Dear kind-hearted reader,
I hope you’re well as the season of giving approaches. In America the holiday of Thanksgiving looms — the Canadians finished up with it back in October. In many religions there is an equivalent harvest festival, which is generally celebrated any time from September to November.
Samhain is the closest Irish holiday in this ballpark. Our old traditions of harvest frolics are back in August for our solar holiday of Lughnasadh. So we don’t have an official equivalent for Thanksgiving in Ireland. On the 1st of November the shops here pivoted instantly from Gothic skulls on black and orange to showcasing tinselled trees and blinking reindeer while pumping out sentimental seasonal songs.1 The latest addition is the adoption of European-style Christmas markets. My local city of Galway turned on its holiday lights and opened its Christmas market the weekend Storm Debi blew into town.
Before you think I’m about to devolve into grumpy Grinchesque condemnations of the holiday season, and start spouting phrases like ‘down with the capitalist gift-giving money machine’, I’m afraid I’ve mellowed enough in my life to understand that cynicism is a cheap mask to pick up and wear but an exceedingly tiresome one for everyone else to view.
I’m sure I’ll discuss this more around the winter solstice — when I tend to do my annual reflection — but there’s a lot to be said for a holiday that is about appreciating your friends and family and acknowledging that for which you are grateful.
Yet, while giving and gifts are splendid, they can come with pressure as well as pleasure, and occasionally… danger!
Pandora is the poster child of problematic issues around unexpected gifts. If you thought the greatest worry was matching the thoughtfulness or budget of the gift you were given, think again…
Most people know Pandora as the first human woman in Greek mythology —gorgeous, multi-talented, crafty—who was created by the gods to unleash the evils of the world upon humankind, partly as a revenge since Prometheus2, the traitorous deity, had stolen Olympian fire to give it to humans (i.e. the first act of technology theft). In his Theogony and in Works and Days, Hesiod writes the earliest recorded version of the Pandora story. In this she’s the ‘all-gifted’ woman, given to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus.
Prometheus had warned his brother never to accept a bounty from the gods, and especially not from Zeus. Epimetheus must have been quite the smitten dunderhead. Pandora arrived with a large terracotta storage jar known as a pithos, and everyone assumed it must be full of wine to celebrate that she’s being handed over to a stranger as if she’s property.
When you think about it that way, it may not be so surprising that Pandora unsealed the jar and scattered out all the evils of the world, the ‘baneful anxieties for humankind’. The only thing that remained inside the jar was hope—and she sealed it in.3
That’s ice cold revenge!
If you start digging into what is clearly a piece of propaganda that states that women are a ‘pernicious race’, you start to figure out that Pandora is probably a much earlier goddess.
For instance, that epithet, ‘all-gifted’, might actually be ‘all-giving’, from the other name noted for Pandora: Anesidora4, which translates as ‘she who sends up gifts’. This is a designation often applied to the Greek earth goddess Demeter (who may have been coopted from a previous Bronze age culture). When you examine other archaeological relics that depict Pandora, her provenance appears more complicated. She was probably an older goddess from an assimilated people who was warped into the bringer of evils as an act of cultural domination.
That is a dastardly act of malicious re-gifting.
Yet, when it comes to festivals, the Greeks knew when to let loose, for it’s their holiday, Kronia (honouring their god, Kronos), that would be transformed by the Romans into Saturnalia (honouring their equivalent god, Saturn). The Romans moved the festival to December, and over time it grew from a three-day event to a seven-day bawdy shindig to celebrate the winter solstice.
The last days were known as the Sigillaria, since figurines (sigilla) were given as gifts. These could be pottery, pasta or even biscuits, as the festival evolved. Each Roman household had a lararium, a shrine to the family’s guardian spirits, where daily observations were held to keep them appeased and honoured. These domestic spirits— known as the lares—were displayed as pottery figurines or artwork, alongside others depicting family members who had passed on. During the Sigillaria the statues were arranged and cleaned by the children of the family, a forerunner to the modern nativity scene. Offerings of food and wine were left with the lares overnight, and magically transformed into sweets and treats for the children the following morning. Some concepts of gift exchange are so strong they remain with us throughout the centuries.
On one of the days of the Saturnalia, the rigid hierarchical system was upended, and the heads of the households had to wait upon their servants. This became the Feast of Fools by the early 4th century, where junior clergy in the Catholic Church were able to boss around their superiors. This was a particularly persistent tradition, and was also known as the ‘Maister of merry disports’ or ‘Abbot of Unreasons’. For instance, in England, King Henry VII (1485-1509) enjoyed the conceit, and elected a servant as ‘Lord of Misrule’ to preside over the court’s Twelve Day celebrations.
When the Puritans came along they put an end to all this nonsense, and the tradition of role reversal faded away over time.
The difficult aspect of giving gifts that arises at times is the obligation or the pressure to return a present with equal value or thoughtfulness. Some cultures have a complicated set of social rules about this, which could involve what is suitable for the occasion, how it is presented, etc. Japan is famed for its customs about gifts.
A good overview is this article: A Guide to the Japanese Gift Giving Etiquette. What interested me is that the oseibo — the winter gift / end of the year gift — which often is food or beverages, is falling out of popularity. People are feeling too much pressure to respond to too many presents, and some companies have asked people not to exchange gifts. In fact, this is often the case in Western companies or even within families, where a ‘Kris Kringle’ (Secret Santa) is bought within a strict budget, and allows everyone the joy of receiving a small present without any burden to match an outlandish gift.
Yet in Japan, the oseibo custom has transformed slightly. Traditions are always morphing, and the influence of other cultures changes the way we view our systems. This is not always bad of course, but there is a bit of a clever repackaging going on here to keep the cash registers chiming.
‘For many Japanese, oseibo seems to have been overtaken by a recently imported custom, the exchange of Christmas presents. While oseibo carries the nuance of a public obligation, Christmas gifts are considered to be a more private expression. Christmas gifts are usually given to family members, or close friends, not business associates. In a sense, marketers in Japan very cleverly built upon the existing idea of giving a gift at year-end, and reshaped it into something with a more modern and personal feeling.’5
There will always be people who we can never match for the scope of their thoughtfulness and the extent of their planning. The best of them are unconcerned about what they receive in return, but revel in the joy of bestowing their boons upon the people they love.
In those extraordinary cases, it is best to accept graciously. You may never even approach their level of gift expertise, so suck up the feeling of inadequacy and thank them kindly.6
For those of you who enjoyed the funny TV series Parks and Recreation, here’s a supercut of the esteemed Leslie Nope (Amy Poehler), demonstrating to one and all that she is the Mater of Gifts.
Of course, some of them skip Halloween and aim straight for the big holiday finale of the year.
Prometheus endured an awful punishment: he was bound to a rock, and an eagle—the bird that represented Zeus—was sent to eat his liver. Since Prometheus was a god, his liver would regenerate overnight, only to be consumed again the next day, playing out a perpetual cycle of torment. The major lesson here: the Greek gods — Zeus especially — were enormously cruel and insecure divas with superpowers. In a nice addendum, in some stories Prometheus eventually escapes, thanks to Hercules. The arrow that slew his avian foe is now a constellation in our skies (Oistos/Sagitta).
Hesiod — Works and Days.
As seen on a cup in the British Museum.
(I would recommend being wary of a goddess holding a pithos, however.)
For some reason, probably a bad translation, the jar Pandora carried became a box, and "Pandora's Box" became a symbol of forbidden knowledge.