Category: Well I thought it was neat!
Why we celebrate Christmas on December 25
A lot of people know that this goes all the way back to the Roman Empire – not surprising when you think that the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Emperors in the 320s AD. But a lot of people mistakenly think that the date for Christmas was chosen to coincide with the old Roman holiday of Saturnalia, a goofy end of year celebration where slaves were given the opportunity to act as masters for a day (as long as they really didn’t try to). No, it was something different, and more important for the development of the early Church, something that grew out of one of the most difficult times in the Empire’s history and came from one of their very greatest Emperors.
The third century AD was a terrible time for the Empire, with a succession of generals usurping the Imperial crown and the empire assaulted by external enemies like the great Persian king Sharpur II. Things got so bad that the Empire split into three pieces – a “Gallic Empire” in the West comprising Britain, France, and Spain; the rich eastern provinces of Egypt and Syria falling under the domination of Queen Zenobia’s oasis city state of Palmyra, and a rump Empire of Italy and Africa. It was really possible for a moment that the Roman Empire would simply dissolve – the bonds holding it together looked too weak to hold.
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| A gold coin from Aurelian’s reign |
But the Empire was saved by emperor Aurelian, who brought the whole thing back together. A grateful Senate awarded him the title “Restitutor Orbis” – Restorer of the World. Mike Duncan in his great History Of Rome Podcast describes Aurelian as the Sandy Koufax of Roman Emperors – he didn’t have the longest career or the most strikeouts or wins, but while he played he was simply unhittable – Left Hand Of God. You really should listen to the first couple minutes of this podcast episode as it is Mike Duncan at his very best.
So in five short years Aurelian restored the Roman world. But he wasn’t just one of the best generals in Roman history, he was also a great statesman. He turned his mind to why the Empire was so fragile; if he could knit it more tightly together he might be able to prevent a repeat breakup. Aurelian believed that a big problem was that the Empire was a collection of diverse peoples – Gauls and Britons and Egyptians and Syrians who all had different cultures and beliefs. In short, they had little in common other than the Emperor of the day and everyone had just seen how that had worked out.
And so Aurelian tried to overlay some commonality on his peoples. Each worshiped their own local gods, but most of these religious systems were fairly flexible. Aurelian introduced an Empire-wide cult, thinking that having some similarities would help create a common sense of Roman-ness. Aurelian chose a cult that was popular with the Army since the closest thing that the Empire had to a single common institution throughout the Empire was the Army.
Sol Invictus was popular with the troops, the Unconquered Sun god. Most parts of the Empire adopted this seamlessly as one of the many gods, although it seems that Aurelian seemed to believe that Sol Invictus was the only god who took many forms which were interpreted as the local deities. This was an emergent idea in the Ancient world and an expression in the chronicles say the one wax takes many moulds.
Aurelian introduced his cult on December 25, 274 AD and it became really the first Empire-wide holiday. He succeeded in founding a common belief across the Empire, perhaps succeeded more than even he hoped. Because the idea stuck: Emperor Constantine didn’t just introduce Christianity. It’s from him that we get the word Sunday, since he decreed that across the Empire the weekly day of rest would be the day of rest – the dies Solis.
And so the early Church had a challenge from a popular cult, but this was also an opportunity for them. Sol Invictus was the first half step towards monotheism and identifying Jesus Christ with the unconquered sun didn’t actually turn out to be all that hard for the early Church Fathers. Indeed, what is Easter if not the celebration of the Unconquered Son? December 25 stuck in the calendar. It’s been celebrated all the way down through the ages – ever since 274 AD.
It wasn’t the silliness of Saturnalia that had to be co-opted, it was the Feast of the Nativity of the Unconquered Son. May tomorrow’s feast day be festive indeed. You might even want to offer a toast to Aurelian Restitutor Orbis.
Everything in the news these days seems to be bad. Carnage captures the eye, and we human animals are drawn way more to chaos than to kittens. If you form your worldview via the modern mass media you might be forgiven if you’d sooner just blast off into space and abandon the whole sordid lot. Perhaps that’s what’s driving Elon Musk’s train.
This is a radical thought, but what if people are not so ghastly as we have been led to believe? What if out there amidst all that rampant inhumanity there was actually something wholesome and inspiring? In this tale, we find a dad who took something bad and made it into something good. We also find a massive corporation that actually did the right thing by the little guy when they really didn’t have to.
It was 1938, and life was hard. The country and the world were still clawing their way out of the Great Depression, and people still knew genuine deprivation. Additionally, medical science was not then what it is today. Stuff that is treatable nowadays was a death sentence back then. So it was with the wife of one Robert May.
The original “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was a booklet handed out for
free at Montgomery Ward stores during the 1939 Christmas shopping season.
Source: Wikipedia
Bob was a 34-year-old advertising writer for Montgomery Ward. Montgomery Ward was a massive mail order and department store conglomerate. Bob May was a tiny little piece of that enormous machine. He had very little money, and his wife Evelyn was dying from cancer. Their four-year-old daughter Barbara was facing a terribly dark Christmas. The man seemed to have very little for which to be thankful.
Bob’s life prior to this point had not exactly been all unicorns and butterflies, either. Having been a small, sickly kid himself, he had ample experience with bullying at the hands of his classmates. Children can be cruel, and this manifested in a thousand little ways.
In a full-circle moment, Bob’s employer tasked him to create a children’s story. Montgomery Ward typically gave away cheap coloring books to families doing their Christmas shopping, but this particular year they decided to make the book in-house and Bob drew the duty.
The end result was a familiar tale about a runt reindeer whose glowing red nose had made him an outcast. The little reindeer was frustrated, angry, and ashamed. His struggles coming to terms with his differentness were drawn from Bob’s own personal experiences during childhood.
We’ve all heard the story. Rudolph’s impediment becomes a blessing that ultimately saves Christmas. The little outcast reindeer becomes the hero. The fact that he was so different ultimately became his superpower.
Creating “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was a process. The gimpy little deer was originally supposed to be Rollo, then Reginald, before settling out as Rudolph. In early December 1938, Evelyn succumbed to her cancer. Bob and Barbara were crushed. To console his distraught daughter, Bob shared his Rudolph project from work with his little girl.
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” went on to become an enduring family classic.
Most of us modern folk know the story from the 1964 Burl Ives animated Christmas special.
Word of Bob’s quaint little tale made the rounds of the marketing department at Montgomery Ward. His coworkers found the simple story to be utterly mesmerizing and requested copies of their own. In 1939, Montgomery Ward reproduced the little book en masse and gave 2.9 million copies away for free. Over the next six years they produced more than six million copies despite wartime paper shortages. The largest publishers in the country scrambled to secure the printing rights. In January 1947, Sewell Avery, the CEO of Montgomery Ward, returned the exclusive rights to May because it was the right thing to do. Bob May ultimately remarried and became a millionaire.
Bob’s brother-in-law was a songwriter named Johnny Marks. Marks took the basic prose — itself a series of rhyming couplets in anapestic tetrameter — and set it to music. Together, the two men pitched the tune to every major singer they could find. All of them demurred. However, Gene Autry’s wife Ina Mae was moved by the lyrics and insisted her husband record the project.
The song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” became the second-most popular Christmas song ever recorded, right behind White Christmas. Rudolph went on to inspire toys, games, seasonal greeting cards, and a Ringling Brothers circus act. The familiar 1964 stop-motion television adaptation narrated by Burl Ives remains enduringly popular even today. And it all began with a grieving father trying to console his little girl.
As we move into this Christmas season, don’t believe what the news tells you. There are still scads of good people out there — they just don’t typically make quite so much noise as the other sort. The story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a great example.
These 104th ID Timberwolves are tearing about in a captured German Stug III
assault gun. Note the MP44 assault rifle in the gunner’s shield on the left.
Public domain photo.
He was the last one. Like the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, the passenger pigeon, or the Great Auk, William Strickland was the very last of his species. Mr. Strickland was the last of my close personal friends who served in World War II, and now he’s gone. I’m honestly struggling with that.
The man died at age 95 after a rich, long life, exceptionally well-lived. He left behind a devoted wife and expansive family along with battalions of buddies like me. He had been in the local VA nursing home. Thanks to COVID-19 he and his wife had gone a year without touching one another. On a cosmic scale that was just wrong.
Mr. Strickland was an avid student of history and enjoyed a razor-sharp mind. He described events from seven decades ago like they happened last week. There will never be another like him.
I met Mr. Strickland as a patient. I somehow found out he was a veteran and asked the standard questions. The stories that followed moved me.
Mr. Strickland landed in France in September of 1944 at the age of 19 with the 104th Infantry Division, the “Timberwolves.” Eight months later the teenager was an old man. By VE Day he was the War Daddy, the soldier the younger troops were told to stick close to if they wanted to live. War uniquely ages a man.
Mr. Strickland wasn’t really a gun guy, but he definitely knew guns. He landed packing a Garand. They called it the M1. The M1 Carbine was the Carbine, and the M1A1 Thompson was the Thompson. There was, however, always only one M1.
One night he got tagged for a night patrol and wanted something handier than that long, heavy Infantry rifle. He traded his M1 to a 37mm antitank gunner for his Thompson submachine gun and just never gave it back. He said that 37mm was worthless against the German tanks they faced, so it wasn’t like that guy needed it.
We asked so much of those awesome old guys. They were indeed the very best of us.
The Tommy gun came with five 20-round stick magazines and no web gear. Mr. Strickland carried his magazines in the pockets of his field jacket along with piles of loose .45ACP ammo. He said that during every lull in the action he would drop down behind cover and thumb rounds into his magazines. He packed an M1911A1 pistol as well and extolled the many manifest virtues of ammunition commonality.
I’ve got several tales, but this was the most poignant. They were days from the end of the war, and everyone on both sides knew it. The 104th was pulled up on one bank of the Mulde tributary of the Elbe River, while the battered remnants of the Wehrmacht occupied the other. Everybody involved wanted to run out the clock and go home. Some overachiever in the chain of command, however, decided they needed a few prisoners to interrogate. That meant one last combat patrol.
Mr. Strickland’s best friend was a kid from New York named Sol. He and Sol had been together from the beginning, and they took point going into the village. They snatched a pair of beleaguered Krauts in short order and made haste to return. However, their patrol leader was a green Lieutenant who had not yet tasted proper war. He wanted to press on and find some trouble.
Mr. Strickland and Sol found themselves together crouching behind the corner of a brick building. The two young veterans decided this was as far as they were going, orders or not. They passed word back that they were turning around. However, Sol said he was going to take one quick peek around the corner.
Mr. Strickland said he tried to talk his friend out of this. The war was over, and there was nothing in that village that was ever going to make a difference. Sol was not to be dissuaded. He stepped around the corner and immediately caught a burst of 9mm to the chest from a German MP40.
Mr. Strickland leapt around his friend and tore the offending German soldier to pieces with his Thompson. They all then scurried back into the building, Sol under his own steam. Sol then sagged against the wall, sat down heavily, and died.
There wasn’t time to mourn. Mr. Strickland pushed the captured Germans ahead and ran out the back door headed for the river. They hit a tripwire in the backyard, and the two German captives were killed by an anti-personnel mine. The rest of the patrol, now minus his best friend, made it back across the river safely. The war ended mere days later.
In those seven months the Timberwolves suffered 4,961 casualties. In the same timeframe Mr. Strickland earned three Bronze Stars for Valor and a Purple Heart. When he returned home, he sought out Sol’s family in New York and told them what a great friend he had been. Even in his nineties Mr. Strickland was still justifiably bitter about that last patrol.
If you have old people in your life who are special, seek them out. Parents, mentors, friends, or heroes, believe me when I tell you that you are all on the clock. The opportunities to soak up their experience and wisdom are transient and fleeting. I will be forever grateful to call William Strickland a friend. They’ll never make another like him.