At some point during this Advent season and the coming of Christmas, you will log on to your computer, and you will see somebody smugly opining that ‘actually Christmas is a pagan festival’.
This person will not know anything about pagans, bar some fuzzy ideas about equinoxes (always with the equinoxes) and sacrifice. The reasons given for this will vary: we put up trees in our houses and decorate them, just like pagans! We light candles! And we give presents, like the Romans did at Saturnalia or the Vikings at Yule or [insert random pagan festival here]. And 25 December is actually the festival of the Roman god Sol Invictus! And it’s near the solstice! And doesn’t it all have something to do with Mithras anyway? By this point, I will have slowly torn out enough of my hair to craft a Christmas stocking.
What’s worse is that these canards are usually posted by people of intelligence and some historical acuity. But somehow, when it comes to Christianity, there remains a deep-seated desire to say that it’s all rubbish. All of this matters, though – whether you are a Christian or not.
Let’s start with the date. Early Christians – and remember that Britain had been Christian since the Romans, and that the invading Anglo-Saxons and Vikings converted pretty damn quickly – weren’t that bothered about the birth of Jesus. When they started getting interested, various dates were posited, and eventually, influenced by a tradition that prophets died on the same day that they were conceived, they landed on 25 March. Since Jesus was believed to have died on 25 March, nine months onwards from the crucifixion is 25 December. (Incidentally, the world was supposed to have begun on 25 March.) How anyone could claim that the crucifixion was ‘actually a pagan festival’ is beyond me.
Some will say that 25 December was ‘the birth of Mithras’, and that the Christians, sly fellows that they were, simply landed on this date and incorporated elements of this feast into their own. This is, quite simply, wrong. There wasn’t a celebration of this much misunderstood minor deity in December at all, and what we know of Mithraism has nothing to do with Christianity.
Aha, but what about Saturnalia? Sure, it was celebrated on 17 December, extending until 22 December. But given that Christmas begins on 25 December and continues to 6 January, even the most blinkered can see that’s not the same ball park.
Sol Invictus was celebrated on 25 December – we think – as there is only a single reference to this festival from the Calendar of Philocalus from AD 354, which simply says ‘N.INVICTI.CM.XXX.’, which means that on the birthday of ‘the Unconquered One’, 30 games were given. (Note that there isn’t even a mention of Sol here.) The problem with this, though, is that 25 December had already been chosen as the date of Christmas. So it’s either the case that the very new cult of Sol Invictus took the date of Christmas, or that they were celebrating on what the Romans thought was the winter solstice.
Mention the word solstice, and the Christmas-rubbishers will become enthused. It is like a red rag to a Mithraic bull. They will think that they’ve got you. It’s the winter solstice! All Christmas is, is a celebration of the winter solstice! Again – the date was calculated from 25 March. Although modern people like to think that pagans were dead keen on solstices, in fact they didn’t really care very much about them at all. There was a minor festival, Brumalia, celebrated on 25 December, but it’s a post-Christian festival, first mentioned in the late second century AD. So no dice there either.
But the trees in your house! Surely that’s pagan and something to do with, er, er, Yule? Well, here’s the kicker. As with Sol Invictus, the evidence that we have for Christmas is earlier – and in this case centuries earlier – than any reference we have for pagan festivals to do with Yule. Yule was a season, not a festival.
As for the customs performed during Yule in the 800s by the Vikings – of vow-making, feasting, hags and spirits, and a sacred boar – well, I don’t know about you, but hags and spirits don’t come out on Christmas in my house, unless you mean a grumpy great-aunt with her bottle of whisky. Our first references to logs and trees are late, and in any case they are called Christmas logs, such as in a poem by Robert Herrick in the 17th century:
Come, bring with a noise,
My merry, merry boys,
The Christmas Log to the firing;
While my good Dame, she
Bids ye all be free;
And drink to your heart’s desiring.
It was only later on that these were rebranded as Yule logs. Christmas trees, as we all know, are a late German custom, brought to England by Prince Albert. All of this happened within a Christian context, and to suggest that they are continuations of more ancient pagan practices is just – there’s no other word for it – wrong.
What about giving gifts and lighting candles? Parents used to give their children presents on the feast of St Nicholas on 6 December, and giving money to charity on Christmas Day is a practice that dates back fairly far. But the fact that Romans gave each other presents and candles during Saturnalia does not mean that when we give presents at Christmas we are aping a pagan festival. What’s more, there is a very simple reason for giving candles and using torches: try looking outside. It was winter, and it was dark, and they didn’t have electricity.
Christmas is a Christian festival – the clue’s in the name. It didn’t ‘muscle out’ or ‘take on’ aspects of other festivals. Remember this when you are in church this year: the ancient parts of the ceremony are what you will hear there – stories of the birth of a child who, with his message and light and life, changed the whole world.
Comments