The Christmas Mood

52 Weeks of Steiner – Week 10  (This is part of a weekly serial started on Michaelmas 2023. To see the other entries, please see the post linked HERE and scroll down to the bottom for individual links)

The Christmas Festival has begun! The last few years I have taken advent as a time to slowly read through Steiner’s various Christmas lectures. This year, I came across GA 125, The Christmas Festival in the Changing Course of Time. This quote struck me:

For a modern urban dweller it is hardly possible to appreciate truly the full depth of what is connected with our great seasonal festivals. It is hardly possible to experience that magic which like a gentle breeze permeated the mood of soul of those who believed that they bore the Christ in their hearts during the great festivities surrounding Christmas or Easter. Today it has become very difficult indeed, especially for the city dweller, to sense anything of this magic, which permeated humanity like a gentle spiritual breeze during those seasons. For those who have had the opportunity of experiencing even a little of this magic wind which permeated the soul mood in those times this will most certainly be a wonderful, glorious memory. As a young child I was able to behold the last remnants of such a magic wind as it permeated the souls, the mood, of country folk in certain remote German villages. When the Christmas season approached I could behold how something arose in the deepest, innermost soul life of young and old, which differed essentially from the feelings and sentiments that prevailed during the rest of the year. When Christmas approached this could still be sensed quite distinctly in certain farming villages as recently as a few decades ago. The souls had then a natural way of making themselves inwardly beautiful. And they really felt something like this: “Into deepest night-enveloped darkness has the physical sunlight descended during autumn. More outer physical darkness has come about. Long have the nights become, shortened are the days. We must stay home much of the time. During the other seasons we used to go outside, to the fields, where we would feel the golden rays of the morning sun coming to meet us, where we could feel the warmth of the sun, where we could work with our hands during the long days of summer. But now, we must sit inside much of the time, we must feel much, much darkness around us, and we must often see, as we look outside through windows, how the earth is being covered with its winter garment.”

Rudolf Steiner
The Christmas Festival in the Changing Course of Time
GA 125: 22 December, 1910

The beginning of the lecture Steiner discusses how cities are decorated with all the materialistic “props” of the festival, lights trees, angels, while cars zoom around and people rush from place to place, hardly taking them in, and says that the Christmas mood is no longer felt like it once was in the farm villages of years before.

In the shared quote, he discusses all the ways the farmer used to feel the Christmas mood, and throughout the lecture he discusses the deep spiritual connection these communities had with the Christmas play and the importance it played in carrying the Christmas mood through the entire season, from the start of advent through Epiphany. He calls the more modern plays of his time grotesque and that they have lost all of the mood of times before (which makes me chuckle, because what would he say if he saw the myriad of Christmas movies we have streaming through our souls starting November first, LOL).

I was struck with these questions as I read through the lecture:

1. Were all remnants of the mood lost or were they just in a transformative phase?
2. In many lectures he says we must not blindly follow the traditions of the past because humanity is meant to move forward, so how can we re-enliven this mood into the NEW?
3. As many of us adapt our spiritual leanings towards individual spirituality from organized religion, what does that do to the Christmas mood Steiner laments has been lost?

The first thing that popped into my mind while sitting with these questions is that I see a shift in Christmas all around me. As I speak with friends and family, as well as scroll through Instagram I can see the individualization of Christmas coming to life.

There is an impulse to embrace the darkening days and focus on staying home and slowing down. There is a thread between us that keeps us from falling victim to the messages of “busy-ness” through the season (as a side note, have you ever noticed that the word business is actually busy-ness and wondered if much of what we call business is just running around keeping busy in an inefficient way and that maybe the job and image of being a business person was created as a way to keep us running and not focused on other, deeper impulses held within us? Just a pondering…).

I have noticed people turning from the materialism associated with Christmas and focusing on the deeply rooted impulse of spending time together, slowing down, and holding our souls open to possibility.

I have noticed those who have stepped away from organized religion and more specifically the following of Christ create their own beautiful celebrations centred around the birth of inner impulses, natural impulses and the symbolism of the growing light. They have embraced spiritualism and higher beings outside of the confines of organized religion. They have found freedom within the Christmas Festival.

If you have read many of Steiner’s lectures you’ll understand that the Christ impulse is about being open to the higher beings and the soul and spiritual life within and with-out us, regardless of religion and is not so specifically about Jesus Christ. I have many friends who are of different religions who discuss the Christ Impulse in relation to their beliefs, welcoming spirit into their lives as guidance and inner strength. And the Christ Impulse goes further beyond that when spoken of in relation to festivals. It is not just an impulse within the Christmas festival, but a thread connecting all festivals year round. This bigger picture of the breathing of life/nature and spirituality through the year.

So, yes, I believe we can cultivate this Christmas mood Steiner speaks of within our modern society, because we already are! Every step towards individualization and away from materialism is a step towards the Christmas mood. Every step towards realizing these festivals do not stand alone and a part of a greater cycle of the year is a step towards the Christmas mood. The ways of the times that Steiner felt the echo of when he was young were privative and must evolve if we are to evolve. But of course, Steiner already knew this. He goes on to say further down the lecture:

What people brought to the Christmas season by these primitive memories and thoughts of the greatest event of human evolution, this could only be carried by a mood such as we described. Therefore, we must find it quite understandable that in the place of this former poetry, this simple primitive art, we have today the prose of electric railways and automobiles, speeding forth so grotesquely between rows of Christmas trees. An aesthetically sensitive eye must find it impossible to view these two kinds of things together: Christmas trees, Christmas sales, and cars and electric trains running through their midst! Today this impossible situation is naturally accepted as a matter of course. But for an aesthetically sensitive eye it remains nevertheless something impossible. Even so, we want to be friends of our civilization, not enemies. We want to understand that it must be so as a matter of course.”

I like to believe, and in fact can see proof, that our aesthetically sensitive eyes have also evolved to a point where we can filter the noise and see the both together, side by side. But what strikes me in this paragraph are these words: Even so, we want to be friends of our civilization, not enemies. We want to understand that it must be so as a matter of course.

Yes, yes, yes!! We are so often pulled to move backwards, towards simpler times, but we must keep moving forward and bring simplicity to OUR times!

Why is this so? Because in the course of time humanity must evolve, because what is most intimate, what is greatest and most significant at one time, cannot remain so in the same way for all times. Only an enemy of evolution would want to drag what was great in one time over into other times. Each period of time has its own special mission. In each period we must learn how to enliven in ever new ways what should enter the souls and hearts of man. Our time can only appreciate that real Christmas mood, which I have sketched here in brief outline, if this mood is seen as a historic memory, a thing of the past. Yet, if we do accept the symbol of the Christmas tree also into our own festival gatherings, we do so precisely because we connect with Spiritual Science the thought of a new Christmas mood of mankind, of progressively evolving mankind. For Spiritual Science means to introduce the secrets of Christ into the hearts and souls of man in a way that is appropriate for our time. Even though modern conveyances rush past us when we step outdoors, or perhaps will even fly away with us through the air — and soon these things will awaken humanity quite differently to the most sobering and terrifying prose — nevertheless men of today must have a chance to find again the divine-spiritual world, precisely by an even stronger and more meaningful deepening of the soul. This is the same divine-spiritual world which in bygone centuries appeared before the eyes of those primitive minds when they saw at Christmas time the Holy Child in the manger. Today we need other means to awaken this mood in the soul. Certainly we may like to immerse ourselves in what past times possessed as ways to find the Christ Event, but we must also transcend what depends on time. Ancient people approached the secrets of Nature by merging with her through feeling. That was only possible in a primitive time. Today we need other means.”

I love when Steiner does this. He often waxes poetic about time gone by and how humanity had a deep soul connection to spirituality, and then half way through the lecture, while you are nodding your head and feeling the pull of long ago times, he does a full 180 and says that where we are is exactly where we need to be because we can’t go back and must go forward. Whiplash anyone?

So if we need other means of connecting deeply with the spirituality of this December festival, how do we do that? How do YOU do that? Have you seen the ripples of this happening around you?

I leave you with those ponderings this week.

Until next time,
Marina