The trace of the gift: a phenomenology of Christmas

I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol Epiphany marks the end of Christmas in the Western tradition and the arrival of three wise men from the east, bearing gifts for the infant Christ: gold, frankincense and myrrh, popularly associated with respectively kingship, cultic worship, and the embalming of the dead. Fitting then that for Claude Lvi-Strauss, Christmas is a ritual of exchange representing an improvement in our relationships with death. According to Strauss it is no longer the traditional fear of spirits and ghosts that prevails, but instead a dread of everything death represents, both in itself and in life: degeneration, dessication, and deprivation. He exhorts us to reflect upon the tender care we take of Father Christmas, the precautions and sacrifices we make to keep his prestige intact for the children. The question, he asks, is it not that, deep within us, there is a small desire to believe in boundless generosity, kindness without ulterior motives, a brief interlude during which all fear, envy, and bitterness are suspended? Even though we cannot fully share the illusion, he suggests that sharing with others at least gives us a chance to warm our hearts by the flame that burns in young souls. The belief that we help to perpetuate in our children that their toys come from 'out there' gives us an alibi for our own secret desire to offer them to those 'out there' under the pretext of giving them to the children. In this way, Christmas presents remain a true sacrifice to the sweetness of life, which consists first and foremost of not dying. Wrapping, argues Lvi-Strauss, simply overlays the mass-produced product with sentiment and with the giver's identity; the belief in Father Christmas is not just a hoax imposed by adults on children for fun; it is, to a large extent, the result of a very onerous transaction between the two generations. He is part of a complex ritual, like the evergreens pine, holly, ivy, mistletoe with which we decorate our homes. Today a simple luxury, in some regions they were once the object of an exchange between two social groups. Lvi-Strauss therefore asks where in our being-toward-death might Father Christmas be placed, at least from the point of view of religious typology? He is not a mythic being, for there is no myth that accounts for his origin or his function. Neither is he a legendary figure, since there is no semi-historical account attached to him. As a supernatural and immutable being, eternally fixed in form and defined by an exclusive function and a periodic return Strauss concludes that he belongs more properly to the family of the gods. Moreover, children pay him homage at certain times of the year with letters and prayers; he rewards the good and punishes the wicked. Dressed in scarlet, Lvi-Strauss suggests, [Father Christmas] is a king. His white beard, his furs and his boots the sleigh in which he travels evoke winter. He is called 'Father' and he is an old man, thus he incarnates the benevolent form of the authority of the ancients. This figure has many names Father Christmas, Santa Claus, Saint Nick and in his brief anthropological survey Lvi-Strauss is clearly making an implicit association between Pre Nol and the wise men (or kings) of Epiphany. But whilst the name of his home may itself be derived from the myrrh it exported and a Dutch speaker might well recognise Santa Claus as a form of Sinterklaas (the common Dutch agglutination of Sint Nicolaas), little is known about Saint Nicholas of Myra. Only a single reference a trace survives from the late sixth century life of Saint Nicholas of Sion, some two and a half centuries after Nicholas' death: And going down to the metropolis of Myra, he went off to the martyrium of the glorious Saint Nicholas.

In his thirteenth-century life of the saint, Jacob of Varazze recorded that Nicholas' parents were celibate following his birth; the infant Nicholas restrained himself to a twice weekly feeding at his mother's breast, but the narrative that sealed Nicholas' glorious reputation is a misfit, depending neither on the saintly planks of celibacy and asceticism. All through the year, notes Lvi-Strauss, we tell children Father Christmas is coming, to remind them that his generosity is in proportion to their good behaviour. Giving presents only at certain times is a useful way of disciplining children's demands, reducing to a brief period the time when they really have the right to demand presents. In fact, the story of Saint Nicholas is one of an original and quite peculiar generosity: destitute and with no suitors, a once prosperous nobleman from Petera in Lycia decided to sell his three daughters into prostitution; as preparations were being made for the eldest daughter's entry into the oldest profession, Nicholas intervened and, not wishing to be identified in his philanthropy, made a nocturnal visit to the nobleman's house and threw a bag of gold through an open window. Upon finding the mysterious gift the next morning, the nobleman used the gold as her dowry. Nicholas visited the house again; however, during his third and final visit, either the window was closed (one tradition has a thwarted Nicholas using the chimney instead, foreshadowing the present-day habits of Santa Claus) or Nicholas was discovered by an inquisitive and grateful father, who chased after Nicholas, pulling back his hood to reveal the identity of the anonymous donor, who begged for discretion. His plea went unheeded; his charity exposed to public scrutiny. In The Recognition of Gift Jean-Luc Marion refines his project of a radical phenomenology of the gift forged from a conceptual pairing of visibility and invisibility intended to expose the tension between what is seen, what remains unseen, and what is in principle invisible in the gift. The gift appears as autonomous simply by being thought independently from its the donor, and thereby loses its given status as an object at risk of possession. If one is to see a gift, notes Marion, which nonetheless remains in principle invisible, one has to draw upon a phenomenology of the invisible. However, lest this formula be dismissed as an absurd contradiction Marion refers us to Heidegger:
What is it that phenomenology is to let us see? What is it that must be called a phenomenon in a distinctive sense? What is it that by its very essence is necessarily the theme whenever we exhibit something explicitly? Manifestly, it is something that which proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all: it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself.

It is the same for the gift, which comes from and is driven by love; it can never be seen and becomes more invisible the more effectively it gives itself, and disappears precisely in direct proportion to its appearing. This is an eidetic law Marion argues: if the donor places the gift on the table...stating loudly that he is giving it for good, and that a gift is a gift, to take it back would be stealing, he makes his gift visible. Furthermore, the more that that which has been given occupies both witnesses and its recipient as some accomplished fact, the less the gift will appear. Because what decides the value and price of the gift on the table (or under the tree) means that it becomes a thing (a present, a tool, etc.), which is either useful or worth something. And the more this thing is given - truly given - and thereby abandoned without any possible return to its donor, the more it becomes a thing, intended only for the naked possession of its user. Its ontic attributes: material, shape, colour, purpose, beauty, worth, market value, etc. define the thing in terms of its those predicates which make it worth having. But the gift - the quality of having been given and the character of donation, is not among those real predicates. As Marion observes, The character of donation can no more be described than it could be used to describe the object itself. The thing which was perhaps once given, is no longer given because, through the accomplishment of the same gift, it becomes the possession of its owner, who does not consider the character of being given among its properties, and this because he takes the thing to be one of his goods. The gift has disappeared as such; the only thing left to see is a possession. Although Marion does not mention it explicitly, this is the Christmas paradox: when a child

receives a gift, he often forgets to say thank you; that is to say, he forgets the donor and in his eagerness to take hold of the gift which was given to him, and thus immediately uses it and abuses it as his possession, thereby forgetting, for a second time, not only the donor, but also the character of donation of the gift. And the gift disappears, surrendering its place to a possession. In effect, concludes Marion, phenomenology understood in all its rigour ultimately strives to make visible that which without it would remain invisible, or more precisely, unseen. In this sense, the invisibility of the gift would indicate a radical phenomenology. But would even so radical a phenomenology be enough to make visible the specific unseen character which constitutes the gift? The Gospel of Matthew the only one of the evangelists to record the arrival of the visitors from the east nowhere mentions either their names or their number, while early Christian art is an inconsistent witness, depicting as many as eight magi. From the seventh century onwards we find regional variations upon the names of Caspar [Gaspar], Melchior, and Balthasar: in Syria they were called Larvandad, Hormisdas, and Gushnasaph; the Ethiopian tradition refers to them as Hor, Karsudan, and Basanater, while in the Armenian church they are called Kagpha [Kagpha], Badadakharida and Badadilma. It is unclear even what they were: the magi (Latin magus; Greek magos, , pl. , magoi, itself a trace of a priestly caste of Persian Zoroastrianism) are referred to as wise men, magicians, astronomers, kings or astrologers. Clearly, what mattered to the biblical witness was less the identity of their donor than the gifts themselves; the names of Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar represent later glosses, the product of an increasingly economic sensibility that needed to associate gifts with a specific donor, particularly the Victorian generosity displayed by Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, an era that witnessed the start of the codification of the iconography of Father Christmas. The phrase Net ikon Kak Nikol [There is no icon like that of Nicholas] evokes the iconic status of Saint Nicholas; in Russian folklore the Epiphany gift-giving of the witch Babushka, condemned for giving the magi the wrong directions to Jerusalem, represents a form of community penance. Rather than simple nostalgia or the ritual analgesic described by Lvi-Strauss and it is a truly Ghostly Idea whose eidetic reduction exploits the logic of the trace to confound its final commodification, and which, as Dickens hoped, continues to pleasantly haunt our homes. Just as for Marion the eucharist resists our attempts at possession, since it maintains a position of exteriority in relation to its celebrating community, then Christmas similarly resists our attempts; like its central figure, the children's patron whose own childhood eludes us, and the stellar event that the magi pursued, Christmas is a saturated phenomenon. Fittingly the apocryphal Protoevangelium of St James (written around 125AD) records, And the wise men said: 'We saw how an indescribably greater star shone among these stars and dimmed them so that they no longer shone.' Bibliography Jeremy Heal, Santa: A Life (London: Picador, 2005) Martin Heidegger (translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson), Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) Claude Lvi-Strauss, 'Le Pre Nol supplici' in Les Temps modernes 77 (March 1952), pp.1572-90; translated as 'Father Christmas Executed' in D. Miller (Ed.), Unwrapping Christmas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 38-51. Jean-Luc Marion, 'The Recognition of the Gift' in Cristian Ciocan (Ed.), Philosophical Concepts and Religious Metaphors: New Perspectives on Phenomenology and Theology (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2009), pp.15-28.