Holi discussion.

[Gene Thursby]

	On Thu, 8 Feb 1996, Vidhyanath K. Rao wrote:
> As I read the heated discussion on Holi, a question crossed my mind:
> Is it usual or correct to describe the "Christmas Party atmosphere"
> as a reenactment of the chaos that preceded the birth of the Savior?
> -Nath
	G. K. Chesterton begins "Christmas and the Aesthetes" with the
words: "The world is round, so round that the schools of optimism and
pessimism have been arguing from the beginning whether it is the right way
up.  The difficulty does not arise so much from the mere fact that good
and evil are mingled in roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly from
the fact that men always differ about what parts are good and what evil." 
	Because neither names like Victor Turner and Ronald Grimes nor
terms like 'liminality' and 'communitas' are recognized in this
discussion, perhaps popular literature will be more effective.  Not only
do I respond in the affirmative to Nath's inquiry, I find its most lively
exemplification (so far as the writers generally identified with my own
region may go) in Lillian Smith's book -Memory of a Large Christmas-
(Norton, 1962) which aptly throws together hog-killing, interracial
interdining, and innocent virgins who are seated at the same dining table
as robbers and rapists from a chain-gang.  Truly a large Christmas, and a
fitting one.
	Moving from popular regional literature to popular history, J.M. 
Golby and A.W. Purdue in -The Making of the Modern Christmas- (Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 1986) offer a fairly long menu of similar
fare:  "Thus we find St Gregory Nazianzen, who died in AD 389, warning his
flock against '...feasting to excess, dancing and crowning the doors' and
urging 'the celebration of the festival after an heavenly and not after an
earthly manner'.  Many a priest, prelate or minister has preached to his
congregation in similar vein, from AD 389 to AD 1986.  The 'gross'
elements of Christmas -- gluttony, drunkenness and the challenge to public
order and discipline represented by indecent plays, the reversal of social
roles and dressing up as the oppositve sex or as animals -- all became the
standard targets of austere and reformist prelates." 
	The same and worse is found in more ambitious regional histories,
such as Ronald Hutton's -The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual
Year 1400-1700- (OUP, 1994). 
	I'd study the Christmas cycle in much the same way as I'd study 
the Holi cycle.  And I'd stir up about the same amount of resentment in 
either context.  Face it, truth, ambitious scholarship, unfamiliar ways 
of speaking and writing, all hurt.  As the late Ernest Becker hammered 
home in his last major work, it's dangerous to stick out too far.