The following essay was first published by The Illustrated London News on St. Stephen’s Day in 1925 and it conveys GK Chesterton’s thoughts on commercial efforts at trying to create a Christmas without Christianity.
An article on "Christmas Old and New" appeared recently in a magazine, and said many things that many people are probably saying just now. I do not say they are very lucid things, but they revolve round a reality and something sincerely if vaguely felt.
They raise all the talk about tradition and change; about keeping the spirit but not the letter; about suiting something to modern conditions, and so on. We have heard a good deal about these things; unfortunately, we have not heard much sense about them.
For it has become a convention to say we must disregard conventions; and the demand for something new is already old enough to be in its dotage or (if we had luck) in its coffin. But I notice one rather queer paradox about all this talk of change or reform in customs like Christmas. People talk about sacrificing the letter and keeping the spirit; and then go and do exactly the opposite. They keep a few fragmentary letters (which no longer make a word) and then sacrifice the spirit altogether.
Now the difficulty in all talk about the letter and the spirit is that a man who goes by the spirit must be very sure that he does really understand the spirit. And in my little local experience, the man generally does not. To take a parallel, a sceptic might ask what is the permanent value of the particular forms of good manners that go to make up what is conventionally called a gentleman. He might say he wished to alter the letter of certain little observances, but keep the spirit of the social and historical type. He might say, "Need a gentleman take off his hat to a lady? Need he take it off on entering another man's house?" To which the universal philosopher will reply, "No, of course not. He might take off his boots. The Arabs already do it in the case of the house, when Arabs are so fortunate as to have any houses. And, although it would be tiresome to sit down on the pavement and unlace one's boots while an obliging lady stood still and patiently waited to be saluted, of course that symbol would do as well as any other symbol, if it were socially accepted as symbolising respect." That would be really to alter the letter but keep the spirit. But I do not observe that this is what the more casual or callous youths of the rising generation tend to do.
I do not observe many of them prostrating themselves on the pavement, or standing on their heads in the street (to show how completely the lady's beauty has bowled them over), or in any other fashion experimenting in new modes of expression for the chivalric sentiment. They are not inventing new forms for an old feeling; they are doing just the reverse. They are ignoring the old feeling, but preserving a few limp remains of the old forms.
Now suppose a man, when entering by his friend's front door, were to toss his hat off with a jerk and leave it lying in the middle of the floor. His gesture would not be, like the removal of his boots, a new gesture or antic to express respect. It would simply be the old antic without the respect. It would be going through the old arbitrary action in such a way as to make it mean the opposite of what it was supposed to mean. Suppose a young man were to stroll up to a lady with his hands in his pockets and tell her to take off his hat for him and hold it in the air for a few seconds before replacing it on his head. It would not be a new way of expressing courtesy, but an old way distorted to express discourtesy.
Now I do not say that the unconventional young man of fact and fiction is going quite so far as this; but what amuses me is that, so far as he goes, he is not repudiating the forms of courtesy to keep the soul of chivalry; he is rather repudiating chivalry and keeping a few of the merely mechanical and meaningless gestures of courtesy. Our latest romance of cocktails and rapid dramas is not unconventional; it is only languidly conventional. It is not a school of new manners; it is only old manners modified and softened by bad manners.
Now I notice the same contradiction about Christmas—and, indeed, about Christian traditions generally. It is apparent in the people who tell us, in the papers and elsewhere, that they have emancipated themselves from dogmas, and propose to live by the spirit of Christianity. To which I reply: "All right—go ahead," or words to that effect. But then I always find myself confronted with this extraordinary fact. They start out to live by the spirit of Christianity, and proceed to fling themselves with frenzy into preventing poor people from getting any beer, preventing oppressed nations from defending themselves against tyrants (because it might lead to war), tearing backward children away from their heart-broken parents and locking them up in some sort of materialistic madhouse, and so on. And then they are quite surprised when I tell them that I think they have far less of the spirit of Christianity than they have the letter of it, of the actual words and terminology of its dogmas.
In point of fact, they have kept some of the words and terminology, words like Peace and Righteousness and Love; but they make these words stand for an atmosphere utterly alien to Christendom; they keep the letter and lose the spirit. And as it is with Christendom, so it is with Christmas. If men knew exactly what they meant by Christmas, and then started out to make new symbols, new ceremonies, or new jokes, it might be a very good thing. Something of the sort may yet happen, very probably, in that world of modern men that does know what it means by Christmas. But most of the modern modifications which were discussed in the magazine and elsewhere were quite the reverse of this.
They were really ways in which men may keep the name of Christmas, and a few faded badges of Christmas, while doing something totally different. But what is meant by men like the magazine writer is simply this: that a few sprigs of a particular vegetation called holly and mistletoe should be stuck up in large, over-heated, homeless American hotels, where people shall forget all about Christmas, be bored with the very thought of Christmas, blaspheme the supreme and sacred soul of Christmas with their sophistication and their satiety and their despair. They are too tired to feel the spirit; they are too tired to improve the symbolism; only they are also too tired even to alter the name.
That sort of thing is nothing so creative as reform, just as it is nothing so tenacious as tradition. It is simply drifting, like a halfmelted iceberg which floats into warmer waters, without knowing why it differs from its surroundings, why it is changing, or how much of it is left. None of us should desire to see the noble snow man of the English Christmas melt in the meaningless fashion of that iceberg. It would be better that the snow man should be destroyed like an idol by iconoclasts like the Puritans.
It were better that those who know why they like it should have to defend it against those who know why they dislike it. I have very little fear that in the last resort the latter would ever be the majority. But the former would fight much better if they did know why they liked it, even at the expense of returning to some of the superstitions of their fathers. Anyhow, I know why I like it; and in the case of the Christmas of cocktails and central heating, I know why I dislike it.
I know that the reality is not relativity or progress or the mere passage of the ages. I know Father Christmas when I see him, even when he is in plain clothes. And I am not deceived by Father Time dressed up in holly and mistletoe.