LongWalker, I wonder if Christmas was less important in 19th-century Catholic traditions because there are just so many feast days and other events on the Catholic liturgical calendar compared to the Protestant, which mostly has only Christmas and Easter week to celebrate.
Bill , I would opine the opposite. Catholic feast and feast days abound, and are widely celebrated. Christmas is of course most important, followed by Easter in the the Catholic Liturgy. Saitns and other Feast days are of lesser importance.
Many Feast Days were literally put in place during the Dark Ages by the Popes because there was so much warring going on. A Holy Day literally stopped all fighting during the observed days. Anybody who violated that was both excommunicated and outlawed, and thus fair game to be cut down and their posessions confiscated.
Remember - in those days Holy Ground was universally honored, anyone who made it to a church
could claim Sanctuary. And being outlawed was death sentence.
But I digress- Catholic Feast and Holy Days were followed by the masses, with lots of celebration.
Some protestants did not celebrate much, due to the fact that Cromwell and the Puritans were super grumpy over the excesses of the Anglican Church ( started by Henry 8, who proclaimed himself boss), and Puritans banned all celebration, and that seemed to follow many Protestants over here.
On one end of the era, we have descriptions and accounts of Christmas celebrations at the various trading posts. Towards the other end, we have the accounts of Portugee Phillips interrupting the annual Yuletide Ball when he rode into Fort Laramie in 1866. The descriptions of Christmas traditions and celebrations are almost exclusively Protestant, forgetting the fact that an awful lot of folks--especially in Texas, along the Santa Fe Trail, and further west in California--were Catholic. Offhand, the only descriptions of Catholic Christmas celebrations and traditions I can recall are from Taos.
AH Longwalker, thanks for the remiinder!
I previously discussed the Germanic, Scandinavian, and other Euro Immigrants who brought their traditions, The Yule, trees,
holy, ivy, mistletoe, greenery, etc.
But we seem to be neglecting the widespread and long lived ( over 400 year) Christmas traditions of the Great Southwest!
Anywhere affected by the Spanish Catholic influence, from California through Texas, we find somewhat modified and transformed Catholic Christmas traditions were followed by many communities, including the Pueblos, and by many Protestants.
these include Christmas and New Years Fiestas, La Posada, luminaria, farolitos, other Nativity Plays, and Pueblo Midwinter
Dances that co-exist beside Catholic traditions.
Any town large enough to have a church also hosted Christmas socials where people would
gather, sing carols and hymns, and celebrate.
The early 16th century missionary historian Toribio de Benavente Motolinia described luminarias in use by Native Americans in Colonial Mexico, to illuminate midnight church services in outdoor chapels, and on their rooftops on Christmas Eve.
The luminaria is placed at the entrance to the home or in the middle of a courtyard. In New Mexico many traditional Spanish Colonial homes have a central open courtyard with a large entrance gate; the luminaria is placed at the gate. In traditional Pueblo villages, where the entrances to homes are rooftops, the luminaria may be placed on a rooftop.
For some people the tradition includes lighting a new luminaria each night of Las Posadas (nine nights in all), and rebuilding and lighting those from the previous nights. Thus, on the first night there is a single luminaria, and on the ninth night there are nine, all in a line leading to the gate.
In some other traditional communities in New Mexico a single large luminaria is ignited on Christmas Eve after the evening meal, on a mountain lookout where the light may be visible to the entire community.
Rarely, use of the luminaria begins even earlier, on December 12 after the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This is said to be related to Native American (Pueblo) beliefs.
http://www.nmhistorymuseum.org/blog/2014/12/legend-of-the-luminarias-uh-farolitos/In a Dec. 3, 1590, journal entry, Spanish explorer Gaspar Costaño de Sosa mentioned the small bonfires his cohorts had lit to guide a scout back to camp. Luminarias, he called them, thereby casting the first stone in a 400-year-old, northern-versus-southern New Mexico debate over the little paper bags that light up our holiday nights.
“They’re farolitos,” folks north of La Bajada Hill insist.
“Luminarias,” everyone from Albuquerque on down says.
Over the years, even linguists have disagreed. Their arguments for and against fill a fat file at the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library at the New Mexico History Museum. Among the certainties is this: Before the 1872 invention of flat-bottom paper bags, before the ready availability of votive candles, and before electricity and strings of “icicle lights,” New Mexicans marked the paths to their doors and the local church with small, Sosa-style bonfires on Christmas eve—symbolically lighting the way for the Holy Family.
Chinese paper lanterns found their way to Santa Fe via the 18th-century Manila galleons and El Camino Real, but the paper was so fragile that outdoor use was rare. Once cheaper paper bags arrived on the Santa Fe Trail, locals discovered they could fold down the tops, anchor them with a few handfuls of sand, and set a small candle inside for a more subtle display that didn’t deplete the winter woodpile.
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Then there are the 9 Days of Las Posadas celebrated by Catholics, Protestants and Pueblos in The Great Southwest.
https://taos.org/events/las-posadas/ Las Posadas is a novenario (nine days of religious observance) beginning 16 December and ending 24 December.
Las Posadas is Spanish for lodging, or accommodation, which in this case refers to the inn in the story of the nativity of Jesus. It uses the plural form as the celebration lasts for a nine-day interval (called the novena) during the Christmas season. The novena represents the nine-month pregnancy of Mary, the mother of Jesus celebrated by Christians.
The celebration has been a tradition in Mexico for 400 years. Many Mexican holidays include dramatizations of original events, a tradition which has its roots in the ritual of Bible plays used to teach religious doctrine to a largely illiterate population in Europe as early as the 10th and 11th centuries. These plays lost favor with the Church as they became popularized with the addition of folk music and other non-religious elements, and were eventually banned; only to be re-introduced in the sixteenth century by two Spanish saints as the Christmas Pageant, a new kind of religious ceremony to accompany the Christmas holiday.
The old winter solstice festival was one of the most important celebrations of the year and it was on December 12 according to the Julian calendar. But Spanish missionaries replaced it with the custom of the re-invented religious pageant to Mexico, where they used it to teach the story of Jesus' birth to Mexico's people. In 1586, Friar Diego de Soria obtained a papal bull from Pope Sixtus V, stating that a Christmas Mass (misa de Aguinaldo), be observed as novenas on the nine days preceding Christmas Day throughout Mexico.
While its roots are in Catholicism, even Protestant Latinos and Anglos follow the tradition. It may have been started by early friars who combined Spanish Catholicism with the December Aztec celebration of the birth of Huitzilopochtli.The Las Posadas text and ritual are also strongly identified throughout the Rio Grande with converso settlers.
yhs
prof marvel
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