ENVS 045. 'Tis the Season: Festivals of Solstice, Yule, and Christmas

(Cross-listed as RELG 058 )
What is time and temporality? What makes festival and holiday time different from other seasons of the year? This course investigates the complex of ritual traditions known today as the Winter Solstice, Yuletide, and Christmas.

Through a combination of primary and secondary textual and multimedia sources, students will consider what these holiday traditions reveal about the ways in which humans make the experience of time meaningful. Students will encounter the long history of Christianization in Europe and its global spread via economies of colonialism during the Modern Period, and will analyze the ways in which Christian religious authorities and institutions negotiate(d) with indigenous, land/nature-based spiritualities.

From conifer trees to flying reindeer and the cryptozoological legends of Krampus, students will consider December holiday rituals and lore as a special form of ecological knowledge that holds potential to relate humans to the earth, animals, plants, and the seasonal passage of time in more intimate and expansive ways.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Eligible for ENVS
Fall 2023. Padilioni.
Catalog chapter: Environmental Studies  
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/environmental-studies


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