The meaning of Christmas

Happy Friday, everyone—and, as my four-year-old daughter would say, carefully counting on her fingers: happy Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve.

Montessori said a few things about Christmas directly—she was skeptical of encouraging credulity about Santa Claus, for example. But I don’t think she had much experience with the modern, post-Dickens, post-Moore, Anglo-American version of the holiday—the version with an intense focus on family and gifts and lights and decorated trees in one’s living room, the version that most of us are familiar with.

The meaning of our Christmas is: a celebration of abundance with intimates. It takes the pagan idea of defying the darkest day of the year with fire and light, and runs it through 19th-century romanticism about the family and 20th-century innovation and wealth. Our “fire and light”, in the face of winter, is cheap electricity pumped into our homes from massive rotors and stators, hot chocolate delivered from West Africa, and gifts, especially for children, wrapped beautifully and unwrapped joyfully around a hearth.

It’s a ritual, not for professing exceptionally different values than the ones we live by day to day, but for spiritualizing a whole way of life, commercial and familial, that we can easily take for granted.

On that general topic—on spiritualizing our distinctly modern way of life that we often discount—Montessori had a great deal to say.

After World War II, Montessori reflected on the persistent darkness in humanity. Mankind had shown itself to be “a monster when adult—bloodthirsty, indulging in continuous slaughter.” This, despite the fact that

peace-loving men, men endowed with the best intentions, have earnestly tried to create a world where peace could reign. And they have not succeeded. Think how hard humanity has worked toward this ideal of peace, how many moral guidelines they have laid down. “Love one another” has been preached for centuries, and yet peace has not come. It is as though something more profound were necessary. (1946 London Lectures, pp. 1-2)

On the other hand, humanity is neither merely nor mainly a monster. She insisted on this, even in the immediate aftermath of the War and its horrors. The central feature of humanity is not its wars, but its creations.

We only have to look at civilization to realize the greatness of which man is capable. … Think of how many things man has created—the wireless [radio], to mention but one. Look around at all we have—small, great, or beautiful—whatever it is, it has been created by man. … Although we try to do everything we can to enhance our comfort, we do not consider the greatness of man, we only consider his defects. We do not consider man, the creator. (ibid., p. 5)

Our everyday practices of commerce and exchange, our participation in a world ripe with invention, the accumulated infrastructure and beauty of the centuries—these, Montessori thought, are profound things. They are commonplace, often forgotten and not infrequently jeered at. But they speak to the essence of the human spirit.

It’s striking to me, in the Christmas seasons, that Montessori chose the radio—a gadget, one that would become even more gadget-like, commercialized, casually gift-able in the decade after her death—as a symbol of “the greatness of which man is capable.”

Montessori’s solution to the problem of world disunity was to advocate for humanism: to advocate that we should center our hearts and minds on “the greatness of man” rather than “his defects”. A big part of the way to do this, according to her, was to understand and appreciate the everyday reality of life in an industrial, globalized, progressing civilization.

Montessori wrote that “today men have taken refuge on a plateau upon which they live, strongly bound, above nature; that is to say, men have created a super-nature.” She notes that “Man has accomplished a great feat in establishing a near-perfect system of exchange, similar to the circulatory system of the human body”—giving the examples of different professions contribute their different forms of expertise in a way that adds up to a larger sum, or how food is imported and exported all over the world, or, another invention alongside the radio: how air travel had become possible (in her lifetime for the first time).

Humans work together in all modes and at all scales, and have succeeded at conquering nature.

“Why then”, she asks,

do we persist in saying that we should educate men to aim for universal unity? World unity is there already; it exists! The issue, therefore, is to do everything possible to help mankind become conscious of this reality, substituting the perception of a need to create union among men by the revelation that ties of interdependence and social solidarity among the peoples of the earth already exist, real and strong. (San Remo Lectures, p. 16)

We have, as a species, ascended. All of us live in—inherit and interact with and contribute to—a world utterly transformed for our comfort and well-being. Our lives are interwoven with those of others at many scales, allowing for overlapping tapestries of voluntary interdependence. And yet… we aren’t all that conscious of these facts as stated. We’ve solved so many problems, but our lack of self-awareness about those solutions presents as its own kind of problem.

As you might imagine, Montessori’s primary focus in helping people “become conscious of this reality” is the education of children. But it’s not the only way.

We, all of us, children and grownups, benefit greatly from periodically surfacing the personal significance of abundance. Christmas is the most important ritual for this purpose. It brings all of the comforts of civilization beautifully into the home, turning our abundance into a vehicle for warmth and love.

Nothing is more ordinary than a child. But Montessori believed that if we saw the child just right that it would “refocus our hearts”, that it would explicate and celebrate a half-forgotten worldview that undergirds our lives.

Similarly: to most of us, nothing is more ordinary than electrified homes, affordable consumer goods and delectables, and a very particular kind of loving family. I believe that if you array them just so on Christmas day that it will refocus your heart, it will explicate and celebrate a half-forgotten worldview that undergirds our lives.

Merry Christmas,

Matt Bateman
Board of Directors, Higher Ground Education