Christmas and paganism why?

[Justmerach]

I have been wondering about this and so am posting this questions as I would like to read peoples opinions. I might have known the question to this but cannot remember today for sure.
Why do people link Christmas to paganism and say like they are not buying a Christmas tree for example.

I am a Christian and I do mark the event thinking that perhaps may not have been born exactly on that day, but it is a symbolic marking. I am marking the gift of the Lord that God gave us into the world. Who atoned for our sins.
Jesus brought into the world. Christmas tree are sparkly as such as such can some of that lightness.
I like to do some Biblical themed things around that time. I know the pitfalls and used like a commercial event. Surely it is what you make of it in your heart.
With Dwhali we mark light. In Norway the festival of lights a few days before Christmas. So where is disputes for Christians. Ok, many have walked from God but we are all free to live our lives as want. We await Jesus return as Christians but we know when what his life meant.

So a quick 101 from someone who has knowledge as well. I would like an answer about the lights and Christmas tree a tradition from Norway I think.
Thank you

The Catholic Church was really an early doors political party which held power over rulers & people, and which is why many wars were religious ones To hold onto its power it needed to dominate the lives of everyone & eradicate pagans. Hence the curse of witches came from the church,

The practice of Wicca is incompatible with Christianity because it is based on the worship of pagan deities, and is therefore a sin against the First Commandment," Father Gesy said. "Wicca is basically a pantheistic religion, which means it is a worship of nature.

so Christmas was setup end December in direct competition to pagan solstice celebrations. The birth of Christ was actually earlier on in the year.

Many of today’s Xmas traditions came from the Victorians such as tree decorations, present giving etc. some come from pagans traditions.

is it not perhaps entirely possible that rather than The Church imposing its ideas on the celebrations of the great unwashed, maybe the newly-converted people simply kept the old rites and parties but adapted them to their new way of thinking?

Even now you get people saying things like I'm not religious but I do love Carols from Kings...

“Christmas is when we, as Christians, celebrate the birth of our Lord, Jesus.”

amen! This is it, exactly.
The incarnation, the arrival of Immanuel, the Almighty God sharing in our humanity, the Creator stepping down to live within creation, the uncreated Being taking on flesh- this is what we Christians celebrate when we celebrate Christmas 🙌🏻

Because some elite Victorians came up with a myth that everything Christian came from some long lost pagan 'true' religion, which continues today because people find that an interesting story & humans like to see patterns & connections, even if they aren't there.

Easter has a connection to the Vernal Equinox because of Judaism and how the Jewish calendar works - it's a sol-lunar calendar with months starting on the new moon so when early church leaders tried to figure out when Jesus was executed, to the day, they used calculations around the moon cycles. Most of the world refer to that holiday using some form of Pesach, the holiday on or before which Jesus was executed. English doesn't because of Anglo-Saxons. The only connection we have evidence of to paganism is Bede saying it was celebrated in the month named after a goddess that we have no other sources on. Making any more of a connection to that goddess or paganism is like saying May Day is a Roman pagan holiday based on the name May coming from a Roman goddess. Eggs come from it being a common food to break the Lent, which turned people giving them a gifts, which turned into people decorating them, which turned into stories of Mary Magdalen using an egg that changed colours in a miracle. Rabbits were connected to the Mary because at least one type of European hare can get pregnant while already pregnant which can appear like a virgin birth, we have medieval artwork of her surrounded by rabbits, those images ended up connected.

As already mentioned, Christmas is when it is because of the calculations for Easter. Early church determined either 25th of March or 6th of April. Add 9 months. That's it. They wanted the day of his death and conception to be the same due to Jewish tales about perfect lives. The early church while it was still developing out of Judaism had neither the power nor the desire to take on Roman festivals - most of which were far more regionally celebrated than is commonly portrayed today - they were trying to be separate. The entire development of a deity being omnipotent and all that comes in a significant way from early Christians wants little to do with the fickle and easily trick deities. The practice of trying to intentionally synergize with local customs wouldn't come until they were a main power centuries later. Christmas trees are very late addition. Trees didn't start coming into it until the Victorians, Prince Albert is sometimes credited with bringing it over though there was more movement of ideas around it than just him. Yule wasn't celebrated on a consistent date that linked with the Roman calendar and Christianity hadn't really come to the places that would have celebrated until well after the dates for Christmas were fairly set. Candles and lights have been part of Christmas traditions for a while, the whole bringing light to the world thing, though how it presents has varied. Candlemas in February is an early Christian tradition that has somewhat expanded into how Christmas has become celebrated.

But many people like the story that these all came from pagans better for various reasons. It's like how people like to discuss CE and BCE as intentionally designed to be more inclusive or anti-Christian, depending on the storyteller, when really Christians came up with Common Era (or Vulgar Era) as an alternative to BC/AD because there was discussion a few centuries back around what if those early calculation around the birth and death are wrong - there has been significant agreement on that for a while. It was literally invented by Christians who wanted to be more accurate and respectful to Christianity, but now that gets erased for different stories. Stories of our limited understanding of how thing came to be are often erased with things people find more interesting.

A Catholic response here which is broadly in line with RamblingEclectic above

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-christmas-baptism-of-the-winter-solstice

A Christian doesn't have to have a Christmas tree or wreath or anything like that but as these symbols have been incorporated into a broader Christmas tradition most do. We're in Advent now, a time of fasting and preparation ahead of the celebration of Christ's birth, and in some Christian traditions the Christmas season carries on for six weeks until Candlemas in February. It doesn't really fit with the old pagan calendar when you examine it

@RamblingEclectic

No, these things really have their roots in pagan traditions.

Yule was never a Roman holiday. It’s from Northern European pagan traditions. When Christianity started, there were dozens of different pagan religions active in what would become Christendom.

The Christmas tree has its origin in Yule. Yule is the pagan holiday of the Germanic peoples and involves setting a tree on fire outdoors or as much of one as you can indoors. This was incorporated into Christianity when the Germanic tribes were Christianised. Then around the 1600s the Christian Germans invented the Christmas tree where you bring the Yule tree indoors but you don’t set it on fire, you put lit candles on it. In 1510 there are records that people were still setting trees on fire to celebrate the birth of Christ in Germany,

Prince Albert, being German, brought the German Christian tradition of the Christmas tree to the U.K. Christmas trees as part of Christianity are centuries older than the Victorians in England.

The practice of trying to intentionally synergize with local customs wouldn't come until they were a main power centuries later

This isn’t exactly true. Matching local pagan customs to Christian events was often used to swell conversions by Christian missionaries when Christianity was new to a region and not yet powerful.

When Christianity became the main power in a region, there was no attempt to synergise with local religions or customs, but rather repression and persecution for heresy.

Which “old pagan calendar” would that be? There wasn’t just one…Christianity spread beyond the borders of the Roman Empire fairly quickly.

I suppose old pagan calendars would be more correct? The Germanic, Roman ones, etc. The point is the Christians made their own feast calendar according to their own calculations from the Judaic and early Christian writers.

And Christianised people moving Yule up a few weeks sooner to make it part of Christmas is hardly unprecedented, after all early Christians moved the birth of Christ over 3 months later to match up with Saturnalia.

The problem with this:
Early church determined either 25th of March or 6th of April. Add 9 months. That's it. They wanted the day of his death and conception to be the same due to Jewish tales about perfect lives.

Is that at the time you are talking, the medical wisdom of the day held that pregnancy lasted 10 months, not 9. So there is a whiff of anachronistic error there by whoever proposed this tale.

As Christianity gained power, it erased the pagan roots of what it did adopt all the better to repress and persecute out if existence the pagan customs it rejected.

Yes, dates of festivals can move a bit, after all there isn’t one universal Christmas Day in Christianity. The point I’m making is that how these feasts are celebrated, the customs, traditions, and such are often adopted from or echos of older practices from local pagan religions.

I see what you're saying, the wassailing, trees, etc. Yes, that's how modern Christmas is celebrated, it has picked up pieces from local practices, including modern materialism. None of these things are required by the Church though as part of the Christmas celebration and they weren't there at the time they fixed the 25th ( western) and 6th Jan (eastern). So the Catholic Church essentially says go to Mass on this date that we have come up with as a good date based on Jewish and early Christian practice and that's it. It's not written down anywhere that we give gifts or put up trees or anything. These things have evolved into common practice over the years and probably more things will come along in time.

Hear hear. I've been thinking much the same for a long time.

Speaking as an Anglican, and considering the mess we humans are currently making of the planet, it makes me wonder whether the old religions who worshipped the natural world might have been on to something all along.

All things bright and beautiful...

Yule was never a Roman holiday.

I'm aware, I'm addressing that people have connected Christmas to both Roman holidays of the time and Yule in this thread.

I've not seen any sources that trees were part of Yule that are not from many centuries after the relevant time period. Twigs used for fire, yes, but not trees or logs.

Is that at the time you are talking, the medical wisdom of the day held that pregnancy lasted 10 months, not 9. So there is a whiff of anachronistic error there by whoever proposed this tale.

'Medical wisdom' would vary by location and people group - it's anachronistic to claim they'd all have the same idea at the time. I've not seen Jewish sources - the sources used to determine the dates for Easter and where the concept where Moses, David, and others had 'perfect lives' - of that time that has pregnancy being 10 months.

We have many of the writings of church fathers, and many of those have fairly decent translations. We know they wanted to develop a calendar to be independent from Jewish leaders, and a significant part for them was determining when Jesus was executed. There were two dates calculated, and Christmas was calculated from those dates.

As Christianity gained power, it erased the pagan roots of what it did adopt all the better to repress and persecute out if existence the pagan customs it rejected.

That idea comes from the Victorians. It entirely erases how Christianity developed out of Judaism. Ancient Judaism has monolatry that likely developed out of a Divine Council model common in West Asia that King Josiah attempted to squash though not fully from the texts (see the god of Israel fighting the god of Moab), but that's irrelevant to connecting it to entirely different polytheistic groups (and using the pagan would be anachronistic for the time period the dates for Christmas was being developed).

Like I said, I get people find the stealing from pagan story more compelling. I'm not Christian, I don't even celebrate these holidays, I just have a background in these texts, and the answer to the OP's question about why people today make that link is that some Victorian elites pushed the idea that everything Christian is pagan. Some will always argue they did so with good reason, I don't buy it.

This isn’t exactly true. Matching local pagan customs to Christian events was often used to swell conversions by Christian missionaries when Christianity was new to a region and not yet powerful.

While not powerful in the region, they still only did that after they had power - they weren't doing that in 1st to early 3rd century CE when the development of celebrations of remembrance of his death and birth and other aspects were developed within. They only start gaining enough power in the late 3rd into the 4th century CE to start throwing any tactics like that around.

Even at the height of their power and their most violent, the Catholic church couldn't erase that they altered the dates for the festival of the dead in mid-southern part of what is now Mexico from August to November & how they synergised with the local polytheistic traditions. If they couldn't do it then, how would they when they had fuckall power and many people openly mocked the entire concept (one of the earliest depictions of the crucifixion is graffiti mocking the concept of worshipping someone crucified). That was the environment the dates were calculated and developed in, an environment where if they had tried to co-opt Roman or any other known holidays, we'd likely have sources mocking them for it as we have for other things they did or that they suffered violence for it (it could be read as an insult to the gods to do such a thing) - I don't know of any.

Very interesting RamblingEclectic.

Also, for the first 300 years or so the early Christians who refused the pagan practices of the day were deprived of property, tortured and even killed by the pagan Romans - there's a long list of martyrs in the early Church. I don't see why they would say "oh those pagan ideas are great, let's adopt the Saturnalia festival as our own".

It would have been very handy if the Bible had given us dates so we could have avoided all this but the books of the New Testament are written by the very first Christians who were actually Jews who witnessed Jesus in person and were converted. The Jews used their own calendar and their date for the death of Jesus was Nisan 25 or March 25. These early Jewish Christians came from a very long tradition that was waiting for a Messiah and that person would fulfill various parts of their scripture and tradition (Old Testament or the Torah to the Jews). They believed that a great man would die on the date of his conception so early Christians writers expanded on an idea held by the early Christian Jews that if Jesus died on the 25 March, his conception date, then 25 December is his birthday. Ok, so we say 40 weeks as the gestational period of a baby, but we date that from the first day of our last period, the actual conception doesn't take place until later in the cycle which obviously leads to a missed period. Women back then missed their period, and calculated from there, so roughly a month later than us.

Also Christmas isn't the most important feast in the Christian calendar it's Easter, which opens another can of worms I know!

So anyway that's how Christians figured out the date for their second most important occasion. For sure bits. surrounding the occasion have been brought into the celebrations from local customs or traditions over the last 2,000 years or so, but at the core of it the Christian Nativity is celebrated on this date for reasons calculated separately from these traditions.

I had a thought and I have a bit of an allergic reaction so will come and read the replies later today,
I want to say something everyone has liberty to worship or define themselves as they want and to believe what they want.
However, think this over there are eminent figures in the Church therefore the Body of Christ who is head of the Church. These people carry out work for Jesus using the Holy Spirit gifts. There are healers and those with gifts of wonder-i.e micraclous gifts.1 Corithinans 1-31.. Many of these people celebrate the true meaning of Christmas. The Holy Spirit was never stripped from them. Therefore meaning is not a crime and Jesus is ok with it.
Just to ponder over.

I favour tying history and His story together, it’s called contextual theology. There are after all only so many days in the year and on a cold wet dark December I look forward to advent moving into Christmas. My youngest DD is heathen with heathen and pagan friends. They make a gathered door wreath for outside our house and gift us home made Yule treats whilst wishing us a blessed Christmas. I doubt the magi were Jewish when they bought gifts and so we welcome them in, share food and talk about what makes the midwinter season for each of us.

DH (priest) will be run off his feet and covering the hospital chaplains on top of his parish so DD makes us Christmas dinner on Boxing Day. For me I have a greater concern of the mammon version of Christmas rather than pagan season of Yule which is far more reflective and family focussed.

That's a nice point triballeader, modern materialism is a greater threat to the core ideas of the Christian feast.

The pagan traditions recognize the spark of the divine in nature, seasons, the physical environment, which is finds a parallel in the Christian ideas surrounding creation. Materialism recognizes nothing divine, it worships what it can get, have, buy, use up regardless of of what environmental or human degradation comes because of that.

A Christmas tree and the lights & ornaments on it are all the work of God, so I can see no reason why we shouldn't have something like that in our home for a few weeks. After all we are simply admiring God's creation.

Would Jesus have minded? I very much doubt it.

Now my DC have grown up I did find myself questioning for the first time this year why on earth, as Christians, we were hauling a big wet 7ft tree into our living room. Bonkers. All part of the rich tapestry of festivals and feasts of all persuasions though… is there any going back on it do we think? A new reformation on Christmas?

I really like this post and like what you wrote on worshipping trees, such a good post.

I must say. I agree we should respect each other demontional stance. But again such wise words I think as well. In agreement with the words and I cannot say it better.

This post I feel gets close to breaking it down about this paganism but is just nearly there with that first one or two lines but, still the confusion is there a bit. A few more words about breaking what pagnism is about and I think you might be there. Many of us are educated I am sure and I am in religion university. Pagnism is not something I have studied and it is hard to filter online with a 15 minute often rule on life as an adult. You cannot go back and study everything. So more words breaking the Pagnism and that I think would be helpful. Imagine you are explaining who has never heard about Pagnism.

It is going like this..you don't like Christmas and are saying I am not a Christian and jumps in. Let's not go there keep going.