Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival—The Holly and the Ivy

Have you been missing traditional carols in this year’s Winter Holiday Music Festival selection?  Today we feature one of the oldest English carols, The Holly and the Ivy.  Its origins are shrouded in the mist of time.

The most familiar melody of several that have been set to the is very old and resembles the songs of the Tudor era 1485–1602 which is why it is a favorite of Madrigal Singers.

The early 19th Century Birmingham broadside that has the earliest surviving version of the lyrics.

The earliest surviving mention of the song in print occurred in the early 19th Century when collecting folk music became fashionable.  The earliest recorded version of the lyrics was in a broadside published by H. Wadsworth in Birmingham between 1814 and ’18.  Later Victorian sources claimed that it was on a now lost Broadside published about 1710.  Variations of the words were reproduced and the form in which they are most usually sung now first appeared in Cecil Sharp’s 1911 collection English Folk-Carols.  Sharp also married the words to the melody we now know.

The holly’s bright red berries were identified with the Blood of Christ and its sharp leaves with the Crown of Thorns and the ivy was said to represent the purity of the Virgin Mary.  Versions of the song were sung during the Advent hanging of the greens in country parishes.  

The custom of decorating homes with greens around the Winter Solstice pre-dates Christianity.  The Druids apparently used the ever-green holly and in Roman Britain greens were hung for Saturnalia.  The Christian references in the song as we now sing it may have been grafted onto earlier pagan or rural versions that orally preserved the old traditions.

The earliest recording of the song was collected by Cecil Sharp from Mrs. Mary Clayton, at Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire and can be found in the British museum.  Sir Henry Walford Davies wrote a popular choral arrangement that is often performed at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols and by choirs around the world.

Annie Lennox's 2010 album included The Holy and the Ivy.

In addition to choral presentations, many artists have recorded versions of the song.  None are lovelier than the rendition of Anne Lennox, the classically trained singer who gained fame as one half of Eurhythmics.  It was included in her 2010 album A Christmas Cornucopia.

For a Good Time Call Saturnalia the Roman Solstice Romp

Saternalia--everyone is having a great time in Italian sculptor Ernesto Biondo's 1900 monument.

Saturnalia was the Roman feast of Saturn, the god of Harvest, a dies festus, a legal holiday when no public business could be conducted.  It was first celebrated on this date—accounting for a couple of changes of calendars—in 496 BC.  At various points during the Republic and Empire festivities extended over seven, three, and finally five days.

For a long time, all I knew about Saturnalia was that when I was in Cheyenne East High School the Latin Club nerds plastered the school with posters reading Io Saturnalia! Which roughly translated to “way to go, big fella!” or something.  They also had a slave auction fundraiser in the lunch room where leering gym teachers bought the comeliest girls and likeliest boys draped in their mothers’ bed sheets.  Kind of creepy, when you think about it.

But as a student of all things religious, I have since learned a thing or two about it.

As gods go Saturn could be a mean dude as depicted in this 1637 portrait by Peter Paul Rubens.

Saturnalia is just one of the many festivals common in Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere around the period of the solstice.  Unlike others, it is a harvest festival, which seems strange until you remember that Rome not only had a pleasant Mediterranean climate but was in a period of historic warming prior the Little Ice Age, the onset of which helped plunge the continent into the Dark Ages.  But that’s another story.

The public ritual of the holiday was observed at the Temple of Saturn, one of the most important buildings in the Forum.  A lectisternium, a ceremonial couch, was set up before the Temple and the statue of Saturn was unbound—The rest of the year he was tied up because of his unfortunate habit of eating people.  He was depicted as a semi-depraved old man caring a harvesting scythe.  Christians would later adapt that image to the Father Time image associated with the celebration of the New Year.   A feast was laid out for the god before the couch so that he wouldn’t get hungry and revert to his nasty cannibalism.

In time the festival incorporated many of the aspects of the Greek festival of Dionysus or Baccus as he was known in Rome.

The public ritual and spectacle aside what made Saturnalia especially popular with Roman plebeians and the large population of slaves were the carnival-like traditions.  Customs from the earlier Greek festival of Dionysus—Bacchus—were incorporated into the celebrations.

 Social norms of the rest of the year were set aside.  Private parties and public revelry were the order of the day.  Restrictions on gambling were loosened and even slaves could try their luck at games, many trying to win enough money to buy their freedom.   Exchanging small gifts—saturnalia et sigillaricia—either made by hand or purchased at special holiday markets was a highlight.  Slaves were exempted from punishment by their masters, in theory at least.

Gambling is an important part of the revelry and slaves were allowed to participate.  For them the stakes could be very high indeed--many hoped to win the small fortunes needed to buy their freedom.  This common dice game was depicted on the walls of a wealthy villa in Pompeii.

The most telling was the turn-about feature of the celebration.  Slaves and common laborers were supposed to be served feasts by their masters and were free to express disrespect.  Sometimes complete role reversal was practiced.

With the rules of public decorum suspended, it was a very good time for wine merchants and public drunkenness was common.  So were sexual hi-jinks, including usually forbidden mixing among classes, master and slave.

After 250 AD Saturnalia was subsumed into the new Festival of Sttol Invictus decreed by Emperor Aurelian in celebrations of a Sun clut.  The return of the sun on December 25 was a high point of the multi day rcelebration.  Although the original Saturnalia ended before that date a confusion about the two Roman holidays led to the popular misconception that the early Church "stole" December 25 for it celebration of the birth of Christ.

Around 250 AD Emperor Aurelian created the new official cult of Sol Invictus, a Sun deity which may have borrowed from the Persian warrior cult of Mithra, which celebrated the return of the Sun on December 25, just after the conclusion of Saturnalia.

This led to the often told tale is that the early Christians, still persecuted, hid their celebration of the Feast of the Nativity during Saturnalia to avoid detection.  The trouble was that the date for that celebration was not yet fixed.  In fact it was often celebrated in the Spring—the lambing season when shepherds would have been in the fields on the lookout for wolves. Even when Christmas was settled on December 25, it was two days after the customary end of Saturnalia but did coincide with the feast of Sol Invictus.  However later Emperors began to suppress the Sun festival with the rise of Christianity, around 390 AD.  The first written reference to a festival of Natalis Invicti was the Philocalian calendar of  354.  But a spring celebration of the nativity persisted more generally for another 100 years by which time the festival of Sol Invictus was banned and reduced to a rural folk celebration.   

The early church did seem to want to mount a feast or festival that competed with the various pagan solstice festivals and to which locals could adapt some of their beloved customs.  At the same time, the Church went through periods of vigorously trying to stamp out vestiges of those same pagan festivals.  For this reason the exchange of gifts was outlawed through much of the early Middle Ages.

But customs did persist.  Although most of the trapping of Christmas were borrowed from the Nordic Yule, Celtic, and Druidic customs, the cultural influence of Rome’s long occupation of Britain can be seen in the carnival like observation of Christmas there up to the Puritan era   which included the same role-reversals, public revelry, and drinking.  The vestiges of it can be seen in Boxing Day, when masters give presents to servants and often serve them meals on the day after Christmas.

Christmas Eve, Chanukah and the Miracles of Light

Tonight by calendar coincidence the First Night of Chanukah and Christmas Eve arrive smack dab at the same time.  This festive night should be the cause of great joy to just about everybody but Chinese restaurant owners who traditionally made a killing serving Jewish households who go out for dinner when all of the goyim are merrily Noëling and the other eateries are closed.

Tonight marks the First Night of Chanukah—25 Kislev in the year 5777 in the Hebrew Calendar. The date on many calendars will say December 8, but don’t let that fool you—by tradition the observance begins a sun down the evening before.  The festival will run for eight nights until January 1—New Year’s Day—or 2 Tevet.  But don’t look for it on these exact dates again anytime soon.  Because the Hebrew Calendar is Lunar, the dates float in relationship to the Gregorian Calendar anywhere from late November to late December.

Christmas, as most people but willful fundamentalists know, is celebrated around the time of the Solstice because the early Church wanted to co-opt the return-of-the-sun festivals long observed and treasured by the pagans—the catchall name for the country people with pre-Christian faiths.  The actual birthday of Jesus, a/k/a the Christ Child, if it was a historical event as recounted in the Gospels, is unknown but thought by some Biblical scholars to likely have been in the Spring when shepherds typically stayed out in the fields with their flocks to protect the new born lambs from wolves.

Elements of the Christmas story, especially the Star leading the Magi to the stable, echoed the symbolism of the return of the light in the pagan traditions.  And Christ/Jesus himself, his tiny head ringed by a halo in icons and paintings, marked the arrival of the Light of God and hope for humanity.

Chanukah represents another miracle of light.  When Judah Maccabee, his brothers, and followers entered Jerusalem after a long and victorious guerilla rebellion against the Greco-Syrian Seleucid Empire ruled by Antiochus IV Epiphanes and his Helanized Jewish allies.  The found the Temple of David profaned by an idol to the god/king   Antiochus and the unclean rituals performed  by his priests.  In the Holy of Holies the seven-branched golden candelabrum called the Menorah, essential to worship and which must be kept lit, was found with only enough  oil to burn for one day.   It would take more than a week to prepare and ritually purify more oil.  The Macabee lit the flame any way at it miraculously burned for eight days, long enough for the new oil to be prepared.

 Because it is not described in the Torah or prescribed in ancient Law like Passover, Yom Kippur, and Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah is officially considered a minor Jewish holiday.  But its cultural importance is far greater even than its religious significance.  Because of the many persecutions of Jews through the centuries and because the ritual could safely be performed in the privacy of the home and away from prying eyes, Chanukah became a celebration of hope for deliverance against oppression as the Maccabees delivered the Temple from the defilers.  Stories about observances even in Nazi extermination camps have added special significance to the holiday for many.

In Europe and the U.S. the rise of Christmas from a holy day to a long season that overwhelms and dominates everything else even as it has become more and more secularized, many Jews ramped up their own observances of Chanukah so their children would not feel left out by the excitement and presents of Christmas.  Many non-Orthodox and secularized Jews, as well as the many dual-faith families, have even adopted or a so called Chanukah bush or even embraced Christmas as the secular holiday of Santa and sales alongside of Chanukah.

I know, it’s complicated.

But we have an undeniable connection between Solstice, Chanukah, Christmas, and other observations this time of year around the world.  I call them all together the Festivals of Light and several years ago celebrated them all in a poem which is included in my collection, We Build Temples in the Heart published in 2004 by Skinner House Books of Boston.   It is one of two of my seasonal poems that is fairly widely used in Unitarian Universalist services this time of year.

Miracle of Light

When the sky has swallowed the sun,

     left us in icy darkness

     save the brief gray memory of light

     escaping from its stifled yawn.

When hope and heat and harvest

     have been banished into night

     and dread, despair and death

     grip our forlorn hearts—

          Then, just then a light returns.

Druidic fires tor to hillock

     call again the sun

     and shyly does it come once more.

The awful gloom of tyranny

     is banished by a zealous few

     so that a Temple drop of Macabean oil

     may burn a mystic week.

Some account a sudden brilliant star,

     a nova in Judean skies

     to mark a coming messenger

     of hope and faith and love.

And though the gloom may crowd us still

     the light may lift our hearts

     until this spinning, turning ball

     we ride around the sun.

          brings us again to Spring,

—Patrick  Murfin