CHRISTMAS ISN'T CHRISTIAN, THANK GOD!
“Christmas isn’t really Christian.”
"Jesus wasn’t actually born on December 25th.”
“Wasn’t this originally the pagan festival of Samhain / Yule / Saturnalia?”
We’ve heard these arguments a million times from every teenage atheist, every pub bore in a flashing Rudolf sweater. And of course they are right. No point denying it. But there are at least three very good reasons why Christians and traditionalists alike should grin broadly next time we hear this kind of thing, punch the air and say, ‘Yes! Isn’t it just brilliant?’ Why? Well, here are the things we know:
***Why December 25th?***
The earliest source proposing December 25th as Jesus birthday comes from Hippolytus of Rome, early in the 3rd century. He had become convinced that Jesus must have been conceived on 25 March. Why? Because this is the Spring Equinox, silly. And when Hippolytus added nine months to that date he discovered that it landed Jesus birthday party slap bang at the end of the Roman festival of Saturnalia (17th - 23rd Dec) during which Romans gave gifts, threw feasts, and allowed their servants to boss them around. Perhaps this sounds familiar?
As the Romans extended their empire into the northern frontiers of Europe, they discovered that Saturnalia overlapped with the festival of ‘Yule’ in the Germanic world and ’Samhain’ in the Celtic nations. These two great pagan feasts brightened the longest, coldest nights of the year amongst the shivering masses of the northern hemisphere.
Many of these pagan roots are still evident today in the way we celebrate Christmas. From Yule and Samhain we have kissing under the mistletoe, the iconography of candles and fire, 'the holly and the ivy’ and even the worship of trees in the heart of our homes! And from Saturnalia we have the throwing of feasts, the giving of gifts, and the unrestrained hedonism of office parties.
So why do I think that any of this is a good thing? I think it’s brilliant that Christmas supplanted, redeemed and reframed these three pagan feasts for three very good reasons:
1. The date of Christmas speaks of higher beauty
2. The date of Christmas speaks of deeper redemption
3. The date of Christmas speaks of greater good news.
***THE DATE OF CHRISTMAS SPEAKS OF HIGHER BEAUTY***
The Christian festival of Christmas successfully displaced the pagan alternatives because it was much more attractive.
While pagans merely debauched themselves at the solstice, or attended violent games in Rome, the Gospel came along and elevated this nihilistic stag-do of base-ribaldry into a higher celebration of beauty, light, hope, charity, generosity, family and kindness. I don’t mind a few candles and a red nosed reindeer. I adore the movie Elf. But none of it compares to the real magic of Christmas: the voice of a choirboy singing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ in Kings College Chapel, Cambridge, a Salvation Army brass band in New York City collecting for the destitute, the hushed whispers in which we recount the greatest story ever told, the old, old tale of ‘infinity dwindled to infancy’ as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it. No wonder those pagans so readily swapped the cheap fripperies of obscenity, violence and drunkenness for the sublime mysteries of the nativity story. You can keep your Jagermeister hangover and your stale Brussels sprouts. In the words of, um, Whitney Houston, ‘bring me a higher love’.
***THE DATE OF CHRISTMAS SPEAKS OF DEEPER REDEMPTION***.
It has never been the gospel way to merely, mindlessly negate, castigate or appropriate the practices of another culture, but rather to redeem and fulfil all that is good and of God within the host environment. Imagine the wonder of those pagans as they marked the darkest, cruellest days of the year when they heard the words of Isaiah echoing from an even older culture in a far distant land: "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.” (Isaiah 9:2) How they must have longed for that dawning during Samhain, awaiting Spring in the seasons, and new birth in their souls.
There’s a village in England where the priest leads an annual ceremony to give thanks to God for the river that runs through the heart of their community. Many centuries ago this was an annual pagan rite - worshipping the river spirits - but the missionaries to that village like Paul on Mars Hill redeemed it instead of suppressing it. They gently pointed the villagers towards: "The God who made the world and everything in it... so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:24)
The fact that so many Roman temples became churches, and that most pagan festivals became Christian ones, is to our credit. It’s not something to be covered up. Wherever there are horrors in a culture - the abuse of children, the filing of teeth to points, genital mutilation of teenage girls - the gospel cries ‘no’. But in Yule and Samhain the first apostles to northern Europe found celebrations of darkness and light, a marking of the turning of the earth, a longing for seasons to change, and so they proclaimed the birth of Jesus as the very articulation of these longings, and as the fulfilment of these hopes. One might argue that it is far better to celebrate Christmas at the solstice, with all its many layers of historical cultural, astronomical and seasonal significance, than on some random date (no doubt equally disputed) in February, or whenever.
***THE DATE OF CHRISTMAS SPEAKS OF GREATER GOOD NEWS***
Finally, it is significant that in many supposedly ‘pagan’ (animist) nations today the movement towards Christian faith is exponential. Unlike all the post-Christian westerners who seem nostalgic for a bit of nature-worship, these actual nature-worshippers can see clearly how much more wonderful is the gospel of Jesus.
If reclaiming Christmas for the pagans means the promise of light in the darkness during the winter solstice as it did for the ancient Celts at Samhain, feasting with family, giving gifts and inverting hierarchies as it did for the Romans at Saturnalia, decking trees with lights and lighting fires, as it did for the Germans at Yule - then count me in! Jesus attended parties, he turned up at feasts, and he invariably made them better by his presence. So should we!
But if reclaiming the pagan festivals that once marked this time of year means downgrading ‘good news of great joy to all people’ - a message first declared two millennia ago while we in the Celtic nations were all still painting ourselves blue and worshipping trees - to mere beige hedonism, puking in the street and exchanging saliva under plastic mistletoe at the office party; if its about swapping the sublime mystery of the incarnation with the lesser magic of primitive nature-worship, if its all just kitsch Rudolf and adolescent superstition instead of ‘O Holy Night’ and angelic choirs and good news to the poor, and the miracle of new birth, and the mystery of weakness supplanting power - well, I think I’ll stick with the upgrade if that’s okay with Yule? Peter Greig.
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