This time of year has morphed into a time for family, friends, good times, and happiness. I love this time of year; the snow (not driving in it of course), the music, the get-togethers, the parties… I just find it ignorant and arrogant the preconceptions and misunderstandings MOST people blindly walk around with. And let’s not forget the rude and obnoxious holiday shoppers willing to beat up an old lady over a singing Elmo doll.
Let me state that I am not trying to bash Christianity, get on a high horse, or anything like that.
First of I wonder if people believe they live in a police state now. For generations it was the other way around. Christian morals, Christian holidays, and Christian dogma was shoved down the throats of every single man, woman, and child in the country whether you were of European/Christian decent or not. But in the last several decades people began to realize, hey we have a guarantee to freedom of belief, expression of ideas, and tolerance. Gone are the big Christian-only displays in front of city halls to be replaced with all-encompassing Seasons Greetings or Happy Holidays displays instead. This is done to simply include all citizens in the festive days and unify communities. People can say, believe, and think as they like as individuals but the community should reflect the feeling of belonging and peace. I find it interesting that some groups have absolutely no problem shoving their ideals down your throat (be it religious, political, or societal in nature) but freak out if you kindly try to do the same with them in response.
I always like to compromise at places I’ve worked. I quietly say I’ll work the bigger Jewish or Christian holidays because I realize that most people in my area are of those traditions and will want the day to spend with family and friends. The only thing I ask in return is that I have my holidays off, and most of those I end up working anyway because of financial reasons.
I’ve laughed to myself for a good amount of time now as the managers at work started putting holiday decorations up a few weeks before Thanksgiving. In the last few weeks I’ve had to deal with ignorant customers that waste my time by pulling me aside with whispered comments about how “it’s so nice to see a public business displaying a nativity scene”.
Then they say Merry Christmas with a big smile. I greet them back with sincere wishes for a nice holiday season and prosperity, as I’m sure they intend toward me and I politely say “Thank you, Happy Soltice to you as well”.
They look at me in shock like I just started squirting blood from my eyes and walk away, some even backing away in disgust like I’m some kind of monster that is going to sacrifice their first born and fly after them on a ball of fire.
I tell my bosses that yeah, technically I’m offended by the nativity scene in the store because it should be a place that all feel welcome but, eh.. I try to keep the peace and say it’s a nice compromise. This, of course, results in looks of confusion.
They can have their nativity scene since basically all the other “Christmas Decorations” as they like to call them are pagan in origin anyway. Never mind the fact that Jesus wasn’t even born on December 25th, but more on that shortly. Furthermore the very idea that they put up even a few window decals that say Happy Chanukah is immediately shot down.
At our recent company holiday party, three coworkers were leaving for the night and I got up with everyone else to say goodnight. I went to hug one and she pulled away with a look of disgust. Eh, whatever. Not wanting to ruin the festive mood of the evening I simply smiled and said, “Well, Happy Holidays.” She looked at me and in a corrective, arrogant tone stated, “You mean Merry Christmas.” I replied, “No.. Happy Holidays” Which elicited an even more sardonic “You mean Merry CHRISTMAS” I just went “Pffft”, and went back to what I was doing and not willing to waste any oof my time on a naive little girl. She’lll go far in life with that kind of non-compromizing, arrogant attitude.
So what are the origins of carols, mistletoe and ho ho ho?
Most people accepted that Christmas, or December 25, was the actual date on which Jesus was born. However, in the early eighteenth century, some scholars started giving alternative explanations.
The New Testament gives no date or year for Jesus’ birth. The earliest gospel – St. Mark’s, written about 65 CE – begins with the baptism of an adult Jesus. This suggests that people of the time lacked interest in, or knowledge of, Jesus’ birthdate. All of his historically-important deeds came later in life. Up til then he was just another citizen.
The year of Jesus birth was determined by Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk, “abbot of a Roman monastery. He posited that in the Roman, pre-Christian era, years were counted from ab urbe condita (“the founding of the City” [Rome]). Thus 1 AUC signifies the year Rome was founded, 5 AUC signifies the 5th year of Rome’s reign, etc.
Dionysius received a tradition that the Roman emperor Augustus reigned 43 years, and was followed by the emperor Tiberius. Luke 3:1,23 indicates that when Jesus turned 30 years old, it was the 15th year of Tiberius reign. If Jesus was 30 years old in Tiberius’ reign, then he lived 15 years under Augustus (placing Jesus birth in Augustus’ 28th year of reign). Augustus took power in 727 AUC. Therefore, Dionysius put Jesus birth in 754 AUC. However, Luke 1:5 places Jesus’ birth in the days of Herod, and Herod died in 750 AUC – four years before the year in which Dionysius places Jesus birth.
Joseph A. Fitzmyer – Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the Catholic University of America, member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and former president of the Catholic Biblical Association writes about the date of Jesus’ birth, “Though the year of Jesus’ birth is not reckoned with certainty, the birth did not occur in AD 1. The Christian era, supposed to have its starting point in the year of Jesus birth, is based on a miscalculation introduced ca. 533 by Dionysius Exiguus.”
The DePascha Computus, an anonymous document believed to have been written in North Africa around 243 CE, placed Jesus birth on March 28. Clement, a bishop of Alexandria (d. ca. 215 CE), thought Jesus was born on November 18. Based on historical records, Fitzmyer guesses that Jesus birth occurred on September 11, 3 BCE.
With all historic proof, it’s been determined that Jesus was indeed not born on December 25th. There are churches now that don’t even acknowledge December 25th as the date of birth for Jesus.
So how did Christmas come to be celebrated on December 25?
Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. During this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the week-long celebration. The festival began when Roman authorities chose “an enemy of the Roman people” to represent the “Lord of Misrule.” Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival’s conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.
The ancient Greek writer, poet, and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in his time. In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).
In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to make converting the pagan masses easier. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians. The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus’ birthday. Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, “In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been.” The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, and singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling).
The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that “the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that month, but because Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays morphed into Christian ones.” Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681. However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.
Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.”
As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. Gee, coud this be the foundation for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the following Christmas parades across the country?
When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in 1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.” On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two million rubles worth of property was destroyed.
Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia and other holidays, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas Trees”. Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.
Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim. The Christian custom of “kissing under the mistletoe” is a later synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult.
In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas.
Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December 6th. He was only named a saint in the 19th century. Nicholas was among the most senior bishops who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Testament. The text they produced portrayed Jews as “the children of the devil” who sentenced Jesus to death. In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children’s stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas’ death, December 6. The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden –their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw. Woden had a long, white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each Autumn. When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing. In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25th instead of December 6th. In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) wrote a satire of Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History. The satire refers several times to the white bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus. Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…” Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys. The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern picture of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly. Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad children of the world. All Santa was missing was his red outfit. It is an urban legend, by the way, that the modern red-suited Santa image was created by the Coca Cola company in 1931.
Many of the ‘traditional Christmas carols’ were pagan in refernece and content. Come on, “Deck the hall with boughs of holly?”
Christmas has always been a holiday celebrated carelessly. Few people ever pause to consider the celebration’s intrinsic meaning, history, or origins; or the origins and meaning behind any tradition for that matter. Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christian god who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the Torah.” It is a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.
Many who are excitedly preparing for their Christmas celebrations would prefer not knowing about the holiday’s real significance. If they do know the history, they often object that their celebration has nothing to do with the holiday’s monstrous history and meaning. “We are just having fun.”
What’s turned into such a commercial holiday originally had nothing to do with Jesus, Santa Claus or family goodness. Today the holiday is more about materialism, personal wealth and greed than anything else. It’s gimme, gimme, gimme and more, more, more. The first day of classes after the winter break kids all over bring their shiniest, most expensive presents to show off. It’s not about good will toward man; it’s about who got the coolest gadget. My toy is bigger than yours because you’re daddy is just a poor, out of work auto worker and my daddy took a hefty bonus from the bank bail out. Maybe it’s just me but I’m thankful just to have a few good friends and enough money in my pocket to buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee if I get hungry enough. I could care less about an iPhone with a shiny touch screen. My fingers can take the extra seconds to press a button or two to get to the same exact information on the web or dial a relative to say “Hi, someone loves you and is thinking about you.” When you give a gift from your heart no gift receipt is needed. Remember what Garfield said to Odie. “Christmas Spirit. It’s not the giving. It’s not the receiving. It’s the loving.”

© 2008 R. Wolf Baldassarro/Deep Forest Productions