Celebrate Saturnalia like a Roman
The Authentic Way To Praise Saturn This Season
Saturnalia was one of the most important Roman festivals, celebrated with grandeur and gaiety. If you’re looking to experience this lively festival authentically, you’ve come to the right place. Today I’ll explore the traditions of Saturnalia and guide you on how to properly celebrate it!
What is Saturnalia?
Saturnalia was originally celebrated on the 17th of December in honour of Saturn, the god of harvest and farming. It was a time to express gratitude for the previous year’s harvest and anticipate the blessings of the coming year.
The festival kicked off with a significant public sacrifice, often involving the slaughter many animals, followed by a communal feast where Romans shared the celebration all together. The best parts of the animal, like the thigh meat wrapped in skin, were burned as offerings to Saturn, while the rest was cooked for the feast. Public sacrifices were one of the few times that poorer Roman citizens would eat meat, and so the level of excitement would have been palpable.
Over time, the duration of Saturnalia extended. It began on the 17th, drawing out until the 19th in later years, and finally expanded into a week-long celebration ending on the 23rd of December, allowing Romans to revel for a huge amount of time.
This was a really, really popular celebration, which is why the days kept getting longer and longer.
How to Celebrate Saturnalia
1. Gift-Giving
A central component of Saturnalia was exchanging gifts. However, often the gifts were typically jokes, gag-gifts meant to lighten the mood and bring laughter.
For more serious and religiously minded gifts, cerei candles for symbolically banishing darkness, and sigillaria figurines as offerings to the gods were good choices.
2. House and Attire
Decorate your home with evergreen branches and bushes, especially those with berries, symbolizing new life and fertile crops.
You also need to look the part if you're going to celebrate Saturnalia. You also have to wear something called synthesis. This is not the usual, quite formal toga. This is very bright clothing, almost garishly bright. Gaudily dyed cloaks, tunics, toas, whatever you can.
If you think of really terribly patterned Christmas jumpers and you're kind of getting the idea.
As well as the synthesis, you also want to wear pillei, which are conical hats. They’re the precursor to the party hat, to show you are in the joking spirit and setting a playful and celebratory tone.
3. Community and Customs
During the week of celebrations, business slowed down, but shops would have remained partially open. So how do you pass the time during Saturnalia?
Carol Singing
People sang loudly in the streets, similar to modern carolling, but with extremely rowdy and even rude songs. It's not a time to try and get good sleep in at night!
Social Calls
You visit family and friends (this is when you give them their gifts) and you would expect people to be coming in and out of your house all the time for this week really.
Swapping Roles
Interestingly, Saturnalia was marked by a reversal of social roles. Slaves would sit at their master's table, they would be waited on by the master and his family. Slaves would would wear fancy clothes and they would often be given gifts by their masters. They would have the chance to order their masters around. It was so ridiculous to the master, the Roman people and their families, that this was all a big joke to them, that they were going to serve their slaves. This is why it was included as an amusing activity for them.
Having said that, they would still be required to cook the food for the feasts, and clean the house and things, though some masters may have given their slaves a little time off too.
Gambling
Often, gambling was banned in Rome. It went in and out of fashion, with some leaders and emperors liking it, others not so much. But on Saturnalia, even when it was banned, you were actually allowed to gamble, so they loved doing it.
They would play dice, they would bet on races, and even children would get involved in the games. Whether you gambled with money, or with little cakes, or with counters, it didn’t matter.
Connection to Christmas?
So if Saturnalia finished on the 23rd, why then is Christmas on the 25th of December? Didn’t the early Christians just co-opt Saturnalia?
It’s a common misconception that Christmas originates from Saturnalia. In reality, Christmas was strategically placed on the 25th of December, aligning with another Roman celebration: Sol Invictus. “The Unconquered Sun”.
This was popularised by Emperor Aurelian in 274. This date in December, marking the longest night of the year (in the Roman calendar), symbolized new birth and made the celebration of the birth of Christ more relatable for Romans. It is much easier to get people to start worshiping a new god if they already have a celebration you can link to.
io Saturnalia!
Whether you decide to greet your friends with a cheerful “io Saturnalia!”, which means something like “hooray, it's Saturnalia”, or you prefer to leave the Roman traditions in the past, I hope you have enjoyed this short view into a Roman festival!
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No matter what you are celebrating this season, whether it is Saturnalia, or anything else, I hope you have a wonderful time.
Thanks so much for joining me, and I'll see you next time on bambasbat!