Since we tend to blame Covid for most of today’s problems, it’s probably fair to assume that no Christmas Parade in Gisborne has something to do with our plague de jour. But a line of trailers draped in tinsel with kids waving from each never seemed to do much to fire up seasonal spirit, although the Pipe Band and that bloke in red from the North Pole always went down well along Gladstone Road.
What a long and venerable tradition parades have — as have most of our December traditions. Before anyone had heard of a festival named Christmas, clowns and musicians capered their way through the Roman Forum each December, inaugurating the season of goodwill that ran for a week, culminating about the time of the winter solstice. Saturn, the god of harvests was celebrated at this time and effigies of an infant cradled in a winnowing basket of wheat were honoured while evergreens were draped over doorways to symbolise eternal life and the inevitable return of the sun.
In the late 3rd century C.E. one of those intriguingly disagreeable emperors, Diocletian, attempted to establish a state religion that would unify all the peoples of his vast empire. The Persian sun god Mithras, supposedly born of a virgin mother in a rock cave on 25th December, was one convenient figurehead since he was already widely worshipped among the legions. To promote the cult, Diocletian ordered a purge of that strange minority movement originating in Judaea with a crucified rebel as its figurehead. Christian scriptures were burned, places of worship torn down. It was brief but bloody, distinguished rather strangely by mutilations of priests rather than your run of the mill mass slaughters.
Diocletian was the last of those very few emperors who occasionally persecuted Christians. Despite Hollywood’s misconceptions that seem to have largely shaped modern views of antiquity, you could believe whatever you liked in the Roman world, so long as you acknowledged the supremacy of the Pontif Maximus in his imperial purple. Christians tended not to do so and were on rare occasions oppressed for this intransigence. By 305 C.E. Diocletian had done his worst and retired to his vast holiday palace at Split in Dalmatia where he could enjoy his hobby of growing cabbages. Yet strangely, within a matter of decades, Christianity emerged as a fully-fledged state religion, largely due to the efforts of morose and murderous Constantine, persuaded by his Christian mother, Helena.
All those mid-winter festivities so enjoyed by the masses became synonymous with remembering the birth of Jesus, although no one could be sure of the exact date. In the early 5th century the task of researching was given to a monk, Dionysius Exiguus, who thought it was dead easy since Luke’s Gospel says it was in the seventh year of the reign of Augustus. Originator of that history divider, B.C. and A.D. (Anno Domini), Exiguus badly miscalculated. That is why his theoretical Year One A.D. was out by at least four years and according to most historians, more like seven. It means we are actually celebrating not 2,021 years since that Bethlehem birth but probably about 2,028 years since the event.
