Every year, I see memes making their rounds on how Christians stole Christmas from the pagans. These memes recur around the Christmas season, and tend to reinforce ideas that question the very historicity of Jesus himself.
So let me lay it out plain: No, Christmas did not begin as a pagan holiday. In fact, to claim as much is to deny the very history folks want to lay claim to. In some ways, the following is going to be a rant. But rants are quite probably the only (and certainly the best) response to such silliness.
The Christmas tree is pagan.
What if I told you that most Christians throughout history did not celebrate Christmas with trees? Christmas trees have started to spread all over the world, but that is a recent development and not something most Christmas-celebrating Christians would have even heard of for most of history. Christmas trees were a purely localized phenomenon for a long time.
And it's not like pagans invented trees or even invented cutting them down and bringing them inside. Are you really saying that pagans own trees?
You can have Christmas without Christmas trees. Most Christians always have.
"Yule" is pagan.
Like the Eostre/Easter connection (which is only made in a handful of countries with Germanic languages; most languages use some variant of the Hellenized Hebrew Pascha), this is really just about the name of a month getting associated with a big festival that happened to fall in that month.
And do you really expect me to believe that burning a log in a fireplace has some unbreakable pagan connection that Christians just shouldn't do? Like, burning logs is pagan? Maybe Christians would like to be warm, too.
Yes, there was Germanic pagan Yule stuff. But Christmas has as much to do with pagan Yule stuff as as the Fourth of July has to do with the deified Julius Caesar (for whom July is named).
And let's remember that Germans didn't even come into the Christmas picture for a good long time. They certainly weren't there at the manger.
So, yes, you can have Christmas without anything to do with "Yule". Most Christians always have.
Giving gifts is pagan.
Yes, commercialization of our holidays (nearly all of them, for the record) is a bad thing -- and driven entirely by market exploitation of companies who use advertising to make their bottom lines swell. But you can't possibly think that giving gifts is a uniquely pagan practice. And, for the record again, giving gifts at Christmas isn't even something that is universally Christian. You can be Christian and not give gifts.
Surely Santa Claus is a pagan tradition.
Actually, Santa isn't real -- he was created by an American advertising agency to sale products. But St Nicholas is. And how St Nicholas become mixed up with Christmas is interesting. St Nicholas' Feast is December 6, which is just a few weeks from Christmas and thus during the Nativity Fast (a 40-day fast that begins on November 15). And like any good Christian saint, he did indeed help poor people with gifts, but they weren't toys or candy but rather money to rescue people from being sold into slavery, etc.
And did you know that in some Christian cultures, the home-visiting, gift-giving saint is a different guy altogether? In Greece, for instance, it's St Basil, and he doesn't come on Christmas but rather on January 1, which is his feast day.
So, yes, you can also have Christmas without Santa. Most Christians always have.
Surely December 25th is a stolen pagan celebration.
This is the worst historical revisionism I've seen, but it predominates the logic of lots of folks these days.
Did you know that the original Christmas festival was a holiday celebrated together with Christ's baptism on January 6? No Sol Invictus (Roman pagan feast of the Invincible Sun) there, I'm afraid, so that can't be the origin of Christmas. (Armenian Christians still celebrate this single feast on January 6, though because the calendar some of them use is out of sync with the one many of us use, it will fall on our January 19.)
And even when Christmas did get moved to December 25 (getting separated out from the baptism feast), it was not about Sol Invictus, which actually post-dates (you read that right!) the association of Christ's birth with December 25, being introduced by the emperor Aurelian only in AD 274. Meanwhile, St Hippolytus said in his commentary on Daniel (written ca. AD 202-211) that Jesus' birthdate is December 25. (Maybe the pagans stole it from the Christians!)
Rather, December 25 was arrived at because it was exactly nine months after March 25, when the Annunciation was being celebrated, which is the feast of Christ's conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
In short, Christmas on December 25 is less a claim about the historical birthday of Jesus as it is a theological statement of Jesus' humanity in relation to his mother and the rest of the Christian calendar. But you can still have Christmas without celebrating on December 25. Lots of Christians historically have, and some still do.
What about the Saturnalia?
Saturnalia is a Roman festival that was held on December 17 and then moved to December 23. But it's proximity to December 25 is not evidence that Christians overtook a Roman holiday to make the celebration of Jesus more palatable. At least not logically.
What about the winter solstice?
Before the introduction of Sol Invictus in AD 274, there were no pagan solstice celebrations going on near where Christians were. (True story.) But surely a reference to something happening in nature ought to be considered pagan and not Christian!
Says who? Are you saying that Christians ought not pay attention to
the rhythms of the natural world that they believe God created for his
people to live in? Really? Nature stuff is pagan? Care to explain the doctrine of creation's prominence in Christian thought then?
While it is true that Christmas was not set for December 25 because of any solstice connections, there is still something beautiful and poetic about celebrating the "Sun of Righteousness" (as an Orthodox hymn of the Nativity calls Jesus) as He "rises", so to speak, into the world. This is not a cause of the Christmas celebration, but it certainly is a natural poetic way to celebrate it.
But let's not forget our brothers and sisters in places like South Africa and Australia, whose Christmas is a rather warm affair with air conditioners and beach visits and such.
The bottom line?
So let's be clear here: Christmas is about Jesus Christ. It's about worshipping Jesus Christ. It isn't about anything else. And definitely not about paganism.