The Grinch didn’t steal Christmas. Europe did. Filched it, packed it up and moved it north, where it snows.
In this wholesale looting of the world’s greatest holiday, the U.S., Canada and some other non-European northern habitats were also complicit.
I grew up in the Southern Hemisphere in faraway Zimbabwe — then called Southern Rhodesia, a British colony — and we had to bear Northern hegemony at Christmas. We had to bear it the rest of the year as well, but this is about Christmas and that symbol of the North: snow.
In subequatorial Africa, snow was a distant European asset. We had learned to associate it with Christmas, and we would celebrate the holiday by singing the carol about the good Bohemian King Wenceslas, looking out “on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.”
Cotton wool was our snow substitute. When we decorated for Christmas, we couldn’t have it lying about “deep and crisp and even.” We just put cotton wool puffs on Christmas trees (another symbol of European expansionism), picture rails and window frames.
The shops used glitter and cotton wool in Christmas window scenes that were out of Victorian-period Europe, not the Holy Land.
Only nativity scenes in churches were exempt from the scourge of cotton wool. Well, mostly. As kids we were confused by the snow mania, and sometimes we tried to embellish the straw in manger scenes with cotton wool.
My mother, who never visited anywhere north of the equator, was a campaigner, in her way, against the theft of Christmas. She would lecture people on what the temperature was at Christmas in Bethlehem. She said it was very hot.
There was no way she could have known what the actual temperature was in Bethlehem, but she didn’t let that inhibit her argument against the Northern appropriation of something that was rooted in the Levant.
In fact, Christmas is the beginning of the coolest time of year in Jerusalem and Bethlehem; the temperature hovers around 40 F. It isn’t a winter wonderland in the way that Christmas is portrayed in Europe and America.
And all that hoopla about sales and shopping till you drop came from those delightful Christmas markets, which you see all over continental Europe at this time of year.
You can blame the Germans for Christmas trees and the Scandinavians for reindeer, but it seems to me that the Brits, my people, have done a rather good job of Christmas appropriation.
Put aside that they have tried to grab the entire concept of the people of Israel. Yes, the British Israelite movement postulates the British are descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.
This is an attempted act of cultural appropriation on a massive scale, and it hasn’t succeeded, but it still has its adherents.
The great English poet William Blake has been more successful. His poem “Jerusalem,” which he wrote in 1804, was put to music by Hubert Parry in 1916 to aid the World War I effort and has become a second British national anthem. People prefer it to “God Save the King” — and it has a better tune.
Blake wrote:
“I will not cease from Mental Fight/ Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:/Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green & pleasant Land.”
Well, that is a very ambitious attempt to steal a legend, and it makes cotton wool seem rather timid in the struggle to own Christmas.
I wish you, yes, a white Christmas. I like the white stuff — snow, not cotton wool.
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