139.1 - Why Christmas is on December 25

Why Christmas is on December 25

Last year around this time I told you about New Year's, about why it was on January 1 as opposed to any other day of the year when for a long time and in a lot of places, it wasn't. This year I'm going to give you a very brief history of Christmas, of why it comes on December 25.

Right at the top: You know those people who say that "Jesus is the reason for the season?" He isn't. And he never was.

In prehistoric times and even well into recorded history, people believed that things like the Sun acted willfully or were controlled by gods that acted willfully - and watching it get lower and lower in the sky each year as winter approached, there was a fear that one year, the Sun would keep sinking until it disappeared, leaving them in perpetual darkness and cold. So each year, when the Sun stopped sinking and began to rise higher in the sky each day, it was a promise of the return of spring and reason to celebrate.

The winter solstice

This is the time of the winter solstice, which occurs in the Northern Hemisphere around December 21. "Solstice" is derived from two Latin words - sol and sistere - which together mean that the Sun stands still - which is what it appears to do at the solstice: to come to a stop and then reverse.

All over the Northern Hemisphere, this was a time to celebrate: ancient Egypt had celebrations, as did ancient Greece - in fact, in the earliest days, theirs involved a human sacrifice. The Druids celebrated, it was celebrated in Iran, Native American peoples, include the Pueblo and the Hopi, had their celebrations.

In pagan Scandinavia the winter festival was the yule. Great yule logs were burned; people drank mead around bonfires listening to tales of great stories of the past. A boar was sacrificed to the chief god Odin, who donned a broad-brimmed hat and magic blue cloak and sped around the world at night on his great white horse. Mistletoe, which was a sacred plant because it grew on the most sacred tree, the oak, was cut and a spray given to each family to be hung in doorways as good luck.

That is a reminder that a lot of our holiday traditions are drawn from pagan ones - including decorating with garlands, wreaths, and the Christmas tree itself, along with the man who can magically fly around the whole world in one night.

For the date of Christmas, though, now we're getting into the space that lies between history and interpretation.

First things first: No one knows the date Jesus was born, no one even knows for sure what season of the year it was. To the extent that the Bible can be trusted as a source we know it was definitely not in the winter since shepherds did not watch their flocks by night at that time of year; the flocks would most likely have been corralled. In fact, "watching their flocks by night" was most commonly done in the spring to protect the newborn lambs from wolves. Which is an awfully thin reed on which to try to build a foundation, much less a conclusion.

Origen

What's more, the earliest known use in English of the word "Christes-Maess," or Christmas, was in a list of Feast Days with Mass Days in England in 1038, a thousand years after Jesus died. No Saint's day listed for December 25th.

In fact, not only did early church leaders (I'm talking 2nd and 3rd centuries here) argue about when Jesus was born - the options included January 2, March 21, March 25, April 18, April 19, May 20, May 28, November 17, November 20, and, yes, December 25 - some, such as Origen, argued that the whole thing was pointless and wrong because it shouldn't be celebrated at all. Celebrating birthdays, he said, was for pagan gods.

Still, by the mid-third century, the idea for having a day to celebrate the birth of Jesus was well-established and December 25 had pretty much become accepted as the day.

Constantine

In 313, Constantine the Great legally allowed Christianity in the Roman Empire - actually, he went considerably beyond that; the text actually says "it was proper that the Christians and all others should have liberty to follow that mode of religion which to each of them appeared best," which shows a lot more tolerance than many here do today, especially among our right-wing so-called Christians, the fanatics who get such a kick this time of year every year out of playing the oppressed victim under the relentless assault of the atheistic socialistic hordes - even though Christians make up over 78% of the US population.

Anyway, the first recorded date of the birth of Jesus being celebrated on December 25th was in 336. A few years later, Pope Julius I officially declared that the birth of Jesus would be celebrated on the 25th of December.

Oh, and as a sidebar and contrary to popular belief, Constantine did not actually get baptized until shortly before his death in 337 and Christianity did not become the official religion of Rome until 380, 43 years after his death.

Saturnalia

Okay, yeah, all well and good, but how did the chosen date come down to December 25? That was the question, after all. To answer that, first remember that this was taking place in Rome.

The solstice celebration is Rome was called Saturnalia. It was originally a feast day to the god Saturn, but it grew to a gigantic fair and a festival of the home. It began with sacrifice of a pig and involved riotous merry-making, feasting, and gambling. Houses were decorated with laurel and evergreens. Schools were closed; the army rested; no criminals were executed. Friends visited one another, bringing good-luck gifts of fruit, cakes, candles, dolls, jewelry, and incense. Temples were decorated with evergreens. Processions of people danced through the streets, with masked or blackened faces and wearing fantastic hats. Masters feasted with slaves, who could do and say what they liked - supposedly, anyway. I doubt they really felt free to push the privilege very far.

Mithra

The old Roman goddess of the solstice was Angerona, whose festival day was, logically enough for a goddess of the solstice, December 21st. But when Mithraism, personified by the god Mithra, was introduced to Rome, the goddess was largely supplanted in favor of Mithra's day of seasonal rebirth, which was December 25. Mithra, himself a composite of earlier beliefs, became amalgamated with a Roman sun god named Solis indigeni, a god which in turn came from the Pelasgean titan of light named Helios.

This new being, this composite of a composite, was Solis invicta, the invincible sun, and Mithra's day became dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the birthday of the unconquerable sun. When the emperor Aurelian proclaimed Mithraism the official religion of the Roman Empire in 274, the day became an official holiday.

So, put it all together. Before Constantine the Great issued his Edict of Milan, being a Christian in Rome could get you killed. Refusal to participate in the Imperial cult was considered treason.

During the Great Persecution carried out by the emperor Diocletian from 303 to 311, Christian buildings and the homes of Christians were torn down, their sacred books collected and burned. Christians were arrested, tortured, mutilated, burned, starved, and condemned to gladiatorial contests to amuse spectators.

So if you wanted celebrate the birth of the man you regarded as your savior - which was becoming widely accepted among Christians right around this same time, you had to hide it. So since the time is purely symbolic and basically arbitrarily chosen because no one knows the actual date for certain, what better time to do it than during Saturnalia - when everyone else was celebrating and so no one would notice? And what better day to pick than December 25, the birthday of the unconquerable "Son?"

St. John Chrysostom

According to St. John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, writing in the late 4th or very early 5th century, the "Roman Church purposefully placed the keeping of Christmas between two popular folk festivals, Saturnalia and the Kalends of January, in order to give Christians something to celebrate about [undisturbed] while others were engaged in secular merrymaking."

By the year 354 CE, December 25 had been accepted in Rome as the date of the Feast of Christ, or Christ-Mass, Christmas. Gradually most of the Christian Church agreed. Once Christianity became the legal religion of Rome, the church began appropriating what old pagan customs it could, with the result that the merry side of Saturnalia was gradually adopted and adapted to the observance of Christmas. By 1100 Christmas was the peak celebration of the year for all of Europe.

In New England, Christmas is a relatively recent holiday. Among the early European settlers of the area, specifically Plymouth and Boston, Christmas was regarded as a pagan celebration with no Biblical justification. In fact, there were laws against it. In his journal entry for 1621, Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford recalled what he called a passage "rather of mirth then of weight." (Spelling has been modernized.)

A page from Bradford's journal

One the day called Christmas day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used,) but the most of this new company [referring to some people who had arrived the month before, in November 1621] excused themselves and said it went against their consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it a matter of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed. So he led away the rest and left them; but when they came home at noon from their work, he found them in the street at play, openly; some pitching the bar and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them that was against his conscience, that they should play and others work. If they made the keeping of it a matter of devotion, let them keep to their houses, but there should be no gaming or reveling in the streets. Since which time nothing has been attempted that way, at least openly.

In 1659, the MassBay colony - that is, Boston - banned celebrating Christmas altogether. The ban remained in place for 22 years, until 1681. Even then, the first recorded celebration of Christmas in Boston wasn't for another five years, in 1686. For many years, Thanksgiving remained the important seasonal holiday in New England.

A religious revival in the early 1800s spurred interest in Christmas, particularly in the South. In 1837, Louisiana became the first state to make the day a holiday. New England continued to lag behind: In Plymouth, the first time Christmas was mentioned in the town’s oldest newspaper wasn't until 1825. But once it got rolling, it developed pretty quickly: In 1856,  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that "The old Puritan feeling prevents [Christmas] from being a cheerful hearty holiday“ in the region, but "We are in a transition state." By 1860 that same Plymouth paper was filled with ads for Christmas presents and by the end of the century Christmas was as much a part of Plymouth as it had become in the rest of the country.

And that is why Christmas in on December 25: Because Christians hid within, then adopted, then adapted, pagan celebrations of the winter solstice.

So in the spirit of Constantine, let me say Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, I know I'm a few weeks late with this but still, Happy Chanukah, Happy Festivus, for all the atheists like me, Happy Winter Solstice, and to all of us, Happy Holidays. Like the man in the story said, we are halfway out of the dark.

Sources:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110430004539/http://www.bsu.edu/web/01bkswartz/xmaspub.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/news/2000/dec08.html
http://christianity.about.com/od/christmas/f/christmashistor.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20110430004539/http://www.bsu.edu/web/01bkswartz/xmaspub.html
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/lactant/lactpers.html#XLVIII
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/erin-r-brown/2011/12/13/war-war-christmas
http://religions.pewforum.org/reports
http://www.whychristmas.com/customs/25th.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great_and_Christianity
http://mith.umd.edu//eada/html/display.php?docs=bradford_history.xml
http://historyofmassachusetts.org/when-christmas-was-banned-in-boston/
http://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/index.shtml
http://festivusweb.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol_(Doctor_Who)
"The Christmas Connection," lecture at Plymouth Antiquarian Society, November 15, 1979