Explainer

Christmas culture

7 December 2023

6 min read

Beyond Christmas cards: a guide to the season’s art, past and present

When great art comes tumbling through your letterbox. Explore the historic and contemporary art of Christmas.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A stained-glass style illustration of an Inuit mother cradling an infant with a halo-like background.

Northern lullaby, Nori Peter, Canada.

via BAME Anglican.

The first commercial Christmas card was sent in 1843, 180 years ago, but is this relatively recent tradition of sending Christmas greetings by post slowing dying a death? The result of the combined impact of environmental concerns, online options and the increased cost of postage? What images have characterised Christmas cards over that period and how will you choose the perfect Christmas image to send, whether digitally or in the mail?

The UK’s Royal Mail estimates that it still delivers 150 million cards during the Christmas period while other sources claim that one billion Christmas cards are sold in the UK annually. As a result, the traditional Christmas card is still going strong.

The tradition was established when Sir Henry Cole, the founding director of the V&A, sent the first commercial Christmas card as a way of responding to the flood of Christmas and New Year letters that he and others had begun to receive following the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post. Cole, who had been involved in the introduction of the Penny Post, commissioned the artist John Callcott Horsley to design a card and advertised it in the Athenaeum paper as “A Christmas Congratulation Card: or picture emblematical of Old English Festivity to Perpetuate kind recollections between Dear Friends”. Horsley’s design is a triptych with a central family party scene, in which three generations drink wine to celebrate the season, offset by two acts of charity – “feeding the hungry” and “clothing the naked” – which derive from Jesus’ Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

In this period card companies would commission designs from significant artists or hold competitions to produce new designs, while Christmas card designs themselves were reviewed in the national press.

Early Christmas cards featured flowers and religious symbols including angels watching over sleeping children. However, George Buday, in his book ‘The History of the Christmas Card’ (1954), suggests that, “the Christmas card from its beginning was more closely associated in the minds of the senders with the social aspect – the festivities connected with Christmas than with the religious function of the season”.

By the 1880s, a prominent card-maker, Prang and Mayer, was producing over five million cards a year and this expansion saw the now familiar iconography of Christmas established: “winter scenes of robins, holly, evergreens, country churches and snowy landscapes; along with indoor scenes of seasonal rituals and gift giving, from decorating trees and Christmas dinner, to Santa Claus, children’s games, pantomime characters and Christmas crackers”. In this period card companies would commission designs from significant artists or hold competitions to produce new designs, while Christmas card designs themselves were reviewed in the national press.

Card companies, of course, also recognised the value of utilising great art from the Western tradition, particularly the art of the Renaissance. As art critic Jonathan Jones has noted:

“Great art comes tumbling through your letterbox at this time of year. Here are the kings from the east laden with gifts, gathering at a stable where an ox and an ass look lovingly at a baby child. Mary sits demurely. Shepherds hearken to an angel. You pop it on the mantelpiece with all the other cards.”

Although the earliest nativity we know of dates back to the third century - being a stucco preserved in the catacombs of Priscilla, in Rome - when we think “Nativity,” we are probably, as Victoria Emily Jones has noted, thinking of church art from the Renaissance “because the Church held particular sway at that time, in that place”. The National Gallery’s exhibition 'Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed', by highlighting an overlooked Renaissance artist, demonstrates the extent to Renaissance art centred on the life of Christ, with a prominent place for nativity scenes. Their choice of December for the opening of this exhibition shows the extent to which we associate such art with the Christmas season. The exhibition includes beautiful renditions of a ‘Virgin and Child’, ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ and ‘King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land’.

“Historical accuracy is not the point; the point is to see Jesus as the Savior of your own people, as incarnated very close to you, and relevant to life today”.
Victoria Emily Jones

Victoria Emily Jones also notes that, to illustrate the truth that “Jesus Christ was born for all people of all times”, Christians around the world, including during the Renaissance, often depicted him “as coming into their own culture, in the present time”. This realisation also provides one way to search for images of the nativity more relevant to our own cultures and time. Jones has made this a particular feature of her independent research on Christianity and the arts.

Noting that “the center of Christianity has shifted”, being “no longer in the West”, she suggests that, if we survey the Christian art being produced today, we will see that “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and the settings they inhabit, have a much different look”. Mary may be “dressed in a sari or a hanbok”, Jesus “wrapped in buffalo skin, or silk” and, instead of oxen and asses, we may “see lizards and kangaroos”. As she writes, “Historical accuracy is not the point; the point is to see Jesus as the Savior of your own people, as incarnated very close to you, and relevant to life today”. Accordingly, she has provided online two series of contextualised images of the Nativity painted within the last century with each work bringing “Jesus into a different place, in order to emphasize the universality of his birth”.

Additionally, she also made use of a meditation I had written, which has as its refrain the plea “Come, Lord Jesus, come”, to create an Advent series of images and reflections exploring “what it meant for Jesus to be born of woman—coming as seed and fetus and birthed son”. Again, in her selection of images, she took “special care to select images by artists from around the world, not just the West, and ones that go beyond the familiar fare”. As a result, in ‘Come, Lord Jesus, Come’, there are images of “the Holy Spirit depositing the divine seed into Mary’s womb; Mary with a baby bump, and then with midwives; an outback birth with kangaroos, emus, and lizards in attendance; Jesus as a Filipino slum dweller; and Quaker history married to Isaiah’s vision of the Peaceable Kingdom”.

Her hope is that “these images fill you with wonder and holy desire—to know Christ more and to live into the kingdom he inaugurated two thousand-plus years ago from a Bethlehem manger”. She quotes S. D. Gordon’s “succinct summary of the Incarnation” - Jesus coming into this world as both God and human being - “Jesus was God spelling Himself out in language humanity could understand” in order to suggest that these images “celebrate the transcendent God made immanent, accessible” and “celebrate his new name: Emmanuel, God-with-us”.

Whether you are looking to continue the tradition of sending Christmas cards through the post or will be sending digital greetings to family and friends, looking for, creating or commissioning nativity images that depict Jesus coming in your culture and your time continues to offer a significant way of showing the wonder of the incarnation to others. And, if you do so, while being entirely contemporary, you will also be firmly rooted in art history and church tradition.

Explore more nativity art

Victoria Emily Jones has curated two collections of nativity art.: 2011 collection, and 2015 collection.

She has also compiled an Advent Slideshow and Devotional for Art & Theology.

Visit BAME Anglicans' Paintings of the Nativity From Around the World.

View a selection of nativity scenes curated by BAME Anglicans.

A nativity seen against a red background

Nativity by Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe, (1913- 1996). Via BAME Anglican.

Contemporary painting tajes in elements of 16th-century Persian art.

Nativity scene in the style of Eithiopian icon.

Contemporary Ethiopian nativity icon.

A Korean style historic illustration of the nativity.

Kim Hueng Jong (Korean, 1928-), Christmas Scene.

Explainer

Christmas culture

Creed

19 December 2023

5 min read

Santa Claus and how not to give gifts

John Barclay unpacks the nature of gift-giving and finds Santa’s list is moralising in comparison to an older unconditional way.

John Barclay

John Barclay is Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University. He researches the history and thought of early Christianity and early Judaism.

A Santa tiptoes in a darkened room carrying a lamp and holding up a finger in a gesture of silencing

Anderson W Rangel on Unsplash.

Christianity is a religion centered on the notion of gift. It is no accident that Christmas, linked with what Christians consider the ultimate gift - the birth of Jesus, is a festival of gift-giving. All sorts of historical and cultural traditions have accumulated around this festival, for good and ill, but one, it seems to me, has become especially problematic: the myth of Santa Claus. The form of giving we associate with Santa Claus is the very opposite of what counts, in the Christian tradition, as a good gift. Here’s how.

In the English-speaking world, Santa Claus (originally St Nicholas) is the man in the red coat and white beard to whom children address their requests for presents. For many, he becomes a bit like God, and as such, shapes their image of God as normally absent, occasionally useful, and generally benign. But if Santa is the distributor of gifts at Christmas, two things mark his giving: first, he gives according to merit; second, his giving is one-way and one-off, creating no relationship of trust, love, or obligation.

The famous Santa song is better known in North America than in the UK, but it has lasted long in the popular imagination. It has also shaped our ideas of gift-giving. Santa, you will recall, has a list of who’s been ‘naughty or nice’, and is using that list to direct his gifts. He is all-seeing and all-knowing (‘he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake’), so his merit-judgments are unfailingly correct: he ‘knows if you’ve been bad or good’ – so ‘be good for goodness sake’! Santa’s gifts, in other words, are merited and conditioned. At one level, this is an adult ploy to get children to behave at Christmas. But at another, it reflects a remorselessly moralizing society, quick to judge who is deserving of praise or blame.

As Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in The Tyranny of Merit, we have allowed the notion of ‘merit’ to govern so many aspects of our society that those who miss out on social and economic success are led to believe that it is really their fault. Santa is the projection of our sense that nothing good comes our way unless we somehow deserve it.

The other feature of Santa’s giving is that it is all over in a trice: it creates no relationship and establishes no long-term connection. The children who write letters asking for presents are not encouraged to enquire after Santa’s wellbeing during the rest of the year. There is no friendship, no commitment, just one-way gifts that arrive without reciprocity or interpersonal depth. That fits Western individualism, where we dislike the constraints created by long-term relationships. We will take a gift ‘with no strings attached’ because thereby we retain our autonomy, our power to choose, our independence.

This was a gift ‘with strings attached’ – not unwelcome new obligations that forced them to do what they hated, but strings of love that enabled them to be better and fuller versions of themselves.

he Christmas event was originally understood as a gift of a very different kind – in fact the inverse of the Santa-gift. What the early Christians celebrated about the gift of Jesus was that it was completely unconditioned: it was given without regard to merit or desert. Even in ancient times that was an unusual, even a bizarre, form of gift: surely it would make better sense to give to those who were worthy of the gift? But what the Gospel writers and St Paul celebrated was that the gift took effect in unexpected, undeserving places – with uneducated fishermen, with women as much as men, with non-Jews as well as Jews, with the social underdogs and the morally dubious.

This was a gift that had nothing to do with merit: it was given irrespective of worth and in the absence of worth. Paul the persecutor received this gift; so did Mary, a village teenager; so did Peter, who let Jesus down time after time; so did idolatrous non-Jews; so did Zacchaeus (a tax-collector – about as popular as a loan shark today)). This was not because the gift was given randomly. It was a strategic policy to make the gift available to all. As an unconditioned gift, not dependent on gender, cultural background, social level, or moral achievement, the gift of the ‘good news’ belonged to no-one – and could go to everyone.

As a result, the early Christians formed new kinds of communities that crossed most social boundaries, and excluded no one on the basis that they were not good enough to join.

And was this a ‘Santa gift’ in the sense of creating no relationship, no ties, no expectations? Far from it! The gift of Christ was understood to transform those who received it, because ultimately it was the gift not of a thing but of a person. Where Santa disappears for eleven months of the year, the Christians found that Jesus stuck around, not as a threat but as a transformative presence (in the form of ‘the Spirit’), who slowly, subtly, but definitively made them different than what they were before. This was a gift ‘with strings attached’ – not unwelcome new obligations that forced them to do what they hated, but strings of love that enabled them to be better and fuller versions of themselves. The Christ-gift drew its recipients, as theologians would later say, into the life of God, which is the best imaginable place for humans to be.

So, how might you give gifts differently this Christmas? Well, you could go beyond ‘the usual suspects’ and include some you would not normally include on your giving-list; why not reach out, with some gesture of goodwill, to someone with whom you have had a difficult relationship this year? You could try to make your gifts more personal, as a token of who you are and who they are, and you could make an effort to continue the friendship beyond the ‘once a year’ gesture. And if someone gives to you and you haven’t thought to give to them - a common source of embarrassment - no problem: take it as an invitation to friendship, to which you can always respond at some other time and in some other way. There is always an opportunity for change and growth.

An unconditioned gift that changes who you are - liberating and transformative, underserved and perpetually effective. There might be reasons why we prefer the ‘no commitment’ gifts of Santa Claus, but we also know that the most meaningful gifts are personal; they create or sustain ties of friendship; even if they are things, they represent an interpersonal commitment of love. Christmas is always a mixed blessing, but it is not helped by the Santa songs (or, indeed, by some terrible lines in Christmas carols!). But at its origin it carries the tune of a different kind of gift, which takes no account of desert but changes its recipients in ways they can never forget.