gascon-en-exil:

amielleon:

santaranispleased:

Stop.

Saturnalia, the major pagan holiday that ran over the Winter Solstice, was celebrated during the period between the 17th and the 23rd, and there was no celebration on the 25th, as they were gearing up for New Years Festival on January 1st.

The whole idea of Christmas being on the 25th came from Hippolytus of Rome in 204 AD. Using Jewish Talmudic Tradition that all righteous men died on the same date they were conceived, the most righteous of Jews, Jesus, the day that he died, accepted as March 25th since 200 AD, must have been the date he was conceived. Using some math, if he was born 9 months later, that placed his birthday on December 25th.

Sol Invictus was another pagan winter solstice festival, but it was established in 274 AD, 70 years after Hippolytus’s calculation, as a pagan alternative.

I’ll grant that elements of Christmas were absorbed from other sources, but “dropped wholesale” I take issue with. Frankly, I’d blame capitalism or mercantilism for that part.

Warning: tons of postulating in bed, but no research done for what I’ve written here.

So, I was randomly thinking about this post tonight, and even if there is an explanation for the chosen date of Dec 25, it seems to me that Saturnalia can’t be discounted in that choice. For instance, why Dec 25 and not March 25? Why does Christmas call for the biggest festives and not another significant Christian holiday, like Easter?

I think there’s a striking modern parallel which may reflect upon how these things started way back when. You know the big to-do about Hannukah? Hannukah was not originally the biggest deal to Judaists. Religiously speaking, Rosh Hashannah (which typically falls around September) is the most major holiday.

However, in America, 90% of the nation gets excited in December and to avoid having Jewish kids feel left out of the festives, people were like “oh yeah there’s Hannukah!” and now Hannukah is a much bigger deal than it used to be.

I imagine that the importance of Christmas, as placed above other holidays, may be owed to a similar effect: Christian Roman children wanted to have fun and be merry in the same season as their pagan playmates. Suddenly, Christmas acts as a substituted Saturnalia for more and more little Romans.

It’s true that theologically speaking Noël is fairly unimportant compared to Pâques/Easter, itself a holiday with strong pagan overtones (including how its date is determined each year, based on the vernal equinox and the lunar cycle).  What I don’t understand is why pointing out that Christian holidays have pagan roots is treated as a form of invalidation – only the most die-hard Bible Belt Protestants, the kind who don’t celebrate Christmas and Easter anyway because their “Bible quote or it didn’t happen” philosophy is really that extreme, would care that very little of either holiday has ever had much to do with Christ.  Personally, I see it as a good marketing strategy on the part of early Christians; how else would they have convinced Romans of wealth and taste to care about some little cult from an arid backwater of the Empire?  Those same Protestants I mentioned earlier demonstrate quite well that Christianity has the potential to be hideously boring if left unadorned.

And of course I always find these sorts of things amusing because Noël to me feels like an hors-d’œuvre before the very pagan main course that is Carnival.