All humans engage in rites.
Google’s online dictionary gives three definitions of rite, which are, slightly paraphrased: a religious or other solemn ceremony or act; the formal body of liturgy of a particular denomination; or a social custom or practice. The example offered for the last is, significantly, “the family Christmas rite”.
Even those professing no religion engage in social rites. Russia under Stalin had ritual self-denunciation. Germany under the Nazis had “Heil Hitler.”
We seem uncomfortable with rites, perhaps because of the last two unfortunate examples, perhaps because of the general Western disdain for formal religion, perhaps because of unfortunate phrases like “compulsive-obsessive ritual” or “ritual sacrifice”. We prefer to speak of traditions or habits. Traditions are rites that we are comfortable talking about with our neighbors, because “family traditions” has the comfortable feel of something focused on ourselves that is not terribly important and can be discarded any time. Because ours is a day in which family can be discarded at any time. Habits are kind of okay, because there can be good habits, like brushing your teeth after every meal. Traditions and habits are reassuringly self-centered and optional, whereas rites sensu stricto are centered Elsewhere and are not really optional.
Christmas blurs the distinction between rite, habit, and tradition. For Catholics celebrating Midnight Mass, or the the significant numbers of Americans who attend church only on Christmas and Easter, the ritual aspect is obvious. Christmas is also laden with what we prefer to call tradition. Most Americans put up at least some Christmas decorations, including a Christmas tree and often lighting or other decorations outside the home. There are traditional foods associated with Christmas, such as the delightful New Mexican feast dish, posole, or Christmas pudding, or the much-despised fruitcake, the butt of Christmas humor that has managed to completely miss the point. There is the exchanging of gifts, the focus of Christmas for children young and old. (Children really ought to grow up at some point.)
And if Christmas decorations are part of our Christmas ritual, then taking down the Christmas decorations must perforce be a Christmas ritual as well.
I took down ours yesterday. The Christmas tree (artificial; good live trees are increasingly hard to come by) and its decorations were disassembled and stowed. Likewise the strings of lights from the house eaves. Likewise the wire frame lighted polar bears and animated deer and penguin and two nativity scenes. Yes, two; I’m not quite sure how that happened. The better one, crudely constructed of actual wood with plaster figurines kneeling in actual hay, sits close to the front door. The modernesque plastic lit one goes out on the street for vulgar enjoyment.
The ritual of putting away the ornaments is, in its way, a seasonal milestone as important as putting them up in the first place. The celebration is over. Now get on with winter. And that calls to mind a significant thing about Christmas.
We do not actually know when Christ was born. We are not even sure of the year, though 4 BC seems a good guess. The Gospels do not clearly spell out the season. The header to D&C 20 has been interpreted as a revealed date of 6 April, but this is a stretch: The introductory verse was added by Oliver Cowdery as scribe, not Joseph Smith as revelator, to what is a quasi-legal document of incorporation. I know at least one reputable Latter-day Saint Christians scholar who believes early winter is perfectly plausible, and others who put it in early spring. Some claim that the shepherds were with the flocks by night only because it was lambing season, of which I am skeptical. I do not think a first century shepherd in Palestine would leave his flocks unattended at any time of year except under unusual circumstances: To look for a lost lamb, to find the Lamb.
Instead, Christmas is a syncretism of winter solstice rites into Christianity. Which I am fine with: The metaphor of spoiling the Egyptians works for me. And this one is unusually easy to Christianize.
Due to meteorological lag, the worst of winter comes after the sun has reached its low point. The celebration comes within days of the sun beginning its return, with the promise of spring, but then we still have to face the cold. We receive the reassurance of better things before they are at their worst. Once the celebration is over, we pack our ornaments and brace for the cold. Our rite of spring ushers in winter.
This is a type of the restored Church. We have been given the reassurance that the Son, too, shall return. Indeed, His return is already set in motion. But, meanwhile, we must brace ourselves for the Wintertime of the Just. In a day of wickedness in places high and low, we look to the One whose Throne is above all thrones.
