Unpacking the origins of our holidays

In a way, talking to UCLA's Henry Ansgar Kelly about holidays is like experiencing a one-person production of "A Christmas Carol." The distinguished research professor of English is a wealth of knowledge about holidays past, present and future, just like Charles Dickens' three ghosts who visit Ebenezer Scrooge on that fateful Victorian Christmas Eve.

To pinpoint one of Kelly's main areas of scholarship, however, one must travel back four centuries from Dickens' cobblestoned London to Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century. It's here that some of the most striking origins of Western holidays lie. For instance, we have Chaucer to thank for Valentine's Day - but according to Kelly, we're doing the holiday all wrong.

To learn more about the history of several holidays and the scope of Kelly's work, hosts of the UCLA College's podcast "Cabinet of Curiosities" sat down with the scholar to talk about mirth, mortality and misconceptions, and why you might want to consider writing your own obituary.

Cabbages and kings

While a flick of the wrist and the words "pagan origins" tend to be the default for pinpointing the genesis of many Hallmark-style holidays we celebrate today, Kelly suggests the stories are usually far more layered. Several of these holidays, such as Halloween, actually have their most direct origins in more recent history than one might think.

Kelly is still publishing books at 91 amid a decades-long career as a medievalist, and is very familiar with the evolution of celebrations and how religion, literature and culture have helped shape reinterpretations of them. His scholarly roots stretch back to his early years in the Jesuit order, where rigorous study of theology, liturgy and church history gave him a firm grasp on the rhythms of feasts, fasts and saints' days that structured Christian life for centuries - cycles that, he notes, underpin many of the holidays that later migrated into secular calendars.

For Halloween, Kelly reaches back to the Scottish and Irish rituals that predate today's candy-filled festivities. "English-speaking people first heard about Halloween, probably from Robert Burns," he explains, referring to the Scottish poet's 1786 work "Halloween." In western Scotland at the time, young couples would gather on October 31, the day before All Saints' Day, for parties in which vegetables were used as a means of divination to predict their futures in marriage and life. "They would pull up cabbages and knock the dirt off the root systems to read their fortunes in the way that our mothers used to read tea leaves," Kelly says.

But the royal thread in this story comes from a different corner of Kelly's scholarship. Because so much of his work examines Chaucer's texts and their cultural afterlives, Kelly delights in pointing out that the real Valentine's Day - at least in the world Chaucer was writing for - falls not in February, but on May 3. This date, Kelly explains, can be traced to King Richard II and Chaucer, whose poem celebrating the monarch's engagement to Anne of Bohemia ("Parliament of Fowls") is the earliest known text linking springtime bird mating to human courtship.

As for his own May 3 tradition? "Basically, a doctored St. Valentine's Day card done for my wife," Kelly said. "I've tried to get Hallmark to come out with a Valentine's Day card for May, but they haven't yet."

The devil you think you know

While Kelly's descriptions of holiday histories brim with mischief and mirth, his best-known scholarship tackles one of the most persistent misconceptions in Western religious thought: the identity and origins of the Devil. This research examines how artistic interpretation, mistranslation and cultural storytelling shaped the modern image of Satan.

"There is a veritable idea that anything connected with pagan ritual or non-Christian ideas is connected with the Devil," he explains, noting that early Christian writers reframed pagan gods and mythological creatures as demonic. This association influenced how the Devil was depicted for centuries - horns, hooves, tail and all.

Kelly is well-positioned to refute these transformations, having quite literally written Satan's biography, also called "Satan in the Bible, God's Minister of Justice," which traces the figure's shifting identity across scripture, literature and cultural imagination.

The "Cabinet of Curiosities" episode also opens a door into questions of the afterlife - a subject Kelly has examined for years. He traces how beliefs about judgment, purgatory and heaven have shifted over centuries, shaping not only theology but the way people understand time, morality and the very purpose of earthly rituals.

These interests of Kelly also shed light on one of his most unusual undertakings: writing his own obituary. The impulse emerged after helping the families of colleagues in the English department, where he has been a professor emeritus since 2004, navigate the task. "I decided to save my wife, Maria, [from having to write] my own obituary," he recalls. What began as a practical gesture became an unexpectedly popular piece of writing, much to his delight. "I put it on my website, and it went viral. So a lot of people think that I'm dead now when they see my obituary online."

For Kelly, the exercise also served to detail the journey of his intellectual life - the unexpected connections and curiosities that wove together a lifetime of inquiry across diverse fields. "I found it quite entertaining to see just how one thing led to another in my research life," he says.

The podcast's conversation eventually turns to mortality and the turning of the year - themes Kelly approaches with earnest optimism. When asked what advice he would offer listeners heading into the holiday season, whether they're celebrating or simply reflecting, he replies with a line as succinct as it is sincere:

"I'd say: Sit tight and keep the faith. And may there be many more holidays to come."