--- Title: The Communist origins of Christmas Date: 24/12/2020 Category: History Tags: hollydays primitive-communism URL: https://marxismo.school/communia/en/the-communist-origins-of-christmas --- ![](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/Horreos-y-trabajo-en-el-campo-tripilia-800x450-1.jpeg) storage houses and farming in the Trypillia-Cucuteni culture (civilization of primitive communism in Eastern Europe). The association established long ago by archaeologists and anthropologists between agricultural development and class society made people think of the [first celebrations of the winter solstice](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2017/11-12/history-europe-megaliths-solstice/) as an early sign of the fracture of society in antagonistic classes. However, findings over the last two decades have completely changed our perspective on [Primitive Communism and its relationship to urbanization and agriculture](https://en.communia.blog/dictionary/primitive-communism/). Today we know that both the systematic cultivation of land and livestock and the emergence of urbanization took place in a framework that was still communitarian. And in Ukraine there is archaeological evidence that [the great cities of primitive communism also hosted their own solstice celebrations](https://www.amazon.es/Prehistoric-Ukraine-Hunters-Farmers-English-ebook/dp/B08M3TSMKQ). As almost always, classical mythology already gave us some clues. We usually associate the celebrations of the winter solstice in Rome to the _Saturnalia_ or Saturn festival. Obviously, they were dedicated to this agricultural god who is also a patriarchal symbol -as is the whole of the hierarchical pantheon- and therefore coupled with the fracture of the human community into classes. But in reality, the Saturnalia was the evolution of the Greek _[Brumalia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumalia)_, related to the Greek _[Lenaia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenaia)_, which highlighted Liber (later turned into Bacchus, the Greek Dionysus, a god that still preserved a strong [pre-patriarchal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bacchae) content) and Cronus, the god of time who is also the guardian of [primitive communism]( https://en.communia.blog/dictionary/primitive-communism/). This nostalgia for the _Golden Age_, promise of an always longed-for return to the human community, remained in the Saturnalia under the form of a true and carnivalesque confusion of classes: domestic slaves theatrically imitated their masters and went out to party dressed in their clothes; priests recommended freeing slaves during those days for _being the most propitious ones_, etc. The first great mutation of the feast is therefore a great social _catharsis_. The ruling class used the celebrations to release social tensions without questioning the prevailing relations. ![](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/fiesta-de-los-locos-brueghel-800x567.jpg) Feast of Fools according to an engraving of Pieter Brueghel the Elder It is often said that the imposition of Christianity eliminated Saturnalia and turned it into the celebration of Christian Christmas. In reality, it is a little more complicated. The idea of a _total and profoundly Christian_ Europe before the 12th century is only half true. The Dominicans, the _order of the preachers_, were founded in Toulouse during the 13th century not only to fight the bases of the Cathar heresy in the North of the Pyrenees, but also to eliminate cults and _pagan_ rites (that is, peasant rites, with the word stemming from _pagus_ in Latin, the countryside) in the whole Cantabrian region. The condemnations of _pagan_ rituals during the solstice are constant in all the medieval ecclesiastical councils, especially those in the Iberian Peninsula. But those solstice rituals, of Celtic-Roman origin for the most part, were far from the _Saturnalia_ in their more subversive aspects, they were in fact atavisms. The _saturnal_ continuity will not be resumed from a ritual continuity, but because of the reappearance of the need for _catharsis_. It was the low clergy themselves who _reinvented_ Saturnalia as the _[Feast of Fools](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%AAte_des_Fous)_ from the 14th century. These celebrations are actually post-solstitial: they were held from December 26 to 30... that is, in the gap between the great Catholic celebration and the celebration that the commercial bourgeoisie had chosen as the beginning of its accounting year, Jesus' circumcision, on January 1. Symbolically inserted between the two main classes in struggle at that time, they were the most significant celebrations of feudal decadence, the product and escape valve for social tensions that seemed unbearable. Not by chance did the myth of the Golden Age reappear under new forms at the same time: the Occitan _Land of Cockaigne_ and its Germanic equivalents, and, after the conquest of Peru, in the imaginary _Jauja_ of the the Iberian peninsula's poor and _needy_. ## What does a feast of abundance mean in a class society? ![](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/tiempo-de-armonia-de-signac-1893-800x599.jpg) "Time of Harmony" by Signac, painted between 1893 and 1895, closes the historical cycle of "Golden Age" representations by placing abundance and community for the first time in the here and now instead of in the future or in a non-place (utopia). All along this journey through the solstice festivities under class societies, what we see is a tension that is multiplied in times of decadence. On the one hand the _unnameable_ and _unacceptable_: the possibility of an abundant and classless society, whose real existence in the past denies the ruling classes as necessary, denies them as _true creators of wealth_ and _protectors of the social whole_. On the other hand, the unbearability of the very conditions of exploitation, the need to overcome the social conditions, to enjoy even punctually the _sensation_ of abundance and fraternity. The tension is resolved in the only way satisfactory to the ruling classes... and the other exploiting classes who hope to become so: as a joke, as a temporarily allowed _excess_, in which the exploited classes can represent their aspirations only under a clownish form... without ceasing to question themselves for a single instant, owing even that moment of liberation to their exploiters. There still remained a few centuries before the [bourgeoisie turned Christmas into a symbol of everything' s commodification](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/papa-noel-es-la-burguesia), the [Russian revolution moved the festivities to January 1st](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/los-revolucionarios-la-navidad-y-su-regreso-reaccionario) and the [stalinist counter-revolution set the Christmas star against the red star of internationalism](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/una-estrella-roja-sobre-el-arbol-de-navidad)... but Christmas was already a battlefield.