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Christmas is closely followed by the festival of the 'Innocents' on the twenty-eighth of December. The 'Innocents' are the children King Herod had murdered at Bethlehem. According to a Dutch custom the children appear on Holy Innocents Day in their fathers' and mothers' garments, thereby expressing the unconscious desire to do away with the parents, and showing the 'innocents'' unconscious aggression. Thus the Festival of the Innocents gives us an important clue to the significance of the Christ figure. King Herod corresponds to King Laios, Christ to Oedipus. In one version of the Oedipus story shepherds find the child Oedipus and bring him up; in another, he is put out to sea in a chest like Moses. The shepherds who welcome the birth of Christ correspond to the shepherds in the Oedipus story and the manger to the floating chest.
Other details of European folklore fit into the picture. On this day the children are driven out of their beds with switches, 'as a joke'. In another version of this custom, called 'whipping' or 'peppering', the children beat their parents.
The rebellion against the father was also expressed in the custom of electing a boy bishop, which survived in the form of a farce as late as 1779. There are many similar customs throughout Europe.
This interpretation is undoubtedly correct in the sense that it shows the latent content behind these customs. A seventeenth-century writer, Gregorie, gives the same interpretation of the whipping custom: 'that the memory of Herod's murther might stick the closer; and in a moderate proportion to act over the crueltie in kind.'1 Historically, the interpretation is insufficient, because these customs are not limited to Holy Innocents Day, and are probably much older than Christianity.
The whole ceremonial complex is based on the Roman Saturnalia which spread over the Continent with Roman civilization, and on earlier fragments of a puberty ritual.2