The midwinter masquerade

All the popular feasts in the Christian calendar are concerned either with the Son or the Mother, not with the Father, though prayers for rain, victory, and the King’s or President’s health are still half-heartedly addressed to him. It is only the pure allegiance of Jesus, recorded in the Gospels, that has kept the Father from going “the way of all flesh”…to end as chief cook and buffoon in the midwinter masquerade. That may yet be the Father’s end in Britain, if popular religious forces continue to work in their traditional fashion. An ominous sign is the conversion of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors and children whose feast properly falls on the sixth of December, into white-bearded Father Christmas, the buffoonish patron of the holiday. For in the early morning of Christmas Day, clad in an old red cotton dressing gown, Father Christmas fills the children’s stockings with nuts, raisins, sugar biscuits and oranges; and while the family are at church singing hymns in honor of the newborn king, presides in the kitchen over the turkey, roast beef, plum pudding, brandy butter and mince pies; and finally when the lighted candles of the Christmas tree have guttered down, goes out into the snow—or rain—with an empty sack and senile groans of farewell.

—Robert Graves, The White Goddess