I am not interested in a serious debate about the most suitable theory there is on the market nor am I willing to discuss it in a romantic way. But I am somehow interested how different perspectives and researchers from different areas would describe a phenomena like Christmas with their own 'scientific' words.
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From a neo-institutional perspective one might argue that Christmas is an institutional establishment of the society, a social practice which was originally ment to come together with your family and friends, to have a time of reflection, to calm or slow down a bit, to think about the ones which are not as lucky as you and in any way donating to the poor in whatever kind of way. (There might be so many other things, what christmas should be like....).
But, what actually happen is that presents/gifts are getting bigger and bigger, more and more, while the original spirit is left behind. Parents are competing about the best (most expensive !sic) present or the most delightful christmas decoration. Christmas is seen as a kind of competition, which perverts the actual sense of it. (it could go longer and deeper into the subject, I am sorry to leave this out at this point....)
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Please, don't take this to discuss about the sense of christmas in this specific way. I am interested in how a theoretical physicist sees christmas (or at least some particles of it...), or what about the anthropologists, the economists, how would you deal with christmas in medicine or mechanical engineering, what about hydrologists or whatever kind of research area there is.....
You could look up a paper called 'The morality of money' (I think)
Thanks Peter, well, I think I could find a many papers/books on it. Unfortunately I am not interested in this specific interpretation only. I would like to know how one could describe the phenomena christmas, or the christmas tree, or whatever there is nowadays connected to christmas. Do you have a certain theory you like/use in your works that could describe certain christmas issues?
A less romantic view: theory of gifts (e.g. Marcel Mauss) and social exchange theories.
Yes. It is an anthropological starting point (e. g. three necessities for exchanging gifts) for the American social exchange theories (George c: Homans, Peter Blau, Linda Molm etc.).
Julian, that is a very compressed analysis. Thanks a lot. Do you think a chemist or physicist could find a similar analysis, or how would it look like? (Forced solidarity could be something like heating up a fluid to make the 'interaction' between its particles more likely or so)
For a theoretical physicist it is most probably the birthday of sir Isaac Newton (and hence, indirectly the birthday of theoretical physics itself) - 25th Dec. 1642 (in the Julian calender). ;)
But as a physicist I am not sure what you want to know - physics deals with measurable/calcuable questions. Therefore the view of a (theoretical) physicist about christmas will always be a personal one and not a scientific one which implies that his answer is as good as anyone elses...
You will get more promising scientific answers from psychologists, sociologists, theologists or anthropologists, etc... but maybe not from the natural sciences.
Here is an anthropologically oriented article on "Festivus" - the TV-inspired parody of Christmas that originated in the Seinfeld show but later became a (minor) cultural phenomenon in its own right:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10253866.2012.662832
Thanks for your answers.
@Johannes: I am basically looking for analogy-making from other sciences. As it was Christmas I thought I start a first test with a topic lying at hand :) Thus I don't think a physicist would only have a personal view on Christmas. You could probably make so many analogies you can't even imagine. Try it!
@Nikhilesh: Thanks for the article. What is your Christmas analogy from your research background?
Hi Ronny!
do you want a concise picture of the whole celebration or parts of it? And in which country. To my experience in each country or even part of a country the customs are different.
I could go for an analogy of building-up tension and desire to the christmas eve with the particle accelerator. In a particle accelerator, particles pass through kind of magnets to boost their speed till they reach a max velocity (energy) when they collide. I could say that similarly in the different christmas traditions (advent for protestants, fast for orthodox) the individual is prepared for the big celebration, the big x-mas dinner ("collision point").
Then, for the xmas eve itself... I might say that it resembles a Higgs field. The Higgs field is believed to exist and when elementary particles, such as electrons, interact with it they acquire their mass. In the analogy the higgs field is the room, maybe the xmas tree. People tend to gather around the xmas tree resembling a heavy particle. Or the person with the best gift gets a lot of attention, also, resembling a heavy particle. On the other hand, a boring present, the 'crazy' aunt or the easter bunny get little or no attention, making them very light particles or massless ones.
That was a quick thought that came to me as I was reading the post. I m not sure if it makes any sense or if it's of any help.
There is an interesting paper I remember reading called "The Dead Weight Loss (DWL) of Christmas" if you want a particularly economics perspective. Although I believe most measures of Christmas do not really measure the addition to society that comes from the psychological boost (and a few days off) to output.
Waldfogel, Joel. "The deadweight loss of Christmas." The American Economic Review 83.5 (1993): 1328-1336.
From an accounting perspective, it would be seen as "year end" where we reconcile the years books, and prepare a financial report, which is commonly known as a "glossy" because even though legislation does not require it, companies have in a sense of one-up-man-ship developed ever larger documents for public consumption. As in the modern day Christmas of today, even though it is no pt neccessary we have slowly developed larger, more extravagant means of showing "love" but as scandals such as Enron show, even with the most pretty reports, darkness can hide within the figures. Christmas has lost it's soul, and become more of a competition. Where we come together as a family and compare ourselves and see how did better. Much as we do within business. As soon as earning are released by a big corporation, analysts are ready to pull it to shreds, as much as we in the family structure will tear apart one another's successes. I know that Christmas dinners can often end up becoming debates about which cousin did better. Or who was right or wrong. But as I said in the beginning it is also a time of "reconciliation" as a family, we come together, exchange information so as to have a full picture of the year. This is what financial reporting aims to achieve, a full detailed picture of the year. But recently it has only become a glossy wad of papers that later become dust-covered in the cupboard or are placed on the CEO's coffee table.
'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' from Erving Goffman is an interesting frame to analyze social interaction in a specific settings. Especially christmas and those awkward family settings and idyllic world habitus evokes stagy performances... ;)
@Benedikt and Matthew: Thanks for your contribution.
As the "special time of the year" is heavily approaching again, I wanted to pick up the question again. Do you have some more ideas "this year"? :)
Could we maybe find some analogies from mathematics, like some special series which could explain the perfect alignment of candles on the christmas tree?!
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