Two young women, lean as greyhounds and showing significantly more fatless flesh than you’d think either possible or comfortable, stand knee-deep in the surf. Their tanned bodies glow in the buttery morning light. Nearby, also catching the sun, a series of municipal banners backgrounded with giant, abstract snowflakes exhort us to “enjoy!”. Somehow, the imperative sounds more like a military command than an adoration of new life. The women, though, glued to their phones, are oblivious. They don’t swim. Duh, obvs. Rather, they frolic briefly, filming themselves in simulated fun. Then, still screen-stuck, they leave.
What fascinates me about this twenty-first-century version of the Aussie Christmas is not the current epidemic of Instagram-induced narcissism, perilous as that is. It’s not the commercialization of Christmas, nor even the colonial ironies of snowflakes in summer. All those I take as given. What piques my curiosity on this hot December morning is the aesthetic of Christmas; why we have sucked it so dry of resonance or meaning and what that says about the environment we make for ourselves.
After all, aesthetics are not just about how things look. They’re about the meaning of how things look: about what we understand the visuals to mean, what enrichment that meaning deliver to our souls and psyches. Mostly, it seems from our cities as much as our Christmas cards, less and less.
A front-door wreath is still kind of acceptable, with its implied refuge from the frozen wastes. But even Santa – Saint Nick – has largely vanished from our Christmas symbology (old white guys favouring kiddies with sweets being a lot less acceptable than was once the case). Christmas has become a mere holiday, a “festive season” vaguely liveried in the red and green of a plant that barely grows in our hemisphere, would fruit at diametrically the wrong time, and anyway has zero to do with Messianic birth or redemption.
Nor is it just Christmas that we’ve shrunk in this way. Easter and Halloween are similarly eviscerated, leaving a sugary trail of eggs and pumpkins, fake spider webs and plastic skeleton brides. I wonder why we do this to ourselves – it’s almost as though we want our world to be as dull as humanly possible. Meaning? Us? Certainly not!
A curious aspect of this is that we’re less inclined to de-nature the festivals and celebrations of non-Christian religions in the same way. Diwali, Chanukah, Chinese New Year and Ramadan are more vivid in their civic celebration and more likely to be studied by schoolchildren or explained on the ABC website.
There’s a sadness here that is partly a result of the perfunctory quality of our celebrations – the lifeless smattering of tinsel and baubles with which we garnish neighbourhoods and cities at this time. The greater loss, though, is of opportunity. Because behind the Christian rituals of Christmas, Easter and Halloween are deeper pagan festivals that, fully grasped, would lead us into precisely the deep connection with nature that, at this point in history, we crave.
Halloween is in some ways the most surprising of the three, since most of us are barely aware that it ever had spiritual significance. The first clue is in the spelling, with the apostrophe in “Hallowe’en” signalling a lost “v.” In Christian tradition, dating from the fourth century, Allhallowtide was a three-day period that began on the evening of 31 October (Hallow Eve or Hallowe’en), proceeded through All Saints’ Day (when the saints and martyrs, known and unknown, were celebrated in a Hallowmass), and ended on 2 November with All Souls’ Day.
In places like Mexico and Sicily, All Souls’ Day is celebrated as the Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos or Festa dei Morti), when the souls of the dead return to earth. Scholars are divided on whether this wonderfully ghoulish tradition – as brilliantly depicted in the grave-tending scene that opens Almodóvar’s Volver (2006) and in the opening parade of the 2015 Bond film Spectre – has pre-Hispanic Native American origins.
But Hallowe’en itself, the first evening of the three-day festival, derives from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-win), a three-day Druidic fire festival set between the winter solstice and the autumn equinox. Elves, fairies and ghouls, as well as the souls of the departed, were expected to visit. To feed these visitors, animal sacrifices were made and the bones disposed of in “bone-fires” or bonfires.
Easter, similarly, was a Celtic festival named for the Saxon fertility goddess Eostre; thus says the Venerable Bede (c. 673–735 AD). On the first full moon after the spring equinox, Easter celebrated the springing of new life from long-dormant nature, as symbolized by the egg and memorialized in the Latin word oestrus. The cross on the hot-cross bun conflates the Roman cross on which Jesus died with the pre-Christian Celtic cross, symbolizing the equality of the four seasons. The Easter bunny derives from the Irish hare, an animal revered in ancient Celtic tradition as having supernatural powers and which people were forbidden to eat.
Gradually, too, this spring festival commingled with the Hebrew Passover, which celebrated the exodus of the enslaved people from Egypt and created the footprint that became Easter. The sacrificial lamb became the murdered Jesus; paschal became passion and newborn animals became the resurrected Christ.
Christmas is a similar symbolic agglomeration. It brings together the ancient Viking solstice tradition of Yule with two Roman traditions: the decadent feast of Saturnalia and the later tradition of Dies Solis Invicti Nati (the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus) on 25 December.
Often portrayed riding a racing chariot pulled by four horses, Sol Invictus was originally a Persian god. His birth celebration became linked with that of another pre-Zoroastrian Persian god: Mithra, the god of light, also born on 25 December. Early Christian writers made much of the play between the birth of the sun and the birth of the son, but all traditions involved the invocation of fire – the burning of the Yule log, the rising of the new sun, the birth of new light – to ward off darkness and bring hope.
Christian believers may resist these pagan underpinnings. To my mind, though, this nature-groundedness – in which the swinging thurible becomes a tool of some ancient smoking ceremony and the wooden cross represents the tree of knowledge – only deepens the resonance of Christian ritual.
What does this have to do with architecture? With city-making?
For a start, it suggests that Jung was right. That there is some deep dreaming, some collective unconscious that ancient and indigenous cultures have used to create meaning that links us umbilically to nature and the planet, and which we forsake at our peril.
We modern humans tend to regard ourselves as automatons, as if fear and dependency were beneath us now and spiritual tradition the province of children. And it is this denial of self-knowledge that, after a century, has so impoverished our towns and cities, not to mention contributed to planetary destruction. Supinely, we accept that almost everything in our lives, from transport to habitat, is shaped not by our heartfelt values but by men-armed-with-numbers who prioritize efficiency and dollars above all else.
It needn’t be this way. There’s no reason why our streets, neighbourhoods, parks and playgrounds cannot resonate with us all, engaging each in the creation of shared civic meaning and encouraging each to blossom. We expect this kind of numinous depth from exotic and ancient cities. Why demand less from our own?
