tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/christmas-2017-46123/articles
Christmas 2017 – The Conversation
2017-12-21T19:08:49Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/88381
2017-12-21T19:08:49Z
2017-12-21T19:08:49Z
Friday essay: dreaming of a ‘white Christmas’ on the Aboriginal missions
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198447/original/file-20171211-27683-z04aq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C14%2C739%2C420&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Christmas Dinner, Mt Margaret Mission 1933</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of Western Australia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This story contains images of people who are deceased.</em></p>
<p>Aboriginal missions, which existed across Australia until the 1970s, are notorious for their austerity. Aboriginal people lived on meagre rations - flour, sugar, tea and tobacco - and later, token wages. At some missions, schoolgirls wore hessian sacks as clothes or skirts made from old bags.</p>
<p>Christmas, however, was a joyful time on them. Old people remember Christmas for food, gifts and carols. But the celebration had a sinister edge. For years, missionaries hoped the joy of Christmas would replace Aboriginal traditions. But Christmas actually became an opportunity for creative cross-cultural engagement, with Aboriginal people adopting its traditions and making them their own. </p>
<p>The food was a respite from the usual diet of damper, rice or stew. On the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory, missionaries would shoot a bullock, and the old women remember feasting on beef and mangoes on the beach. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198454/original/file-20171211-27714-b5q6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198454/original/file-20171211-27714-b5q6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198454/original/file-20171211-27714-b5q6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198454/original/file-20171211-27714-b5q6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198454/original/file-20171211-27714-b5q6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198454/original/file-20171211-27714-b5q6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198454/original/file-20171211-27714-b5q6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198454/original/file-20171211-27714-b5q6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Oenpelli Mission (Gunbalanya) Christmas, 1928.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archives of Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Missionaries used food to attract people to church. Christmas might be the only day of the year that it was distributed to everyone. Cake was a favourite. On Christmas Day at Gunbalanya in western Arnhem Land in 1940 the superintendent called it “the happiest we’ve experienced here. Ten huge cakes for Natives – no complaints – 106 at service” (suggesting that church attendance was linked to cake quantity). </p>
<p>For elders on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria, turtle-egg cake was a highlight of Christmas in the 1940s. As Jabani Lalara recalled:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We used to have a lovely Christmas … In front of the church, that’s where they used to put the Christmas tree and that’s where we used to get a present. Especially like cake, used to make from turtle egg. I love that cake. True. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Gifts were another drawcard. On Christmas 1899, the Bloomfield River Mission in far-north Queesland was said to be “overflowing” because Aboriginal people “heard there would be a distribution of gifts”. These included prized items such as handkerchiefs, pipes and knives. At some missions, Santa (often the superintendent) distributed gifts. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198450/original/file-20171211-27708-1w0bya0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198450/original/file-20171211-27708-1w0bya0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198450/original/file-20171211-27708-1w0bya0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198450/original/file-20171211-27708-1w0bya0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198450/original/file-20171211-27708-1w0bya0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198450/original/file-20171211-27708-1w0bya0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198450/original/file-20171211-27708-1w0bya0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198450/original/file-20171211-27708-1w0bya0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Father Christmas arriving at Mt Margaret Mission in a rickshaw, 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of Western Australia</span></span>
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<p>However looking back, old people have mixed feelings about the gifts. As much as they loved them at the time, they discovered their treasures were only toys that white children had rejected. As one person told me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We didn’t have much in them days, it was tough, but we were happy. We were happy with those secondhand toys at Christmas from the Salvation Army. We didn’t know they were secondhand toys at the time. I found out in my later years. </p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198453/original/file-20171211-27677-1sn8btm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198453/original/file-20171211-27677-1sn8btm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198453/original/file-20171211-27677-1sn8btm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198453/original/file-20171211-27677-1sn8btm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198453/original/file-20171211-27677-1sn8btm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198453/original/file-20171211-27677-1sn8btm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198453/original/file-20171211-27677-1sn8btm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198453/original/file-20171211-27677-1sn8btm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Christmas rally church service, Fitzroy Crossing Mission, 1954.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of Western Australia</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Missionaries and Aboriginal people alike loved carols; they were an opportunity for shared enjoyment. Tiwi women look back fondly on their time singing with nuns. Said one woman:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sister Marie Alfonso, she used to play organ and all of us girls used to sing in Latin, but we still remember… Every Christmas [the old women] sing really good. They all can remember that Latin. It’s really nice. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>There were also nativity plays, with Aboriginal children proudly performing for their communities. Said another:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When there was Christmas or even Easter Day there was a role-play… On Christmas Day I used to read. Three of them was the Wise Men and the other one was Mary and the other young boy was Jesus. </p>
</blockquote>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christmas at Nepabunna, C.P. Mountford, 1937.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of South Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Behind the lightheartedness came an agenda. As one priest commented, Christmas was to be a “magnet” to draw people into missions. Ultimately, missionaries hoped the celebration of Jesus’s birth would prove more attractive than Aboriginal people’s own ceremonies. </p>
<p>For those who would not settle on missions, Christmas was used against them. At Yarrabah in Queensland the “unconverted heathens” were invited to join the festivities, but their exclusion was symbolised by them walking at the back of processions, sitting at the back of the church and being the last to be served their meal. </p>
<h2>Aboriginal Christmas</h2>
<p>In missionaries’ eagerness to use Christmas to spread Christianity, they started to use Aboriginal languages (with Aboriginal co-translators). At Ngukurr in southern Arnhem Land and Gunbalanya, the first church services in Aboriginal languages were Christmas services (in 1921 and 1936). </p>
<p>Aboriginal people loved carols, so these were the first songs translated. On the 1947 release of the Pitjantjatjara Hymnal, Christmas carols were the most popular (The First Noel sung in parts being the favourite). On Groote Eylandt, translation began with Christmas carols, nativity plays and Christmas readings in the 1950s. At Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island in Arnhem Land, the annual Christmas Drama was in Yolngu Matha from 1960. </p>
<p>Translation was meant to make missionary Christianity more attractive, but it opened the way for more profound cultural experimentation. Aboriginal people infused Christmas with their own traditions. On the Tiwi Islands, in 1962 there was a “Corrobboree Style” nativity on the mission told through traditional Tiwi dance. Dance traditions missionaries had previously called “pagan” were now used by Tiwi people to share the Christian celebration.</p>
<p>At Warruwi on the Goulburn Islands in western Arnhem Land, Maung people began “Christmas and Easter Ceremonies” from the 1960s, blending ceremonial styles with Western musical traditions as well as their own music and dance. At Wadeye, in the Northern Territory, “Church Lirrga” (“Liturgy Songs”) include Christmas music, sung in Marri Ngarr with didjeridu. The Church Lirrga share the melodies of other Marri Ngarr songs that tell of Dreamings on the Moyle River.</p>
<p>Many who embraced Christianity sought to express their spirituality without missionary control. At Milingimbi in the NT, Yolngu people developed a Christmas ceremony with clap sticks and dijeridu outside the mission and free of missionary interference. </p>
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<span class="caption">Mt Margaret Mission Christmas, 1933.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of Western Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At Ernabella Mission in South Australia in 1971, people began singing the Christmas story to ancient melodies, with the permission of their songmen. Senior Anangu women at Mimili, SA, later sang the Pitjantjatjara gospel to their witchetty grub tune, blending Christmas with their Dreamings and songlines. </p>
<p>Christmas was woven into community life. Just as introduced animals found their way into Aboriginal songs and stories, Christmas became part of the seasons and landscape, as Therese Bourke explained at Pirlangimpi on the Tiwi Islands: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>They used to have donkeys [here] and the donkeys used to come round in December. And my mother’s mob used to say, “they’re coming around because it’s Christmas and Jesus rode on the back of one.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The missions transformed into “communities” under a policy framework of self-determination in the 1970s, although missionaries themselves often remained active in the communities for decades. Meanwhile, many Aboriginal people have mixed memories of the missions - fondness for some aspects, anger at others - including Christmas.</p>
<p>But regardless of the missionaries, Christmas became an Aboriginal celebration in its own right. Some missionaries even came to appreciate Aboriginal ways of celebrating Christmas in line with their Dreamings. Though missionaries had wanted to replace Aboriginal spirituality with a “white Christmas”, it became a season of deeper meetings of cultures.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88381/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Rademaker received funding from the Australian Research Theology Foundation.</span></em></p>
Aboriginal missions were notorious for their austerity, but Christmas was a brief time of joy. While celebrations had a sinister assimilationist edge, Aboriginal people often adopted traditions into their own culture.
Laura Rademaker, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Modern History, Australian Catholic University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/89444
2017-12-21T19:08:44Z
2017-12-21T19:08:44Z
What history really tells us about the birth of Jesus
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200087/original/file-20171220-4973-q45rx1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The nativity scenes celebrated each Christmas bear little resemblance to history. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/castorgirl/8312668792/">skepticalview/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>I might be about to ruin your Christmas. Sorry. But the reality is those nativity plays in which your adorable children wear tinsel and angel wings bear little resemblance to what actually happened. </p>
<p>Neither does your average Christmas card featuring a peaceful nativity scene. These are traditions, compilations of different accounts that reflect a later Christian piety. So what really happened at that so-called “first Christmas”?</p>
<p>Firstly, the actual birth day of Jesus was not December 25. The date we celebrate was adopted by the Christian church as the birthday of Christ in the fourth century. Prior to this period, different Christians celebrated Christmas on different dates. </p>
<p>Contrary to popular belief that Christians simply adapted a pagan festival, <a href="https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/new-testament/how-december-25-became-christmas/">historian Andrew McGowan</a> argues the date had more to do with Jesus’s crucifixion in the minds of ancient theologians. For them, linking Jesus’s conception with his death nine months prior to December 25 was important for underscoring salvation.</p>
<h2>The inn</h2>
<p>Only two of the four gospels in the Bible discuss Jesus’s birth. Luke recounts the story of the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, the couple’s journey to Bethlehem because of a census and the visit of the shepherds. It features Mary’s famous song of praise (Magnificat), her visit to her cousin Elizabeth, her own reflection on the events, lots of angels and the famous inn with no room.</p>
<p>The matter of the inn with “no room” is one of the most historically misunderstood aspects of the Christmas story. ACU scholar <a href="http://www.hypotyposeis.org/papers/Carlson%202010%20NTS.pdf">Stephen Carlson</a> writes that the word “kataluma” (often translated “inn”) refers to guest quarters. Most likely, Joseph and Mary stayed with family but the guest room was too small for childbirth and hence Mary gave birth in the main room of the house where animal mangers could also be found. </p>
<p>Hence <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+2%3A7">Luke 2:7</a> could be translated “she gave birth to her firstborn son, she swaddled him and laid him in the feeding trough because there was no space for them in their guest room.”</p>
<h2>The wise men</h2>
<p>Matthew’s gospel tells a similar story about Mary’s pregnancy but from a different perspective. This time, the angel appears to Joseph to tell him that his fiancée Mary is pregnant but he must still marry her because it is part of God’s plan.</p>
<p>Where Luke has shepherds visit the baby, a symbol of Jesus’s importance for ordinary folk, Matthew has magi (wise men) from the east bring Jesus royal gifts. There were probably not three magi and they were not kings. In fact, there is no mention of the magi’s number, there could have been two or 20 of them. The tradition of three comes from the mention of three gifts – gold, frankincense, and myrrh. </p>
<p>Notably, the magi visit Jesus in a house (not an inn or stable) and their visit is as late as two years after the birth. <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+2:16">Matthew 2:16</a> records King Herod’s orders to kill baby boys up to the age of two based on the report about Jesus’s age from the magi. This delay is why most Christian churches celebrate the visit of the magi on “Epiphany” or January 6.</p>
<p>Notably absent from these biblical accounts is Mary riding a donkey and <a href="https://theconversation.com/an-ox-an-ass-a-dragon-sorry-there-were-no-animals-in-the-bibles-nativity-scene-89202">animals gathered</a> around the baby Jesus. Animals begin to appear in nativity art in the fourth century AD, possibly because biblical commentators at the time used Isaiah 3 as part of their anti-Jewish polemic to claim that animals understood the significance of Jesus in a way that Jews did not.</p>
<p>When Christians today gather around a crib or set up a nativity scene in their homes they continue a tradition that began in the 12th century with <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-first-nativity-scene-was-created-in-1223-161485505/">Francis of Assisi</a>. He brought a crib and animals into church so that everyone worshipping could feel part of the story. Thus a popular pietistic tradition was born. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aujA6VhEdA">Later art</a> showing the adoration of the baby Jesus reflects a similar devotional spirituality.</p>
<h2>A radical Christmas</h2>
<p>If we pare back the story to its biblical and historical core - removing the stable, the animals, the cherub-like angels, and the inn - with what are we left?</p>
<p>The Jesus of history was a child of a Jewish family living under a foreign regime. He was born into an extended family living away from home and his family fled from a king who sought to kill him because he posed a political threat.</p>
<p>The Jesus story, in its historical context, is one of human terror and divine mercy, of human abuse and divine love. It is a story that claims God became human in the form of one who is vulnerable, poor and displaced in order to unveil the injustice of tyrannical power.</p>
<p>While there is nothing wrong with the devotional piety of Christian tradition, a white-washed nativity scene risks missing the most radical aspects of the Christmas story. The Jesus described in the Bible had more in common with the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/the-faces-of-the-babies-australia-wants-to-send-back-to-hell-on-nauru-20160201-gmirsb.html">children of refugees born on Nauru</a> than the majority of Australian churchgoers. He too was a brown-skinned baby whose Middle-Eastern family was displaced due to terror and political turmoil.</p>
<p>Christmas, in the Christian tradition, is a celebration of God becoming human as a gift of love. To enjoy adorable, albeit a-historical, nativity plays and all the other wonders of the season is one way of delighting in this gift. </p>
<p>But if we nostalgically focus on one baby whilst ignoring the numerous babies who suffer around the world due to politics, religion and poverty, we miss the entire point of the Christmas story.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89444/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robyn J. Whitaker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The inn, the shepherds, angels and animals: pretty much everything we think we know about the Christmas story is historically wrong.
Robyn J. Whitaker, Bromby Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies, Trinity College, University of Divinity
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/89464
2017-12-21T14:29:06Z
2017-12-21T14:29:06Z
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christmas letters to his children bring echoes of Middle-earth to the North Pole
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200388/original/file-20171221-15874-mm9y6e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">First letter and illustration from Father Christmas, 1920.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© The Tolkien Estate Ltd, 1976.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Like parents the world over, J.R.R. Tolkien dedicated considerable time and effort to making Christmas a joyful time for his young children. Yet this was a man whose rich imagination brought to life an <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/fantasy-worlds-invention-restraint/">entire world</a> with thousands of years of legendary history; described different orders of creatures, wars and battles; even invented languages. So inevitably, his family traditions were something rather special. </p>
<p>Every year, from 1920 to 1942, the Tolkien children – first John, and later Michael, Christopher and Priscilla – would receive a letter from Father Christmas. It would be written in his spidery hand (he would, after all, be a very old man) and illustrated with funny scenes from life in the North Pole. In 2018, <a href="http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/2017/dec-20">the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford</a> will exhibit the letters, alongside other manuscripts, artwork, maps, letters and artefacts from Tolkien collections around the world.</p>
<h2>The American influence</h2>
<p>Tolkien was not the first author to produce letters from Father Christmas for his children. Mark Twain famously <a href="http://www.twainquotes.com/santaclaus.html">wrote a letter</a> from “Santa Claus” to his elder daughter, Susie Clemens. And although Tolkien retained the English name for his protagonist, there was a lot of popular American-derived folklore associated with his Father Christmas. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200389/original/file-20171221-15915-og2s9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200389/original/file-20171221-15915-og2s9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200389/original/file-20171221-15915-og2s9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200389/original/file-20171221-15915-og2s9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200389/original/file-20171221-15915-og2s9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200389/original/file-20171221-15915-og2s9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=990&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200389/original/file-20171221-15915-og2s9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=990&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200389/original/file-20171221-15915-og2s9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=990&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The aurora borealis, 1926: ‘Isn’t the North Polar Bear silly? … [he] turned on all the Northern Lights for two years in one go. You have never heard or seen anything like it. I have tried to draw a picture of it: but I am too shaky to do it properly and you can’t paint fizzing light can you?’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© The Tolkien Estate Ltd, 1976.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The idea of Santa Claus dressed in red and white, and riding a sleigh drawn by reindeer every Christmas Eve delivering presents to children, comes from perhaps the best-known poem in the English language: <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43171/a-visit-from-st-nicholas">The Night Before Christmas</a>. Written either by Clement Moore or Henry Livingston (the authorship <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/26719/mystery-behind-worlds-most-famous-christmas-poem">is contested</a>) in the 19th century, this classic American poem established Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, as we know him today. </p>
<p>The imagery of Santa Claus was enhanced by German-American illustrator <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Nast">Thomas Nast</a>, who provided Santa with elf helpers and a toy workshop, and portrayed him living in the North Pole and in regular receipt of children’s letters. </p>
<p>Tolkien borrows freely from all of this American pop culture which, by the end of the 19th century, had migrated to Britain and was immensely popular. But he also takes his Father Christmas in different directions, gravitating towards his own mythology of Middle-earth, which was developing in parallel. </p>
<h2>Old friends, and new</h2>
<p>So of course we get elves in Tolkien’s North Pole. But despite the fact that these are diminutive, jolly elves with pointed hats (a far cry from those of The Lord of the Rings) they belong to different kindreds: Snow Elves, Red Elves or Gnomes, Green Elves – not unlike the High Elves, Silvan Elves and others in The Lord of the Rings. </p>
<p>Some of the Christmas elves were fierce warriors, giving the evil goblins a run for their money in battle. Indeed, the goblins themselves are precursors of the Goblins in The Hobbit, and later the Orcs. They live underground, they are keen on tunnelling, and they are a perennial threat to Christmas.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200386/original/file-20171221-15915-1989kib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200386/original/file-20171221-15915-1989kib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200386/original/file-20171221-15915-1989kib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200386/original/file-20171221-15915-1989kib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200386/original/file-20171221-15915-1989kib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200386/original/file-20171221-15915-1989kib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200386/original/file-20171221-15915-1989kib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200386/original/file-20171221-15915-1989kib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christmas, 1932: ‘The caves are wonderful. I knew they were there, but not how many or how big they were. Of course the goblins went off into the deepest holes and corners, and we soon found Polar Bear. He was getting quite long and thin with hunger, as he had been in the caves about a fortnight … At the top of my ‘Christmas card’ is a picture, imaginary, but more or less as it really is, of me arriving over Oxford. Your house is just about where the three little black points stick up out of the shadow at the right.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© The Tolkien Estate Ltd, 1976</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the same time, Tolkien expands the Christmas mythology considerably. Father Christmas’s best friend (and regular rascal) is the North Polar Bear, whose funny antics are the focus of the early letters. Later on, his nephews, Paksu and Valkotukka (Finnish for “fat” and “white hair” respectively) provide further comic relief, and showcase Tolkien’s love for the language which influenced one of his own invented languages, Quenya, spoken by the Elves of Middle-earth. </p>
<p>A number of “aetiological” myths are also added: motifs that “explain” away things that happen in the real world of Tolkien’s children. So broken chocolates can be explained by the Polar Bear squishing them, and a bright light in the night sky is surely a glimpse of the gigantic Christmas tree in the North Pole. </p>
<h2>Innocence lost</h2>
<p>More details and innovations make this frozen world wonderful and intriguing. Father Christmas apparently has a tap in his cellar that “turns on” the Aurora Borealis; there is cave art by primeval men in the goblin caves, including depictions of mammoths and reindeer; and Snow-boys (the sons of Snow-men who live in the vicinity) get invites to parties in Father Christmas’s house.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200377/original/file-20171221-17748-1y3167q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200377/original/file-20171221-17748-1y3167q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200377/original/file-20171221-17748-1y3167q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200377/original/file-20171221-17748-1y3167q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200377/original/file-20171221-17748-1y3167q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200377/original/file-20171221-17748-1y3167q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200377/original/file-20171221-17748-1y3167q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cave drawings, 1932: ‘Polar Bear himself was astonished when I brought light; for the most remarkable thing is that the walls of these caves are all covered with pictures, cut into the rock or painted on in red and brown and black. Some of them are very good (mostly of animals), and some are queer and some bad; and there are many strange marks, signs and scribbles, some of which have a nasty look.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© The Tolkien Estate Ltd, 1976</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even more Tolkienian, we also get invented languages and alphabets. An elf called Ilbereth, who becomes Father Christmas’s secretary, sends the children a Merry Christmas message in elvish script, which is ostensibly a variation of Tolkien’s tengwar writing system, the same seen on the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. And the Polar Bear gives us a sentence in “Arctic” (a version of Quenya) and introduces us to an alphabet he has devised based on goblin symbols.</p>
<p>The Father Christmas letters were published after Tolkien’s death in 1973, and their lasting popularity is, I would argue, due to the extended Christmas saga they create and the funny and moving father’s voice that comes through each of them. </p>
<p>The poignant “last letter”, when Father Christmas waves goodbye to children who are now “too old” to hang their stocking anymore, while the Second World War is raging, marks the end of innocence in more than one way. But the myth of Father Christmas lives on, and continues to be a favourite festive read of children all over the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89464/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dimitra Fimi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote letters to his children from Father Christmas every year for 23 years. And they’re filled with elves, goblins and playful polar bears.
Dimitra Fimi, Senior Lecturer in English, Cardiff Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/83506
2017-12-21T00:38:28Z
2017-12-21T00:38:28Z
Religion may alter your psychology, even if you’re a non-believer
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199791/original/file-20171218-27544-1j39w42.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Many Australians celebrate Christmas, even those who don't identify as being Christian. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/kosit-sydney-australia-december-23-2016-542791111?src=fiDEkB35_lLt6XxB4_oFrQ-1-16">from www.shutterstock.com </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Sick of tinsel, carols and talk of virgin birth? </p>
<p>In New Zealand, Australia and many other countries, it’s hard to escape Christmas in December. </p>
<p>But even if you don’t believe in Christ or a God, religion can still be a powerful force. Research shows that even nonreligious people may hold unconscious beliefs linked to religion that can affect their psychology. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-mathematics-of-christmas-a-review-of-the-indisputable-existence-of-santa-claus-88508">The mathematics of Christmas: A review of the Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>By many measures, religion in <a href="https://theconversation.com/census-2016-shows-australias-changing-religious-profile-with-more-nones-than-catholics-79837">Australia</a>, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2153599X.2013.824497">New Zealand</a> and the <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/">USA</a> is declining – but <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-australia-becomes-less-religious-our-parliament-becomes-more-so-80456">Christianity still shapes the culture and politics of these societies</a>, from the holidays celebrated to values officially endorsed. </p>
<p>It’s not that surprising that religious symbols and traditions remain in secularised societies. What is surprising is how religious beliefs may remain in and affect the minds of secular people. </p>
<h2>Subconscious responses to God</h2>
<p>A study in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10508619.2013.771991">Finland</a> explored how religious and non-religious people responded to the idea of God. </p>
<p>The researchers used electrodes to measure how much sweat people produced while reading statements like “I dare God to make my parents drown” or “I dare God to make me die of cancer”. Unexpectedly, when nonbelievers read the statements, they produced as much sweat as believers — suggesting they were equally anxious about the consequences of their dares. </p>
<p>And that’s not simply because nonbelievers didn’t want to wish harm on others. A <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10508619.2013.771991">companion study</a> showed that similar dares that did not involve God (such as, “I wish my parents would drown”) did not produce comparable increases in sweat levels. Together, then, these findings suggest that despite denying that God exists, nonbelievers behaved as though God did exist.</p>
<p>Does this mean that nonbelievers are lying when they say they reject God? Not exactly. Rather, these contradictory behaviours probably arise in part due to living in a theistic culture that hammers home the idea that God exists. Perhaps this leads nonbelievers to form “implicit” attitudes that are at odds with their “explicit” ones. </p>
<h2>Explicit and implicit attitudes</h2>
<p>Explicit attitudes are those people can call to mind consciously and can report when asked: for example “carrots are good for me” or “God does not exist”. </p>
<p>By contrast, people have little or no awareness of their implicit attitudes — the learned associations between ideas in their minds, such as how easily the concept “carrot” brings to mind another concept like “bland,” or how easily the word “God” brings to mind “existence”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-religion-rises-and-falls-in-modern-australia-74367">How religion rises – and falls – in modern Australia</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>As these examples illustrate, implicit and explicit attitudes can clash. It’s possible for a person to say they “love carrots” while unconsciously bringing negative associations to mind about them. Or, to say “God does not exist” while unconsciously bringing to mind ideas of God’s existence. </p>
<p>In this way, it makes sense for nonbelievers to get nervous at the thought of daring God to do harm.</p>
<h2>How attitudes shape health</h2>
<p>The idea that mismatches between explicit and implicit attitudes can create conflict is consistent with the theory of <a href="https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html">cognitive dissonance</a>. </p>
<p><a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-33319-001">Studies</a> exploring this psychological phenomenon <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-42257-020">found that</a> conflict between your behaviour (for example, meeting parental expectations of being a submissive daughter) and your own perception of who you are (for example, being an independent woman) <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-08203-012">was associated with</a> relatively high scores on measures of neuroticism and depression, and low scores on measures of self-esteem, compared to people whose behaviours and self-perceptions better align.</p>
<p>Likewise, people whose implicit and explicit attitudes about their self-esteem are misaligned (those who report high self-esteem, but hold negative unconscious associations about the self, or vice versa) suffer negative outcomes. They are more likely to become <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022399989900287">defensive in response to negative feedback</a>, to suppress their <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/anger-suppression-its-relationship-to-adrenergic-receptor-sensitivity-and-stress-induced-changes-in-blood-pressure/1453C48D079FF2B97E4B61E8BC3C7DC8">anger</a> and to <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/per.626/full">take days off of work</a> for health reasons. </p>
<p>Might cognitive dissonance also be at play in the context of religion?</p>
<h2>Religion and health</h2>
<p>Cognitive dissonance, and the degree of alignment of implicit and explicit beliefs might help us understand relationships between religion and health. Indeed, positive outcomes of religious belief could help explain why implicit beliefs persist in nonbelievers. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00986065">study of over 400 white American men</a> showed that those who attended church had lower blood pressure, and a separate study found having a religious affiliation is <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-010-9637-0">associated with</a> a greater sense of well-being. Tweets <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550613492345">posted by Christians</a> have been interpreted to reflect greater happiness and social connectivity than those from atheists, and believers in God are <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088868309351165">reported to be</a> less anxious about their eventual death, and more certain about the meaning of their existence. </p>
<p>But things aren’t so simple when religious belief is less robust. People with moderate religious beliefs <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-010-9637-0">report lower well-being</a> than those with very strong or very weak beliefs. Many factors will be at work here, but one to consider is that moderate believers are more likely to hold conflicting implicit and explicit beliefs. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-psychology-of-christmas-shopping-how-marketers-nudge-you-to-buy-88011">The psychology of Christmas shopping: how marketers nudge you to buy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This might be particularly true if that group includes people who developed strong links between God and concepts of existence during their religious upbringing, but who have <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso.12094/full">begun explicitly doubting those ideas</a>.</p>
<p>If you are a nonbeliever then, you may have lingering beliefs in God that put you at risk of, at best, amusing self-contradictions, and at worst, poorer well-being. </p>
<p>At this point, you’re probably wondering what you can do to reduce that risk. Unfortunately we can’t offer much advice until more is understood about the links between religious beliefs and well-being. </p>
<p>For now, it is safe to assume that if you are a staunch (explicit) nonbeliever, then putting yourself in situations that reinforce your implicit religious beliefs (by, for example, attending church services at Christmas) may exacerbate your internal conflict.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83506/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jamin Halberstadt receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation (grant number 22421)
.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brittany Cardwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
If you’re a non-believer, then staying away from Church may be the best thing for your psychological health this Christmas.
Brittany Cardwell, Affiliate Researcher, University of Otago
Jamin Halberstadt, Professor, University of Otago
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87469
2017-12-20T08:50:10Z
2017-12-20T08:50:10Z
Christmas nostalgia is something to be wary of, according to literary greats
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199231/original/file-20171214-27597-gzrvme.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/closeup-shot-young-woman-sitting-by-735445363?src=YRbKZB0VLRLI8x37DHNP2Q-1-71">kryzhov/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless,” starts Henry James’s 1898 novella <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/209/209-h/209-h.htm">The Turn of the Screw</a>. Though an ultimately “gruesome” tale of ghosts, this is “Christmas Eve in an old house”, and everything is as it should be.</p>
<p>Christmas has long been a time for telling tales around the lively warmth of the fireside, as the narrator does in James’s tale. Nowadays James’s and Charles Dickens’s stories are substituted by John Lewis’s vignette of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw1Y-zhQURU">Moz the kindly Monster</a> and Vodafone’s love story <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoOIb0PeIvQ">all about data packages</a> (no, really). But each of these share at some level a common romanticisation of youth, in which our childhood memories, homes and bedtime stories are restored and revitalised. </p>
<figure>
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</figure>
<p>But is this misty-eyed view of Christmas past any good for us? Or does nostalgia get in the way of what we should be enjoying in the moment?</p>
<h2>Leaving the past behind</h2>
<p>In James Joyce’s short story <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/958/">The Dead</a> (1914), protagonist Gabriel Conroy wrestles with such questions. At a Christmas party hosted by his aunts, Conroy rejects the community in Ireland that seeks to revive the Gaelic language long dead and long gone – a language that might, if effective, forge Ireland as a nation independent of Great Britain. </p>
<p>But “Irish is not my own language,” he tells his dance partner, Miss Ivors. “O, to tell you the truth … I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” Conroy reviles this backward-looking, false inventiveness which says that the Irish language is the keystone to a modern Ireland.</p>
<p>For Conroy this nostalgic view is painfully shortsighted. Instead, he tells his family and companions that the past they should be looking to is not mythical, but their parents’ and grandparents’ whose lived-in and real Ireland is rapidly disappearing. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I fear that this new generation … will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199235/original/file-20171214-27555-kfgs81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The spirit of the season?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/christmas-family-photo-mother-father-girl-763497214?src=JnpQJsrZQ0nmusvOmgFFvw-2-99">Pozynakov/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nostalgia has a complex etymology. The first part stems from <em>nostos</em>, meaning “homecoming” in ancient Greek, which was a heroic quality <a href="http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/%7Elac14/glossary/nostos/index.ghtml">desired by Ulysses</a> in The Odyssey. That epic poem charted Ulysses’ return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. But the second half of the word, <em>algia</em>, means “pain”. The word as a whole implies the “painful homecoming” – the difficult journey – the return home that’s not without trouble.</p>
<p>This pain holds true for Conroy on that Christmas party night. On his journey to his hotel for the night, he learns of his wife Greta’s past when she tells her own story about a former lover who died. Asked by Conroy why the man died, Greta replies simply, “I think he died for me”. This past and its intrusion into Conroy’s present-day Christmas throws him into disarray. He is confused as to why Greta would not tell him everything about her past. Sadly this homecoming proves painful. Neither a backward glance to the mythic Ireland with its Gaelic heritage, nor the reversion to the generation which is dying all around, can soothe Conroy’s Christmas.</p>
<h2>Resisting nostalgia</h2>
<p>To counter the kind of sadness that Conroy feels, today’s stories on the big and small screens focus on memories we cherish from those days when we didn’t know the truth about Father Christmas. The rose-tinted glasses demand ever-sweeter stories of times when Christmas brought our desires home for us. The true meaning of nostalgia, with its necessary pain, has been forgotten in our late capitalist society in which commodities overrule memories.</p>
<p>The 19th century poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, also wondered about nostalgia. In his poem, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses">Ulysses</a> (1833), he questions whether the hero’s return home to Ithaca would have made him happy. In the poem, the raging fireside common to Christmas stories is instead for Ulysses a “still hearth”. To get over the nostalgia he feels (in the strictest sense), he rejects the life spent doling out</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Unequal laws unto a savage race</p>
<p>That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ulysses decides to “to sail beyond the sunset” one more time. Why? “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” Ulysses rejects nostalgia in place of living the real life that Conroy also cherished.</p>
<p>Conroy matches the epiphany of Tennyson’s Ulysses. His decision, however, is not to escape, but to engage with the past on its own terms. Joyce writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Other forms were near. [Gabriel’s] soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. … His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Gabriel meets the souls of the dead people he’s saluted, and is hospitably welcomed into their community. His nostalgic pain is finally soothed as “his soul swooned” to be part of something larger than himself, to have company on that snowy night.</p>
<p>Perhaps, then, we should no longer resist the painful homecoming that nostalgia truly entails. Instead, that pain we feel as we reminisce about the past – especially round the fireplace at Christmas – provides an opportunity: to strive, to seek and to find a new adventure.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87469/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Taylor-Collins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Being misty-eyed about a perfect Christmas past will do you little good.
Nick Taylor-Collins, Lecturer in English Literature, Swansea University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/88614
2017-12-18T15:43:02Z
2017-12-18T15:43:02Z
Christmas shopping is changing – but retailers must accept that pop-up stores are here to stay
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199725/original/file-20171218-27562-13mhpid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=97%2C237%2C3927%2C2802&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/charlotte90t/8273973076/sizes/l">Charlotte9OT/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>At Christmas time, vacant shop spaces suddenly fill with new vendors selling decorations, small toys, gifts and calendars for the following year. Christmas markets seem to materialise out of thin air, and even online retailers set up shop on the high street. By the new year, these will all vanish without a trace. Yet for businesses, the pop-up store phenomenon is more than just a phase. </p>
<p>Pop-up retailing is a simple concept – it’s a retail store that exists for a limited period, measured in weeks, days, sometimes mere hours. They can take any form, from shops, bars and restaurants to cinemas and galleries. And they’re often used as part of strategies to promote brands and launch new products.</p>
<p>The origins of pop-up stores can be traced back to the <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5246/be88a7615f714d7fba61a465c4490969691e.pdf">periodic markets of the Middle Ages</a>, and the salesmen who travelled from place to place, selling their wares. Indeed, since the first <a href="http://www.medievalhistories.com/late-medieval-christmas-german-invention/">German Christmas markets</a> appeared in the 14th century, sellers have used pop-up stores to meet seasonal demands, in cases where having a permanent premises may not make financial sense. </p>
<h2>A new tradition</h2>
<p>The main attraction of pop-up stores is their flexibility, which is become increasingly important in the rapidly changing world of retail. Businesses are under mounting pressure to evolve, to keep pace with changing customer expectations and behaviour. </p>
<p>As established high-street vendors <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/19/amazon-high-street-shop-london">are overtaken</a> by online-only retailers in terms of market value, many find themselves with excess store space: one estimate says there are 50,000 surplus stores accross the UK. </p>
<p>These spaces <a href="https://ee.co.uk/content/dam/everything-everywhere/documents/Pop-Up%20Economy%202015.pdf">present opportunities</a> for pop-up shops, where different retailers can appear unexpectedly, create a buzz and disappear before people have a chance to get bored.</p>
<h2>Maximum flexibility</h2>
<p>The pop-up enables business to be more flexible in terms of location, financing and strategy. Being able to set up in different places allows retailers to take advantage of the growing amounts of vacant space in many shopping malls and town centres. </p>
<p>Short-term use of this space can benefit property owners by bringing in some rent, while providing opportunities for retailers – especially new business owners seeking to test out their business models. </p>
<p>Pop-up stores also allow retailers to go where their customers are; for example, by capitalising on gatherings of potential customers at events and festivals. Retailers can become “nomadic”, setting up stall in <a href="https://www.fastcodesign.com/1663294/a-pop-up-store-made-of-pantyhose-yes-pantyhose-slideshow#10">specially-designed marquees</a>, repurposed shipping containers, and even <a href="https://www.freshnessmag.com/2009/06/11/generic-man-pop-up-store-space-15-twenty/">inside other shops</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199724/original/file-20171218-27607-1wuomov.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199724/original/file-20171218-27607-1wuomov.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199724/original/file-20171218-27607-1wuomov.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199724/original/file-20171218-27607-1wuomov.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199724/original/file-20171218-27607-1wuomov.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199724/original/file-20171218-27607-1wuomov.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199724/original/file-20171218-27607-1wuomov.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Shopping containers in Shoreditch, London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com">Shutterstock.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The financial flexibility of pop-up stores mean that they can be a low-cost alternative for start-ups which want to test a business concept, without the commitment or expense of leasing a permanent premises. The high cost of commercial rent in major cities has also encouraged the emergence of the so-called “shop share”. Here, small retailers can rent a rail, table, shelf or stand in a more established shop. </p>
<p>Such initiatives have encouraged greater collaboration among retailers, and helped small and independent business to boost their brand. Successful business concepts can then develop from pop-up to stay-up. In this way, pop-up stores can offer strategic flexibility. </p>
<h2>Online, in person</h2>
<p>Well-established businesses can also benefit, using pop-up stores less as a means of driving sales, and more as a way to promote their brand, market new products, and connect face-to-face with the general public. This goes for online retailers too: eBay, for instance, <a href="http://www.techexclusive.net/ebay-opening-christmas-shop-in-soho-london-uk/">established a pop-up shop</a> in central London over Christmas, featuring their 200 best-selling items.</p>
<p>This gives online-only stores a chance to have more direct interaction with - and feedback from - consumers, as well as providing opportunities to link the brand to specific cultural, fashion or sporting events. </p>
<p>In the retail industry, the boundaries between pop-up and more traditional retailing are blurring. At Christmas time, retailers will take every opportunity to increase sales during this peak trading period – including through pop-up stores. While these snow-festooned stores may be gone come the new year, it seems that for retailers, the pop-up is for life – not just for Christmas.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88614/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The idea of pop-up shops has been around for ages, but now even established high-street retailers are being forced to buy in.
Charlotte Shi, Senior Lecturer in Fashion Marketing and Branding, Nottingham Trent University
Gary Warnaby, Professor of Retailing and Marketing, Manchester Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/89268
2017-12-18T15:41:40Z
2017-12-18T15:41:40Z
Christmas earworms: the science behind our love-hate relationship with festive songs
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199713/original/file-20171218-27557-10rym87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The best-selling Christmas song of all-time: White Christmas.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>In the run-up to Christmas, we’re subjected to a daily barrage of festive music – on the radio and television, in shops, train stations, restaurants, pubs and bars. In the UK, old favourites by bands such as Slade and Weezer are doing their regular rounds along with newer contenders from Kelly Clarkson and Justin Bieber. And, of course, Britain’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-you-mariah-carey-number-one-for-uks-favourite-festive-song-88179">two most popular Christmas songs</a> by Mariah Carey and The Pogues are getting their annual airing. </p>
<p>So are you humming Jingle Bells or All I Want for Christmas while you wrap your presents? Catchy music, “sticky tunes” <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0086170">or earworms</a>, as they have become known, are songs that <a href="https://theconversation.com/earworms-why-some-songs-get-stuck-in-our-heads-more-than-others-68182">get stuck in our heads</a> – and while about two-thirds are pleasant or neutral, some can become quite annoying. Earworms are common. Nearly 90% of Finnish adults <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735611406578">reported having one earworm a week</a>.</p>
<p>Musically, earworms seem to come more often from songs which have fairly conventional melodic patterns together with something unusual – a key change, or unexpected leaps or repetitions. Just like the well-known <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735607076444">negative effects</a> of actually heard background music on concentration and task performance, it seems that earworms can even impair our concentration on other tasks – whether those are songs with lyrics which could interfere with memory or even purely instrumental sequences like the Star Wars theme. </p>
<p><em><strong>Read more</strong>: <a href="https://theconversation.com/earworms-why-some-songs-get-stuck-in-our-heads-more-than-others-68182">Why some songs get stuck in our heads more than others</a></em></p>
<p>There’s a piece doing the rounds written by journalism professor <a href="https://adamragusea.com/">Adam Ragusea</a>, who claims to have identified an elusive “<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2014/12/mariah_carey_s_all_i_want_for_christmas_is_you_a_musicological_explanation.html">Christmas chord</a>” (a diminished minor 7th flat 5) that might <a href="https://www.vox.com/videos/2016/12/21/14043244/secret-chord-makes-christmas-music-christmassy">explain the popularity</a> of Christmas songs and why they give us earworms, although not all commentators are entirely convinced. New York-based musician Adam Neely argues it’s <a href="http://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/occasions/christmas/secret-christmas-chord/">more about context</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xm4LO22-cyY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But <a href="https://www.dur.ac.uk/music/research/earworms/">research suggests</a> that although there could be some common features, the specific songs that evoke earworms are different from person to person. This chimes with what we find when we look at how people listen to music in general. Even very similar types of listeners who live together choose <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735609339471">different daily favourite</a> pieces of music – and our music listening and preferences are highly individualised.</p>
<p>What’s different about Christmas music is we are all listening to a much smaller pool of musical options at this time of year. Because of the dominance of Christmas music in public settings such as shops and bars or on the radio, we all get a lot more exposure to the same songs than we do at other times of year. So we could argue that Christmas music helps bring us together – whether we love it or hate it.</p>
<h2>Dreaming of a hit record</h2>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RhNgZQxKESw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Among the cheesy sleigh bells-filled tunes, there are some great Christmas classics – and it’s interesting to note that White Christmas by Irving Berlin is not only consistently one of the most well-known Christmas songs but is the <a href="http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/59721-best-selling-single">best-selling song of all time</a>. It also has the characteristics of an earworm, with melodic shifts and slides around a simple rising and falling melodic shape, and it (like many other songs) contains that scrunchy “Christmas chord”. But how does a song like that maintain its popularity over the decades?</p>
<p>The pattern of liking for an individual song over time is held to fit an <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2489308">inverted U-shape curve</a>. According to this, when we first hear a new piece of music we tend to not like it very much. But repetition breeds liking – and repetition both within a song and through repeated listening over days, weeks and months will usually increase our liking in a fairly rapid linear way.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1lo8EomDrwA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>There’s a limit to this repetition effect. Too much exposure sends liking down the other side of the curve, meaning that when we have heard something too much we eventually, and quickly, get quite fed up with it. In <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14780887.2011.647259">our research we find</a> that people regulate their own exposure to their own music over very long periods of time, putting things to one side in favour of new music and constantly keeping their current music fresh.</p>
<p>Following this, coming back to music after a period of time away means it moves back up the liking curve and we can tolerate or enjoy it again. Most of us do this quite intuitively, filing songs away physically or figuratively for later, and <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735609339471">we have labelled</a> this kind of listening the “squirrel” approach. </p>
<p>That means a lot of Christmas music, whether we think it’s good or bad, will be more popular than it might deserve to be as it usually only gets aired a few months of the year. By the time we’re taking down the Christmas tree in January, we’ve all become thoroughly sick of Mariah and Weezer and so we put them away in the attic with the tree, to be dusted off and enjoyed again next year.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89268/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexandra Lamont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
If you find yourself humming White Christmas this year don’t worry … you’re not alone – and the science of earworms suggests why.
Alexandra Lamont, Senior Lecturer in Music Psychology, Keele University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/89101
2017-12-15T10:45:05Z
2017-12-15T10:45:05Z
Bored during the Christmas break? Get creative with science
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199217/original/file-20171214-27580-jixa7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/sad-teen-girl-alone-table-christmas-521718355?src=WTws_8EvCUBAxARFGDKy2A-1-54">Irina Kozorog/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On Christmas Day in 1900, the ornithologist Frank M Chapman proposed a new holiday tradition – a “<a href="http://www.audubon.org/history-christmas-bird-count">Christmas bird count</a>”. This involved counting birds during the holidays rather than hunting them. The project continued year after year, in what is thought to be one of the longest running citizen science projects ever. Tens of thousands of volunteers continue to take part across North America, united by their passion for wildlife and conservation.</p>
<p>In the 21st century, the internet has revolutionised citizen science, leading to many new projects that were not possible before. Yet volunteers’ motivations are still similar to those of the people who took part in the very first Christmas bird count. People get involved because they want to <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6479908/">help with research</a>, feel passionate about a topic, or simply just enjoy the task. But, as our latest research project interviewing citizen scientists shows, <a href="https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/15/03/JCOM_1503_2016_A05">there are some rather unexpected benefits, too</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.zooniverse.org/">Zooniverse</a> is one of the largest volunteer research platforms, hosting a variety of different projects that involve analysing data. Research topics and tasks vary, from classifying images of galaxies to transcribing weather data and annotating photos of animals. So far, they have received over 85m classifications from 1.6m registered volunteers around the world.</p>
<p><a href="https://boinc.berkeley.edu/">BOINC</a> is another popular platform, where volunteers donate their computer’s idle time to a variety of research projects, such as particle physics simulations and climate change modelling. So far, there are 4.5m users from 277 countries, accumulating more than 34 billion “credits” (BOINC’s measure for how much work your computer has done).</p>
<p>There are also many <a href="http://www.citizensciencecenter.com/citizen-science-games-ultimate-list/">citizen science games</a>. For example, you can contribute to dementia research by playing the game <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41036751">Sea Hero Quest</a> on your phone. Almost 3m people have played it so far, providing scientists with 139 centuries’ worth of research data.</p>
<p>Citizen science has resulted in scientific breakthroughs that have changed our understanding of the world. A famous example is <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/foldit-gamers-solve-riddle/">Foldit</a> – a citizen science game that involves solving protein-folding puzzles. In 2011, a group of Foldit players solved a puzzle in three weeks that had previously stumped researchers for over a decade. This particular enzyme was critical for the reproduction of the AIDS virus. Now that its structure was understood, researchers could start to identify targets for drugs to neutralise to it.</p>
<p>Another famous example is <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40558759">Galaxy Zoo</a> – a Zooniverse project that involves classifying galaxies in space telescope images. In 2007, Hanny Van Arkel spotted a strange blue blob in one of the images and emailed the researchers about it. They looked into it and realised it was a new class of astronomical object – a huge cloud of hot gas with no stars in it, which became known as “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp">Hanny’s Voorwerp</a>”. </p>
<p>But not everyone who participates in citizen science makes ground-breaking discoveries. So what are the other benefits of volunteering?</p>
<h2>Personal benefits</h2>
<p>As social scientists, we’re interested in understanding volunteers’ experiences of taking part in citizen science. Working closely with our colleagues from Neuchâtel University and the University of Geneva, we have interviewed over 100 volunteers from various projects.</p>
<p>We found that volunteers learn many different things, not just related to the science task. Some volunteers described growing in self confidence, as they expanded their personal interests and learned new skills. For more experienced volunteers, they were able to assume new roles in the community (such as moderator) and help others.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199216/original/file-20171214-27583-qu32pp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199216/original/file-20171214-27583-qu32pp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199216/original/file-20171214-27583-qu32pp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199216/original/file-20171214-27583-qu32pp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199216/original/file-20171214-27583-qu32pp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199216/original/file-20171214-27583-qu32pp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199216/original/file-20171214-27583-qu32pp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">USS Jamestown. Artwork by Caro, forum moderator and transcriber.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Taking part also helped to inspire many creative works. In <a href="https://www.oldweather.org/">Old Weather</a> – a Zooniverse project that involves transcribing weather data and historical information from the logbooks of 19th and 20th century US naval ships – volunteers like “Caro” felt inspired to create artwork. These images were shared on a forum thread called the Dockside Gallery. It provided a great talking point for the Old Weather community because it helped to bring the ships that they were reading about to life.</p>
<p>In another forum thread, Old Weather volunteers worked together to create glossaries and naval-related lists to make their task of interpreting the ships’ logs easier. This ended up being a useful resource for the community and was eventually published online as a compendium.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://eyewire.org/explore">Eyewire</a> – a citizen science game that involves mapping the brain – one of the volunteers built a chat bot to answer frequently asked questions. As a moderator, she was often asked the same questions again and again by new players, so she decided to use her programming skills to help build tools that could be used by all.</p>
<p>In BOINC – the volunteer computing platform – some volunteers have created websites to display statistics and graphs about the performance of different teams. Joining teams and competing to see who can donate the most credits helps to make the project more fun.</p>
<p>It’s amazing that volunteers are willing to go the extra mile and create things that bring joy and excitement to the project community. It shows how much they care about their projects, and their efforts also help to boost project participation.</p>
<p>Even volunteers who are not looking for a social experience, “<a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2557262">dabbling</a>” in and out of projects for short periods of time, still gain a sense of satisfaction that they have contributed a little towards helping research.</p>
<p>So if you’re looking for something to do this Christmas, why not give citizen science a try? It is a Christmas tradition after all. And with so many online projects to choose from, you’re bound to find a project to suit you.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89101/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Charlene Jennett received funding from the EU (Citizen Cyberlab) and is currently funded by the EPSRC (Open 3D).</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna L Cox received funding from from the EU (Citizen Cyberlab) and is currently funded by the EPSRC (Open 3D).</span></em></p>
Citizen science isn’t just about charity – new research shows there are some quite unexpected benefits for participants.
Charlene Jennett, Researcher of Human-Computer Interaction, UCL
Anna L Cox, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, UCL
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87575
2017-12-14T03:57:25Z
2017-12-14T03:57:25Z
There’s no place like home for the holidays – and that’s what makes the pandemic’s winter surge particularly devastating
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198804/original/file-20171212-9389-116jopo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">George Henry Durrie's 'Winter in the Country: A Cold Morning' (1861).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/VMFA_92-124_v1_CS_XL-1024x728.jpg">Virginia Museum of Fine Arts</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>While Christmas playlists often include cheesy favorites like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” there are also a handful of wistful tracks that go a little bit deeper. </p>
<p>Listen closely to “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” or “White Christmas,” and you’ll hear a deep yearning for home and sorrow at having to spend the holidays somewhere else. </p>
<p>During no holiday season in recent memory have these songs resonated so deeply with so many. The pandemic has upended holiday traditions, and for those who eagerly anticipate annual visits to their hometowns to celebrate with loved ones, the cancellations of these plans are yet another blow to endure in a long, grinding year. </p>
<p>Strip away the cursory Christmas rituals – the TV specials, the lights, the gifts, the music – and what remains is home. It is the beating heart of the holiday, and its importance reflects our primal need to have a meaningful relationship with a setting – a place that transcends the boundary between the self and the physical world. </p>
<h2>Can you love a place like a person?</h2>
<p>Most of us can probably name at least one place we feel an emotional connection to. But you probably don’t realize just how much a place can influence your sense of who you are, or how essential it is for your psychological well-being. </p>
<p>Psychologists even possess an entire vocabulary for the affectionate bonds between people and places: There’s “<a href="http://www.placeness.com/topophilia-and-topophils/">topophilia</a>,” “<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494498900780">rootedness</a>” and “<a href="http://www.elixirpublishers.com/articles/1350368123_45%20(2012)%207637-7641.pdf">attachment to place</a>,” which are all used to describe the feelings of comfort and security that bind us to a place. </p>
<p>Your fondness for a place – whether it’s the house where you lived your whole life, or the fields and woods where you played as a child – can even mimic the affection you feel for other people. </p>
<p>Studies have shown that a forced relocation <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/homesickness-9780195371857?cc=us&lang=en&">can elicit heartbreak and distress</a> every bit as intense as the loss of a loved one. <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00923265">Another study found</a> that if you feel a strong attachment to your town or city, you’ll be more satisfied with your house and you’ll also be less anxious about your future.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198808/original/file-20171212-9396-1qj0z26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198808/original/file-20171212-9396-1qj0z26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198808/original/file-20171212-9396-1qj0z26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198808/original/file-20171212-9396-1qj0z26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198808/original/file-20171212-9396-1qj0z26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198808/original/file-20171212-9396-1qj0z26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198808/original/file-20171212-9396-1qj0z26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gusztáv Magyar Mannheimer’s ‘Factory Site at the Outskirts of Budapest’ (1893).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Magyar_Mannheimer_Guszt%C3%A1v(1859-1937)_Budapesti_k%C3%BClv%C3%A1rosi_gy%C3%A1rtelep.jpg">Hungarian National Gallery</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our physical surroundings play an important role in creating meaning and organization in our lives; much of how we view our lives and what we have become depends on where we’ve lived, and the experiences we’ve had there. </p>
<p>So it’s no surprise that architecture professor Kim Dovey, who has studied the concept of home and the experience of homelessness, <a href="http://www.asu.edu/courses/aph294/total-readings/dovey%20--%20homeandhomelessness.pdf">confirmed that</a> where we live is closely tied to our sense of who we are.</p>
<h2>An anchor of order and comfort</h2>
<p>At the same time, the concept of home can be slippery. </p>
<p>One of the first questions we ask when we meet someone new is “Where are you from?” But we seldom pause to consider how complicated that question is. Does it mean where you currently live? Where you were born? Where you grew up? </p>
<p>Environmental psychologists <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0013916587192004">have long understood</a> that the word “home” clearly connotes more than just a house. It encompasses people, places, objects and memories. </p>
<p>So what or where, exactly, do people consider “home”? </p>
<p><a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/who-moves-who-stays-put-wheres-home/">A 2008 Pew study</a> asked people to identify “the place in your heart you consider to be home.” Twenty-six percent reported that home was where they were born or raised; only 22% said that it was where they currently lived. Eighteen percent identified home as the place that they had lived the longest, and 15% felt that it was where most of their extended family had come from. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198805/original/file-20171212-9432-1qenw26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198805/original/file-20171212-9432-1qenw26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198805/original/file-20171212-9432-1qenw26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198805/original/file-20171212-9432-1qenw26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198805/original/file-20171212-9432-1qenw26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198805/original/file-20171212-9432-1qenw26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198805/original/file-20171212-9432-1qenw26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Matsumoto Shunsuke’s ‘Suburban Landscape’ (1938).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MatsumotoShunsuke_Suburban_Landscape_1938.png">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But if you look at different cultures across time, a common thread emerges.</p>
<p>No matter where they come from, people tend to think about home as a central place that represents order, a counterbalance to the chaos that exists elsewhere. This might explain why, when asked to draw a picture of “where you live,” children and adolescents around the world invariably <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-18531-001">place their house in the center of the sheet of paper</a>. In short, it’s what everything else revolves around. </p>
<p>Anthropologists Charles Hart and Arnold Pilling lived among the the Tiwi People of Bathurst Island off the coast of Northern Australia during the 1920s. They noted that the Tiwi <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/10573352?selectedversion=NBD5272312">thought</a> their island was the only habitable place in the world; to them, everywhere else was the “land of the dead.” </p>
<p>The <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-2266-3_1">Zuni of the American Southwest</a>, meanwhile, have long viewed the house as a living thing. It’s where they raise their kids and communicate with spirits, and there’s an annual ritual – called the <em>Shalako</em> – in which homes are blessed and consecrated as part of the year-end winter solstice celebration.</p>
<p>The ceremony strengthens bonds to the community, to the family – including dead ancestors – and to the spirits and gods by dramatizing the connection each party has to the home.</p>
<p>During the holidays, we might not officially bless our home like the Zuni. But our holiday traditions probably sound familiar: eating with family, exchanging gifts, catching up with old friends and visiting old haunts. These homecoming rituals affirm and renew a person’s place in the family and often are a <a href="http://faculty.knox.edu/fmcandre/enviropsychbook.html">key way to strengthen the family’s social fabric</a>. </p>
<p>Home, therefore, is a predictable and secure place where you feel in control and properly oriented in space and time; it is a bridge between your past and your present, an enduring tether to your family and friends.</p>
<p>It is a place where, as the poet <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-frost">Robert Frost</a> aptly wrote, “When you have to go there, they have to take you in.”</p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of an article published on Dec. 13, 2017.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87575/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank T. McAndrew does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Home can be a slippery concept. But psychologists have long understood that it plays a huge role in self-identity and emotional well-being.
Frank T. McAndrew, Cornelia H. Dudley Professor of Psychology, Knox College
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87656
2017-11-16T16:41:37Z
2017-11-16T16:41:37Z
Greggs the baker’s portrayal of Jesus as a sausage roll echoes the Gospel of John – biblical studies expert
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195059/original/file-20171116-15410-yqfi5r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C2%2C594%2C544&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It's big, but it might not feed 5,000.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Greggs</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>With more than 1,000 outlets across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, Greggs the baker is a national institution. It’s not uncommon for queues to form in some towns and cities as the daily doughnuts, cheese and onion pasties and steak bakes come out of the ovens. But it is the sausage roll that is the star turn.</p>
<p>Now though, it seems it is the star that Greggs took too far. For Britain’s biggest bakery has had to apologise after it replaced the traditional baby Jesus in the manger with its famed product in a nativity scene. The image was used to promote its advent calendar and, the company says, wasn’t meant to cause offence.</p>
<p>Well, regardless of intentions, the image, with three wise men reverently surrounding a golden sausage roll in a manger, caused quite an uproar. </p>
<p>Many Christian Twitter users were at the forefront of this backlash against the image, tapping into the <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/templeofthefuture/2012/10/the-false-narrative-of-christian-persecution/">false narrative of the persecution of Christians</a> in Western countries including the UK and US, and the idea that there is a “war on Christmas”. </p>
<p>While <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_controversies#Retailer_controversies">many of the “war on Christmas” debates</a> focus on the secularisation of the winter holiday, in this instance the attention was on a private company supposedly making light of the baby Jesus for profit.</p>
<p>One organisation, the right-wing pressure group the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freedom_Association">Freedom Association</a>, led by Simon Richards, called for a boycott of Greggs as a result of the image. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"930726919028518912"}"></div></p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"930727926403878912"}"></div></p>
<p>The viral growth of the hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=boycottgreggs&src=typd">#boycottGreggs</a> has prompted the bakery to issue a formal apology. “We’re really sorry to have caused any offence, this was never our intention,” <a href="http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/15660326.Greggs_says__sorry__after_Advent_calendar_launch_replaces_baby_Jesus_with_sausage_roll/">said a spokesperson</a>.</p>
<h2>My flesh is meat indeed</h2>
<p>However, what might not be apparent at first glance is just how appropriate this debate about Jesus-as-sausage-roll is in light of the Gospels – and the Gospel of John in particular. Although the Gospel of John doesn’t describe the nativity scene that we find in Luke and Matthew, it is a Gospel intent on describing Jesus as a food. </p>
<p>In one well-known scene, after he has fed the 5,000 on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus launches into a speech known as the “<a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/papers/bread.pdf">Bread of Life Discourse</a>”. John’s Gospel uses several metaphors to describe Jesus here, including both bread and meat – and <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Flesh-Meat-Indeed-Nonsacramental/dp/1451490240">scholars have argued that Jesus means what he says</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195061/original/file-20171116-15412-ahszeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195061/original/file-20171116-15412-ahszeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195061/original/file-20171116-15412-ahszeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195061/original/file-20171116-15412-ahszeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195061/original/file-20171116-15412-ahszeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195061/original/file-20171116-15412-ahszeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195061/original/file-20171116-15412-ahszeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Giovanni Lanfranco, Miracle of the Bread and Fish (1620-1623).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>First Jesus declares: “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6%3A51-58&version=NRSV">I am the living bread</a>.” Those listening to him are understandably confused, since they don’t see a loaf of bread in front of them but “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6%3A42&version=NRSV">Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know</a>.” When Jesus hears them doubting his claims, he repeats his claim three times, finally stating explicitly that “the bread … is my flesh”.</p>
<p>After this conversation, Jesus makes a second claim about his body, this time that it is flesh to be eaten. In the King James Version, Jesus emphatically declares: “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6%3A55&version=KJV">My flesh is meat indeed</a>.” Even if we accept a metaphorical reading of Jesus’s words, there is no question that John the Evangelist understood Jesus in edible terms.</p>
<h2>Offence and the Gospels</h2>
<p>If Jesus as bread and meat is biblical in its origins, it might be surprising to see that the outrage over these claims is not unique to the current uproar around the Greggs advert.</p>
<p>The Gospel of John first describes people’s disbelief of what Jesus says – they doubt he is the bread he claims to be. But the real outrage comes when Jesus declares that he’s made of meat, and that people should be eating him. Even his followers, his disciples, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6%3A60&version=NRSV">have trouble with this</a>: “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’” Jesus, seeing that what he’s said has offended them, doubles down on his claims – and some of his (nameless) disciples <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6%3A66&version=NRSV">decide to leave him</a>.</p>
<p>Not unlike the current furore over Jesus the Sausage Roll, the Gospel of John depicts uproar and offence at Jesus being compared to food. It seems that comparing Jesus to food has a long history of causing outrage, then, but that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong – the Bible itself recognises both the comparison and the ensuing offence.</p>
<h2>War on Christmas</h2>
<p>Paradoxically, then, Greggs has actually provided a scripture-inspired vision of the nativity that Christians often complain is increasingly absent in the run-up to Christmas. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fYSfY8hQfag?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>While there is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/us/war-on-christmas-controversy.html">no real war on Christmas</a>, those anxious about what they perceive as a lack of Jesus in the advent season should take another look at the Greggs ad, which places a biblical understanding of Jesus right in the centre.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87656/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr M J C Warren is the author of 'My Flesh is Meat Indeed: A Nonsacramental Reading of John 6:51–58' (Fortress Press, 2015). </span></em></p>
A sausage roll standing in for the Christ Child? It’s not as weird as you might think.
M J C Warren, Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies, University of Sheffield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87384
2017-11-13T12:54:29Z
2017-11-13T12:54:29Z
Muslims can and do celebrate a traditional Christmas
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194341/original/file-20171113-27616-1d3gw69.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/beautiful-muslim-woman-cheerful-smile-give-737677939?src=IYV0BNq9I3NY8fCVTKAlSQ-4-65">kheira benkada/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the classic festive film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039628/">Miracle on 34th Street</a>, character Kris Kringle declares that “Christmas isn’t just a day, it’s a state of mind”. If this is true, then it would appear that, for many in the UK, the current state of mind seems to be one that is laden with xenophobic tones.</p>
<p>Tesco recently released its Christmas advert showing families up and down the land coming together for Christmas. However, rather than taking inspiration from the supermarket giant’s “Everyone’s welcome” slogan, some viewers took it upon themselves to <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tesco-christmas-advert-2017-muslim-family-feature-twitter-christian-feeling-a8046396.html">voraciously complain about a scene</a> which shows a Muslim get-together on Christmas day. </p>
<p>Twitter was aflame with a <a href="http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/tesco-christmas-advert-slammed-featuring-13887826?bustcache=1510393611905">range of accusations</a>, including anger at the removal of references to Christianity from the Christmas advert – despite no other major retailer <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/0/retailers-launch-2017-christmas-adverts-asdas-first-air/">taking a religious tone</a> in their promotions. </p>
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<p>Tesco has <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/tesco-responds-to-online-abuse-for-featuring-muslim-family-in-christmas-ad-a8050546.html">defended its position</a> and stressed that the advert focuses on families coming together. However as some have pointed out, while the supermarket promotes an inclusive ethos, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/tesco-christmas-advert-muslims-halal-turkey-diversity-youtube-a8050036.html">it doesn’t stock Halal turkeys</a> for those who might fancy a traditional dinner.</p>
<h2>Festive spirit</h2>
<p>We are about to enter that time of year when false accusations and fake stories are circulated – nativities being banned, no Christmas carols allowed in schools, the word Christmas being replaced by “holiday” – all allegedly because Muslims will be offended. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/12/15/muslim-man-riaz-kahn-ban-christmas_n_8809220.html">This is not remotely true</a>, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/29/cancel-christmas-muslims-traditions-islamic">despite Muslims</a> and Muslim groups repeatedly stating that far from being offended, <a href="http://www.mcb.org.uk/keep-calm-christmas/">Christmas is an enjoyable time</a> for them, it does nothing to stop the rumours’ annual perpetuation.</p>
<p>Those that object to the inclusion of Muslims in Christmas campaigns and celebrations are likely the same Islamophobic people who accuse Muslims of not integrating – but at the slightest indication that Muslims are integrated (as so many are), start to object at Muslims “taking over”. </p>
<p>There is something about Christmas that brings out the Muslim hatred in some people. When popular Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain wrote about her <a href="https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/uk/nadiya-hussain-lost-words-daily-mail-readers-say-muslim-woman-shouldnt-offer-advice-christmas/">favourite Christmas recipes</a>, rather than delight in the new twists on old favourites, some commenters claimed that apparently as a Muslim she had no right to cook festive foods.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"924716370255843328"}"></div></p>
<p>But what is it that Muslims do at Christmas, if they have no religious link? The fact is that Muslims do the same as everyone else who is not a practising Christian at Christmas. They spend time with loved ones, enjoying the holiday period. There is no requirement that one be a Christian to enjoy the season after all.</p>
<p>Almost certainly Muslims will be sitting down to a large family get-together at Christmas, facilitated by bank holidays and extra days off. Presents are shared, but usually because it is some time since the family has all been together. I, for example, have presents for my nieces and nephews that I bought in the summer, which they’ll receive them at Christmas because I haven’t seen them since then.</p>
<p>If anything, it can be argued that Muslims and migrants embody the true spirit of Christmas in the best possible way: devoid of enormous demands and expectations, perhaps they are the ones that truly exemplify the spirit of togetherness, sharing food and company. One where there is no pressure to come up with hordes of gifts, or to cook a turkey and all the trimmings, or worry about how your presents will stand up to comparison.</p>
<p>The Christmas season has become one fraught with tension and emotion. The average UK adult spends <a href="https://www.pwc.co.uk/industries/retail-consumer/insights/christmas-shopping.html">near to £300 on gifts</a> with the average family cost of Christmas hitting <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/household-bills/12038620/Average-British-family-to-spend-800-on-Christmas.html">around £800</a>. Increasing numbers of people are <a href="https://www.uswitch.com/media-centre/2016/12/christmas-debt-hangover-looming-for-nine-out-of-ten-brits/">borrowing ever growing amounts</a> and <a href="http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-3998802/Christmas-credit-One-three-set-borrow-food-presents.html">using credit cards</a> to fund and meet the expectations of Christmas. It has rapidly become the season of spending.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean there is no stress in Muslim families, but the expectation and pressure is less. There is plenty of consumerism – the joyful knowledge that all the Christmas goodies can be bought at a fraction of the cost in the sales is very alluring for any savvy shopper, Muslim or not. </p>
<p>As for the Twitter ranters who want Muslims to <a href="https://twitter.com/KainDog69/status/929632973703581696">stick to celebrating Eid</a> as their Christmas, please do campaign for a national holiday, we will support you. Until then, if you want to book annual leave to celebrate Eid like Muslims have to, there is nothing stopping you, and you are guaranteed <a href="https://www.london.gov.uk/events/2017-07-02/eid-festival-2017">a warm welcome</a> at the many celebrations across the country.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87384/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nilufar Ahmed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Tesco is right, British Muslims enjoy Christmas just as much as the next family.
Nilufar Ahmed, Senior Lecturer in Public Health, Policy and Social Sciences, Swansea University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.