Why Santa Goes Down the Chimney

Why does Santa go down a chimney?

It has nothing to do with baby Jesus or Christianity. It has everything to do with winter customs in Siberia.

Think about it—chimneys aren't made to fit people, especially not fat people. In London, chimney sweeps were often young boys who got scrotal cancer from going in naked to ease the terrible conditions, sometimes getting stuck and never returning. Here we see the first known cases of cancer from chemicals entering through sweat glands, and the first known age restrictions on workers.

We are not meant to be going into European-style chimneys.

I tried finding a picture of anyone with customs of entering a chimney. And I finally found it—a single entry in a traveler's notebook, in Siberia from 1882.

This gets us to a place, even giving us a hint at the idea of a North Pole. But look at the customs of the people, and the rest of the Christmas story emerges from the blur.

The Universal Celebration

The entire way we celebrate Christmas can be told without any hint of a religious Christmas—until we think about the longest-living form of religion that's ever existed: the marvel of nature. The cyclical nature of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun that gives life but also takes it away.

We get to a universal celebration of the sun in the harshest climates of the world to really understand what the winter solstice could mean for people—from Siberian snow to Egyptian desert.

The solstices in Egypt happen to coincide with the rising and flooding of the Nile. While their seasons have totally different temperatures, they still have major traditions and celebrations tied to midwinter and midsummer. Same as everywhere in the world. People find ways to track and record the sun's movements—especially on the solstice—three days when the sun stands still, rising and falling in the same place before going back on its trajectory.

We see ancient Hawaiians lining up ancient heiau’s, religious rock structures facing the water to watch the solstice sun rising and setting. We see Native Americans waiting all year for the foods and music and change of seasons, just as people in Asia do the same.

Our most universal human tradition is praising the sun. Celebrating its birthday, as the Egyptians saw it. But in folklore worldwide, it was a day of triumph—especially in places where winter meant fragility and death and hardly any food. Knowing each day will have longer light gives everyone a reason to celebrate and push through. Winter's far from over in December, but we have the ray of hope knowing each day gets a little more light after this.

When Darkness Reigns

In Alaska, Inuits endure some of the darkest days on record—24 hours of darkness in some places around the solstice. They also have the highest rates of depression and alcohol abuse in these times. Life is not easy this time of year. Winter is a time of death, fighting for survival when the light of the sun is dramatically felt and missed.

Stories worldwide try to explain this loss: Demeter saving Persephone (a mother fighting to get her daughter back from being kidnapped by a lonely underworld god), Isis saving Osiris (a devoted wife searching for her murdered husband, bringing him back to life just long enough to have a child with him).

Interestingly, these epics about the seasons often use women as the heroines—a woman traveler saving the day, saving her family from total destruction. But also saving all of us, giving us spring and summer as Persephone returns, or floods of the Nile that feed and sustain the Egyptians for the year.

Waters tied with solar events. Rain of spring and the vernal equinox—equal days and nights. Flooding of the Nile exactly timed to match the summer solstice.

Learning exactly when the floods would return gave the Egyptians impetus to build a calendar—to track time based on the sun's movements. This gives us our modern calendar, the way we tell time, even the concept of birthdays.

Our First Teachers

People worldwide built monuments to track the stars and sun and moon—the glowing balls of fire and light in the sky we are still mesmerized by. Because for them, the seasons marked life and death. If not prepared properly, one might not have food to make it through the year.

So the celebrations marking these changes were felt very differently. There was urgency to seeing the shadow of the sun reach a certain spot on a monument or pedestal built for such viewing.

Women in Celtic Scotland would rise before the sun, placing dew from clovers on their faces, watching the solstice sunrise above a manmade cliff. The sun cradles in its spot for a few seconds, maybe a minute at most, for the whole year.

This morning ritual wasn't baseless. Turns out dew on plants is more potent at sunrise. One scientist even tried to collect it as medicine with a little dropper, then gave up.

People got used to foods and music sung around these times, remembered from childhood—smells of changing leaves or rising waters that remind them of changes to come. Things to look forward to and plan for. Finding moments to pause and be amazed at the symmetry of it all.

The sun was our first teacher. The stars were our first gods.

The Sacred Dance Above

The sun and moon seem to us to be the exact same size, though they're vastly different distances away. At various moments in time, the moon was supreme—akin to the woman, like the rainbow, ever elusive but eternally beautiful. The sun was consistent, dependable, changing location through the seasons, yes, but only in slight variations that took unimaginable patience and observations over generations to track. The stars were each given names and stories once people realized they could depend on their patterns. The stars helped guide sailors overseas. The sun pulled animals and directed migrations thousands of miles away.

Even the dung beetle moves his ball of dirt around based on the location of the sun, constantly pausing to look up and keep track. Some scientists messed with them for a moment, covering the sun and providing a fake light—totally confusing the little dudes. They were visibly calmer to get the real sun back and get back to work.

We all rely on the sun. The moon turns out to be a broken-off fragment of our earth, but it has given us inspiration for some of our best stories told around campfires. It pulls our tides, and possibly something within us—we are species made up mostly of water.

Women connected to the moon, men to the sun. But some cultures see it differently—women as the sun, men as the moon. Just depends on time and place. We are obsessed with the sun and moon and stars, and why shouldn't we be?

The Price of Questions

People have been killed for saying the sun is a god—and killed for saying it's not. Galileo was persecuted for speculating on the movement of the sun and earth and planets, even though he pledged his life to the religion that condemned him.

We are all made of stardust, recycled matter—all part of that energy that cannot be created nor destroyed. We are literally made of the same gases as the planets.

Our hearts beat, bringing heat to what otherwise wants so badly to equalize in temperature—to meld into the cold around us—just as the earth pulses with heat in a universe of cold space. A strange heat enlivens us both, despite all the reasons to give up, to give in to the cold around us.

The sun shines on us all equally. Not in intensity—the heat is stronger where it is closer—but in a democratizing way that no human can claim more ownership of the sun than any blade of grass. We all fight to get our moment in the light.

We would not be here without it.

This is the foundation of all our religions.

Cooperation and Competition

A cooperation and a competition for light. Staring up at the sky and coming up with a story for what it all means.

We can all look at the stars and be amazed, smile at one another, and wonder. We are all the same in not knowing. The more we know, the more we realize we don't know.

But in our stories of what it means, we fight wars based on which god we think rules. This god on one side, this flag on another.

We are creatures of cooperation. Humans can see the whites of each other's eyes more than any other animal—because it matters what the other person is looking at. We empathize. We go faster alone, but further together. We've never been the biggest or strongest or fastest, or even smartest. Intelligence is subjective—look up an octopus and its hundreds of brains on each tentacle and tell me you're more intelligent. Maybe you think you are. But we've all survived, evolving to be as efficient as we need to be. Bees see more colors than us; other animals see nothing at all. Trees can live 5,000 years. To them, we are a drop in a bucket, ants on a hill. We all have our strengths.

We've dominated the planet not because of our strength, but our cooperation. We can guide bigger animals into traps, but we can't do it alone. Being lonely is as stressful to your body as smoking 14 cigarettes a day. We were made for cooperation—not only with other humans, but all life.

The Sacred Sacrifice

Every time we eat—three times a day or so—something had to die. A sacrifice had to be made. Whether plant or mushroom or animal, every bite was once alive. And we won't be here forever either.

We rely on air, water, food, warmth—things we cannot provide ourselves. We learn from what others taught us.

We are more than competition. Survival of the fittest breaks down on one principle—we are also altruistic. We care about others; we have an instinct to protect, to jump in front of a bus for others. Sure, it's sometimes for our own lineage, our own survival. But many have done this for complete strangers. We were made for cooperation.

Life is about competition for resources—nothing lasts forever, whether time or food—but we thrive in cooperation.

We need other life to live. We rely on the sun coming up every day to regulate us. We rely on something else being alive to eat. We rely on having a member of the opposite sex to have children. We rely on a set of codes designed by some thing or god or whatever—and that is what we are all trying to name as god.

There are patterns to life that we say were created by the thing or person or entity we call god. Some call it an energy. Doesn't matter what you call it. There is a life code. Einstein was trying to find it—he called it a universal code to life. He thought it would be insanely simple but never found it. He wanted to sum all life into an equation—that fractal pattern that repeats itself to no end, or to no known end.

The Evolution of Understanding

Life lives. We went from a single-cell organism to two one day. Life became more complex. Conditions of gases in the air and temperature were favorable enough for one atom to become two. Eyesight appeared on an animal millions of years ago—light shining down hard enough on one spot to transform it into a new kind of reflection of light, connected to a brain—and voila, we have sight. Or at least, some of us do.

One day, humans started to grow the prefrontal cortex, the smallest and newest and least developed part of our brains. But that part is nothing compared to our reptilian brain that keeps us alive—eating, breathing, digesting, creating life when we find someone we love. (Or someone desires us enough to take it without permission, turning one of the most beautiful things in life into one of the most ugly.)

We are still evolving—we still have tailbones. Whales are just cows that went back to the sea.

The point is we all need one another.

Norm, Storm, Perform

And the most important part of it all can be summed as: norm, storm, perform.

We need to learn the basics from those around us. We need to learn the rules of the road, the way to perpetuate life, to eat, to discuss.

Then we storm. We play with it. We see how far we can push it. We find the walls and limits, push further, start over, and try again.

Then we perform. Only after the storm. This applies to group dynamics and personal achievements. We don't start off running; we practice and try and fall and get up. We do it a thousand times before we get good.

But we need the storm. Same goes for religious ideas. We go along with what we were told—sometimes out of necessity, survival, based on the political or social climate. But then we need to figure it out for ourselves, ask the childish questions. See what others are saying and believing around the world. Only then can we say we chose this.

How can you say you're a kind of Christian—one faction of 45,000 different kinds—without knowing what the other 44,999 are? How can you say you know Jesus without knowing about Judaism that he knew and loved? How can you know about Judaism without understanding African religion—at least the Egyptian religion that it fled from?

Did you know Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all stem from the same book? Called the Abrahamic traditions. That guy Abraham came from a city called Ur, whose most popular author in his day was the famous and first known high priestess, our first known author named Enheduanna. And her books, written in stone, discuss epics and songs to her love for Inanna, a stormy, sexy, wise goddess in the sky.

How can we say we know anything at all without understanding the roots of the most popular faiths?

The True Meaning

When one says we need to go back to the true meaning of Christmas, well, it's about the solstice. Truly. Irrevocably. It's about the sun, coming together with those we love, telling stories around the toughest time of the year. Making light of something dark. Thriving in this moment of darkness. Celebrating the sun and life and—most beautifully—our children as the light in the world that perpetuates this life once we're gone.

Every child has light like the rising sun, a new start, a continuation of life and story and legacy.

It's about each of us as divine, each of us made of stardust, each of us with a story to tell. Finding connection amidst diversity.

We thrive in diversity. The reason we liked the Siberian stories was because they were different—the explorers' stories were exploding in the 1800s. The railroads were bringing us deeper into lands untouched by modernity, untouched by Christianity. We found the North Pole in 1901, then 1906—two different men, two different headlines. But a number-one story that mixed into what became Christmas. The Civil War made us crave being together—cartoonists took decades refining a vision of Santa to what the people liked. The Industrial Revolution and rising middle class allowed people to afford all the things that used to be made by hand, meticulously, slowly. But the act of giving, materialistic or not, stems from a beautiful impulse of generosity.

The Real Santa

Santa and Christmas were created by us—humans, our imagination. Santa was never a lie—he was a shaman in Siberia, eating magic mushrooms with his reindeer. Drying mushrooms in socks over the fire, entering through the chimney when doors were blocked by snow. Wearing bells and red to be seen in snowstorms. And mostly celebrating what the reindeer treasured—little red and white psychedelic magic mushrooms that grew under pine trees like presents. Reindeer would push over drunk Russian soldiers to drink their urine because the psychoactive effects remain with less side effects, several times over!

Christmas as celebrated worldwide has nothing to do with Christianity except in name. But its original concept—solstice and sun and light—was celebrated as new life. In German, the celebration was called Mother's Night, celebrating the world as new, as light conquering darkness, and new life entering the world.

The song "Holy Night" isn't so far off. Christmas is about a mother and child—only it doesn't have to be a son, a boy. It can be a girl. The light of the sun has no gender. The joy of life, of becoming a parent, of recognizing our own mother (and father), but truly, the sacrifice our mother made in bringing us into this world. On this day we celebrate mothers—something we all have.

The Sacred Balance

Christmas, in this light, becomes a shared celebration of mothers. Of the glory anyone could have in holding divine light up to that spark in the sky, saying, my god (or goddess), I made this.

The beauty of becoming a parent, of bringing life into this world. Every child is a beacon of hope, a new day, a fresh start.

Whether you have kids, or plan to, or don't, Christmas is about the creation of life. Of love creating life. A combination of forces coming together as a balance of female and male energy—at its best, at its intended process: love creating life.

And if we don't have kids, we celebrate our mothers, our fathers. The kids we can help take care of. The child in ourselves that was once hurt or damaged. We can celebrate every human in our lineage that saw you as their dream, their hope for the future, untold generations back.

The Healing Waters of Rebirth

We can all be traumatized by loved ones or family or parents or anyone. We can all feel the loss of losing them or never having them. But we can also heal. We may feel alone sometimes. But we can always see hope.

The sun will always rise again.

It is up to us to see beauty in the world. Because one day, when it all goes wrong, when it all goes to shit, we want our children to remember there is beauty in the world.

The sun will rise again.

This is our chosen rebirth—not based on politics or inherited guilt, but on information, on understanding, on the waters of knowledge that wash over us and make us new. Like birth itself, it begins with water. Like every sacred story of transformation, we must go under to come up clean.

We are the authors of our own meaning now. We are the shamans entering through the chimney of our own understanding, bringing gifts of wisdom to the children we once were, and to the children we're raising now.

The fire is always burning. We just have to choose to tend it.