Christmas - what came before?

[SkeletonButterfly]

I know Chistianity effectively added itself to local Pagan(?) festivities in order to become accepted (ok? So that's prob not right but my understanding). What was before Christmas then? Were the rituals similar?

A variety of pre-christian religions celebrated the winter solstice, which is sometimes also called Yule. What happened directly before christianisation depends on where in the country you are, in the north where I'm based the Anglo-Saxon pantheon brought over by the Viking invasion were worshipped before Christianity took over - gods like Woden and Thor. I'm not sure how much accurate evidence there is for exactly what rituals would gave occurred at midwinter but plenty of people on the internet will share their theories about it!

Thank you for responding!

I am interested in the theories really, I find it all a bit fascinating. My personal background is Irish, but I am on Oxfordshire at the moment so it would be interesting to know what the feasts would have been around midwinter and what would have been eaten, how it would have been celebrated

The romans had saturnalia.

the celts had the winter festival (of light I think). There's the legend of the holly king and the oak king

It's all about celebrating light, it seems

The egyptians celebrated too.

the celts gave us mistletoe.

yule gave us the christmas tree

and they all gave us feasting

tbh, the more you read about it, the more you realise we're all actually still pagans

rebirth of the sun god (son of god?)

It's fascinating, really.

See this is why I want to know more - it's so fascinating!