In recent years, it’s become a tradition for Christians to push back against our secularized culture by calling for society to “put Christ back in Christmas.” The irony is that most Americans, Christian or not, have been told that many of our Christmas traditions were originally pre-Christian pagan traditions from Europe, which the Church later adopted. Even the date, December 25, supposedly has pagan origins. Ironically, in recent years, neo-pagans have been trying to resuscitate these supposedly suppressed origins with winter solstice festivals.
As the story goes, there was a Roman celebration called Saturnalia at the end of the autumn growing season—corresponding to the winter solstice—when people treated each other kindly, helped the poor, and so forth. Various church fathers and Christian figures needed good branding for their new religion, and decided to gussy up Saturnalia with Christian garb. Perhaps they thought that the drunk Saturnalians would eventually forget what all the commotion was about and find themselves raising a glass to the birth of Jesus.
As it happens, there was another Roman celebration that competed for the same slot on the calendar, Sol invictus, the birthday of the unconquered Sun. By invoking Jupiter and a Sun King, later Roman emperors hoped to use this holiday to further their claim to divinity at a time when Christianity was starting to spread throughout the cities of the Roman Empire.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, however, Sol invictus was sometimes identified as the ancestor of Christmas. Some Protestants used the argument to prove that Christmas was pagan popery. Some Catholics invoked the argument to show that the Church could Christianize pagan elements of culture. As a result, many Christians now take for granted that Christmas had a pagan origin, though this doesn’t prevent most of us from decorating Christmas trees and drinking eggnog.
What is interesting is that this whole story is now widely disputed by historians (even Wikipedia, which is not always a reliable guide, summarizes the details well). Most likely, the date of December 25th for Christmas has an entirely Christian rather than pagan origin: it’s when early Christian thinkers thought Jesus was born.
For complicated reasons that aren’t important here, they inferred that Jesus’s conception took place on March 25th. This is the date when Catholics, Orthodox and many liturgical Christians celebrate the Annunciation, when Gabriel announced to Mary that she would become pregnant and give birth to Jesus. As Matt Salusbury explains in History Today, “Early ecclesiastical number-crunchers extrapolated that the nine months of Mary’s pregnancy following the Annunciation on March 25th would produce a December 25th date for the birth of Christ.”
An important article by historian William Tighe published in Touchstone magazine also challenges the stereotypes:
Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival.… But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.
Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.
Of course, Americans have adopted Christmas customs from several different cultures, many from northern Europe. Some of these seem to have had pre-Christian origins. But they have long since taken on so much Christian meaning that it makes little sense to talk about them as pagan symbols. One could just as well argue that the word “God” is pagan since it, too, was in use by northern Europeans prior to the rise of Christianity.
The more important question is what the symbols and trappings of Christmas mean to us now. Are they merely a distraction, a justification to spend too much and love too little? Or do they serve to draw our minds and hearts closer to the great and beautiful mystery of the Incarnation, in which the very Creator of the universe became a human being, even being born by a peasant girl in a stable in a backwater village? That is what Christmas is about. If lights and trees and presents and feasts and manger scenes help us become mindful of that truth, then so much the better.
Jay Richards is the Executive Editor of The Stream (www.stream.org), which debuts in January. He is the co-author of Indivisible with James Robison. His latest book is The Hobbit Party with Jonathan Witt.
