Christmas conflicts

Once again Christmas is upon us. I am not a big fan, as I do not enjoy the souped-up versions of carols that are so insistently and monotonously played in stores. (Some go so far as to term this musical junk "ear rape.") Luckily I am exempt, pretty much, from the obligation to buy presents. I have no children and my surviving friends are beyond that sort of stuff.

For various reasons, though, myths seem to thrive at this time of year. One which we have not heard much of lately is the notion that Christmas is just a survival of the Roman Saturnalia. I will have more to say about that notion presently.

Another myth, common among secularists these days, is that there is an insidious plot to compel people to say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” which is more appropriate, given the mosaic of observances that occur this time of year. I do not say "Merry Christmas," and feel no compulsion to do so. Speech must be free.

While the expression “War on Christmas” is an exaggeration, it is important to remember the origins of this conflict. A decade ago, Wal-Mart and some other big stores deleted the salutation Merry Christmas from their advertising, using Happy Holidays (HH) instead. Apparently, it was felt that some people who are not Christians were offended by the salutation. The imposition of this seemingly neutral, “ecumenical” wording was intended to address their feelings. In reality this outbreak of Verbal Correctness is not very different from the Michigan school which deleted the word “gay” from “Don we now our gay apparel.”

Heaven forbid that in our multicultural society anyone should be offended by anything. But the HH solution did not resolve the problem, for a different group, traditional Christians, came forward to say that they were offended. After the imposition of the “ecumenical” greeting became common knowledge, there was a fire storm of protest, and the stores that had forbidden “Merry Christmas” allowed it to come back.

The motives of those who are (still) fervently backing “Happy Holidays” as the only truly appropriate greeting merit some attention. In my view, they are seeking to relativize Christmas--and by extension Christianity itself--by promoting this expression. I am not a Christian and I am not an advocate for that faith. But I am a historian, and having investigated the background, I have concluded that the relativizing approach is not defensible. Here is some background (partially recycling some parts of an account from 2004).

It is generally acknowledged that no one can determine the actual day of the birth of Jesus Christ. Several candidates enjoyed popularity in various parts of the late Roman world, some in the spring. The most popular choice, though, was January 6, Epiphany. Yet the Roman Church adopted December 25. Why?

One view regards Christmas as a hijacking of the Saturnalia, a somewhat raucous pagan event, which started on December 17 and extended to from three to seven days thereafter—but never, it seems, reaching as far as the 25th. In addition, some have suggested the winter solstice as a source, but that is fixed at December 22, though some astronomical wobbliness has been detected. Near misses don’t qualify, for the Romans insisted on precision in these calendrical matters. The reason for this emphasis is that astrology, then widely accepted, required determination not just of the actual day of one’s birth, but the hour. (By the way, has anyone ever calculated Jesus’s horoscope based on the several candidates for his proposed birth?)

To make a long story short, Christmas actually coincides with an observance established by the emperor Aurelian in AD 274: December 25 was fixed as the birthday of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus).

Late antiquity saw the rise of a contentious welter of religions. Of Middle Eastern origin, the Unconquered Sun came to enjoy wide appeal because of its lack of specificity. While it connoted potency, the Sol Invictus otherwise had a kind of neutrality that gave it appeal to a number of competing religious factions. It was cosmic, not anthropomorphic, at least not necessarily so. For traditional pagans Sol Invictus was identical with Apollo, originally a Greek import. The Mithraists saw it as a manifestation of their Mithras Helios. Christians could honor the solar deity as a metaphor for the "Sun of Righteousness," that is, Jesus Christ. Interestingly, the soil underneath the basilica of St. Peters has yielded a mosaic, apparently of the early 4th century, showing Christ as a sun god riding a chariot.

While the Roman Church, and eventually the entire Latin West, adopted December 25 to mark the Nativity, the eastern holiday of Epiphany was retained as well. Today the 6th of January is observed in Hispanic countries as the day of the Three Kings (the Magi), when gifts are exchanged. In this way, the old Roman observation of New Year’s Day, the first of January, was bracketed by Christmas, on the one hand, and Epiphany, on the other. They were two bookends, as it were, enclosing the older date for the beginning of the civil year. (For the Church Christmas was the beginning of the year.) The combination attests a widely ramifying process: retention of traditional holidays—providing that their pagan character was not overt--while mingling them with the new.

As part of this inquiry I looked into one of the major sources for late Roman festivals, the Calendar of 354. This richly illustrated volume, made for a cultivated Christian named Valentinus, is actually a composite reference book recording the public religious festivals in Rome (roughly the first half), together with Christian parallels (the second half). While this combination may at first sight seem schizophrenic, or at best a shotgun marriage, it actually accords well with an era of transition. Valentinus, the book’s owner, wished to have a record of the festivals of his ancestors, as well as the holy observances of his own faith. Many of the old festivals were falling into desuetude in his own day, and new deities, more acceptable to Christians and those adhering to other salvific religions, came in, favored because of their relative neutrality. These included Roma Aeterna, a personification of the city; Salus, or public safety; and the aforementioned Sol Invictus.

The original copy of the Calendar of 354, our best source for these matters, has been lost. Yet it has been reconstructed by several generations of classical scholars. The results of these labors have been summed up by Michele Renee Salzman in her fine monograph, “On Roman Time” (Berkeley, 1990).

Now for a fast forward. Somewhat analogous to the transitional picture recorded by the Calendar, we can observe changes in our own practice. Since 1954, Armistice Day, devised to commemorate the end of World War I on November 11, has been renamed Veterans Day. Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthday get rolled together as President’s Day, while a new holiday has appeared to honor Martin Luther King.

Today controversy surrounds Christmas. For some time it has had two rivals, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. While the events commemorated in Hanukkkah took place before the birth of Christ, the actual commemoration is recent. in the 1870s, when Christmas was beginning to come into its own as a mass-market phenomenon in the US, two Cincinnati rabbis, looking for a way to cheer up Jewish kids who felt left out, launched the first big Hanukkah festivals, with games, music, and food. The concept proved popular, soon spreading across the country. So says Dianne Ashton, a religious scholar and author of the coming book "Hanukkah in America." Competition with Christmas is the main reason for the prominence of the festival. Kwanzaa. observed by some African Americans, thrives for similar reasons.

Today in many of the "blue" (liberal) states it is no longer fashionable to say "Merry Christmas"—-one should call out "Happy Holidays" instead. In some cases Nativity scenes and Christmas carols have been banned from public observance, ostensibly on grounds of separation of church and state. While these changes do not add up to an actual War on Christmas, they do represent an effort to relativize Christmas--and in fact Christianity itself.

Christmas is a national holiday in the United States. Yet in its origin it is a religious observance, as I have shown. In a sense we have come full circle, back to the duality of late Roman times. The day of the Unconquered Sun was a holiday in the perfected version of the official (pagan) calendar. Yet Roman Christians could also accept this figure as the avatar of their own founder. Hence Christmas as we know it.

As with everything else in human culture, holidays evolve. As in 4th-century Rome, these changes can occasion controversy, with some urging radical change and others defending the status quo. Whatever the case, it seems that Christmas will be with us a good deal longer.

UPDATE. The reductio ad absurdum of the relativist argument is this list (from rationalwiki.org):

"Late December celebrations"


* Alban Arthuan
* Boxing Day
* Chrismukkah
* Festivus
* Hanukkah
* Inti Raymi
* Kwanzaa
* Holiday (Pastafarianism)
* Lenaea
* Merlinpeen
* New Year's Eve
* New Year's Day (also celebrated on the first of April, by fools)
* Ramadan has recently fallen during this time of year, though since Islamic holidays are on a lunar calendar it is progressing backwards through the calendar.
* Eid Al Adha (Islamic New Year) currently falls during this time of the year, but like Ramadan, progresses backwards through the calendar.
* Saturnalia
* Second Rite of Belial
* Solstice (winter in the northern hemisphere, summer in the southern)
* Thanksgiving (in some places)
* The Long Night
* Xmas
* Yule (or Juul)
* Newtonma

The origins of Christmas

A seemingly inescapable feature of this time of the year is the rerun of the myth that the observance of Christmas is nothing more than a continuation of the rowdy Roman rites of the Saturnalia. Many otherwise judicious writers endorse this claim of derivation. As we shall see, the argument for it does not hold up.

The reasons for yielding to the Saturnalia temptation are several. One is a legitimate wish to learn why the birthday of Christ should have come to be celebrated on December 25. After all, the New Testament gives no indication of when Christ was born, and Early Christian writers opt for various dates, reflecting the fact that different customs prevailed in different parts of the Empire. In addition to this natural curiosity, however, some advocates of the Saturnalia theory seem to want to “stick it to Christians” by uncovering the somewhat sordid origins of one of their major festivals.

What then was the Saturnalia? Saturnalia was the festival by which the Romans the commemorated the dedication of the temple of the god Saturn, a somewhat ambiguous figure who has given us the adjective “saturnine.” Originally celebrated for a day, on December 17, it grew it to week-long extravaganza, ending on the 23rd. Efforts to shorten the length of these festivities were unsuccessful. The emperor Augustus tried to reduce it to three days, and Caligula to five. If the available reports are to be believed, Saturnalia was marked by tomfoolery and reversal of social roles, in which slaves and masters switched places. Temporarily, slaves were exempt from punishment, and treated their masters with a pretense of disrespect. The slaves celebrated a banquet served by the masters. Yet the reversal of the social order was superficial, for the slaves had to do the work of actually preparing the banquet. Saturnalia was, or appeared to be, what sociologists call a “zone of licence.” Yet the license was confined within carefully defined boundaries: it reversed the social order without subverting it.

What can we conclude from the time of the festival’s observance, December 17 to 23? First, by advancing into December, it came to encompass the Winter Solstice. We customarily mark that event (after which the days become longer) on December 21. However, an astronomer of my acquaintance indicates that actual observation is somewhat less precise, and can range from December 20 to 23.

Note that even its expanded form, Saturnalia, ending on the 23rd, did not overlap Christmas as we currently observe it. Nor does that Christian festival fall within the range of dates for the Winter Solstice.

The real parallel is this. The observance on the 25th of December corresponds to the Roman feast of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. The exchanging of gifts was originally associated with January 6, Epiphany, when the visit of the Three Magi was commemorated; hence the traditional “Twelve Days of Christmas.” Of course no one knows even the season when Jesus was born, or the precise year. Various preferences for the day of the Nativity were found in different areas of the Roman empire. About 200 CE Clement of Alexandria that a group in Egypt celebrated the nativity on Paschon 25, corresponding to January 6, now observed as Epiphany, or Three King’s Day. Tertullian (d. 220) does not mention Christmas as a feast day in the church of Roman Africa. In his “Chronographia,” a compilation issued in 221, Sextus Julius Africanus suggested that Jesus was conceived on the Spring Equinox. The Equinox was March 25 on the Roman calendar, so this implied a birth in December. “De Pascha Computus,” a calendar of feasts produced in 243, gives March 28 as the date of the Nativity. Others rejected the whole principle. In 245 the theologian Origen of Alexandria stated that, "only sinners (like Pharaoh and Herod" celebrated their birthdays. In 303 the Christian writer Arnobius ridiculed the idea of celebrating the birthdays of gods, suggesting that for some Christmas was not yet a feast at this time.

In view of this diversity, the success of December 25 was not preordained in any obvious way. Yet its coincidence with the Sol Invictus observance was probably the decisive factor, because of the concept of Christ as the "sun of righteousness" prophesied in Malachi 4:2. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, some secular scholars proposed that Christ himself had never lived, but was simply a personification of the solar principle. In the broadest sense, this connection goes back to Egypt of the Pharaohs. Not only was the sun worshipped there under various guises, Re or Ra, Re-Horakhte, Amun-Re, but the first monotheist, Akhenaten, devised the first form of monotheism based on the sun as supreme deity (the Aten)

To be sure, once the custom became established, many Christian writers accepted as a matter of course that Christmas was the actual date on which Jesus was born. However, in the early eighteenth century, some scholars began proposing alternative explanations. Isaac Newton seems to have been the first to argue, incorrectly, that the date of Christmas was selected to correspond with the winter solstice, However, in 1743 the German Protestant Paul Ernst Jablonski reached the correct solution: Christmas was placed on December 25 to correspond with the Roman solar holiday Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, and therefore represented a Christian purloining of a pagan custom.

The historical record indicates that in 274 CE, during the time of troubles in the Roman Empire, Aurelian stipulated December 25 as the date of the celebration of "Birth of the Unconquered Sun." Aurelian's empire seemed near collapse. As politicians so often find, when practical measures fail propaganda fills the gap. Accordingly, his festival proclaimed imperial and pagan rejuvenation. As we have noted, December 25 falls AFTER the range assigned to the Winter Solstice itself. Instead, it marks the confirmation of the period in which daylight begins to lengthen.

Recently, William Tighe, a Church historian at Pennsylvania's Muhlenberg College, has proposed a different theory. Tighe acknowledges that the first hard evidence of Christmas occurring on December 25 is not found until 336 CE and that the date only became a fixed festival in Constantinople in 379.

However, a reference occurs in the "Chronicle" written by Hippolytus of Rome three decades before Aurelian launched his festival. Hippolytus held that Jesus' birth "took place eight days before the kalends of January," that is, December 25. However, Aurelian did not make up his observance out of whole cloth. In fact, the title Sol Invictus embraced several established solar deities, allowing them to be honored collectively. These include Elah-Gabal, a Syrian sun god; the older Greek deities Helios and Apollo, and Mithras, a soldiers’ god of Persian origin. In his own way the eccentric emperor Elagabalus (218–222), who was a priest of Elah-Gabal, observed the festival. Aurelian merely confirmed it as an empire-wide holiday.

Tighe’s citation of Hippolytus seems a slender reed on which to hang a revisionist theory, as there is every reason to believe that December 25 would be significant for sun worshippers, but not, in the first instance, for Christians. As we have noted, sun worship had prevailed for millennia in the ancient Mediterranean. Consequently, the origins of Christmas illustrate one of the major sources of religion: reverence for cosmic forces, in this case the sun.