On the first day of Christmas

Charles Dickens gave us the modern Christmas festival. He gave us a social object to interact around: a morality tale, with props and scenery that we’ve played with ever since – in the media and in our own homes…

But like the best social objects it helps us be together and interact around it. And it propagates itself through populations fast and with enormous fertility (it changes itself as it goes through us…). So far so good.

However, what it also reveals about goodsocial objects that we don’t often consider is that it was both built on what’s gone before: we all know that Midwinter Solstice Festivals go back into prehistory (til recently Nordic countries have the Yule goat and Austria has a good mix of modern Germanic Skt Niklaus and his sidekick, the goat-faced Krampus); of course the modern Santa Claus (and old man in a white beard) was known in 17th Century London and in the New World colonies but his ancient green robes are now red (thanks partly to the 19th century american political cartoonist, Thomas Nast and only latterly to Haddon Sundblom’sCoke ads.

2 or 3 thoughts that arise:

1. Quite how definitive even Dickens’ own description seems, yet how invented it really is (and no more so than Coca Cola’s)
2. How like a good fib, social objects are plausible not just functionally good
3. Oh yes, quite how innovative we humans can all be in finding ways to be and interact together at e.g. the darkest time of the year (as every other important or otherwise day of the year!).

Hope yours is as magical as Charlie D’s was…and your dreams easier than Ebenezer’s