There were exceptions to that general rule. Non-official religions did spread. You could, for example, find the religion of Isis very widely across the Roman world, although it was still symbolically tied to Egypt by its (alleged) use of water from the river Nile itself in its ceremonies (believe that or not). Rituals focused on the emperor seem to have been ubiquitous, in broadly similar forms. And even remote army bases celebrated some of a repertoire of rituals from the capital. But those who travelled across the Roman empire would expect to find different calendars and different festivals wherever they went. (It was not unlike our acceptance of a different currency in different countries – the Romans took on board radically different local time-keeping systems and different festivals.)

It’s not like that now, with our combination of world religions and globalization. You get some form of Christmas everywhere – but with significant similarities and differences, even between the US and the UK. One of the surprising similarities is the length of time that the whole thing takes. I had always been assured that Americans were more sensible about Christmas than the Brits. It was a couple of days of holiday, then back to work. Not a bit of it, at least in my neck of the American woods. Things began to close down around the 17th/18th and will not open up again till the first week of January.

Poinsettias are one of the big differences.

© Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I went back to the UK briefly for Thanksgiving, leaving Washington DC a city of (Thanksgiving) pumpkins, and returned to find it a city of poinsettias. Within a few days some devoted decorators had swept all the vegetables away and replaced them with a sea of red-leaved plants, everywhere. I don’t think poinsettias have ever quite caught on in the UK, and when I tried them, they died on me pretty quickly. Now I know their history, I feel rather relieved that I never bonded with them. It appears they were a brilliant marketing hype by an entrepreneur in the 1960s, who had worked out how to graft perfect specimens and how to distribute them around the US as cuttings, rather than as more time-limited full-grown plants. He also flooded US television studios with free poinsettias, which ensured their success. It’s not a tradition that goes back centuries. It’s younger than me.

Mostly, though, it’s the hard-to-navigate nuances that make the difference. I am now adept at saying “Happy Holidays”, rather than “Happy Christmas”. And I have learned not even to start to discuss the food. No sensible American would have turkey twice within a month. I haven’t seen many mince pies on the shelves. And mention of Christmas pud elicits more revulsion than anything else.

I haven’t dared confess to my US friends that I have a tribute to the Christmas pud coming up on A Point of View on BBC Radio Four on 20th and 22nd December. Do listen for a very British take on the whole thing!

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