Yule, dude.

One of the best parts of Catholicism (particularly its Anglo- version) is how much paganism it’s got wrapped up in it. Christianity, especially in its ancient rituals, is the closest thing we’ve got to ancient pagans. And those folks were doing human things to make days holy long before the stuff you found imbued with Christianity got tacked on, if in fact they were tacked on and not just reframed afterwards with Christian symbology. There’s something deeply human and true about these celebrations, particularly Christmas and Easter, that no amount of later theology or corporate money-grubbing can erase. If Christmas didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

So, do your believing and non-believing friends a favor and get some research going. Log and bonfires and what else?

HB,

For the record the paganism in Christian feasts seems like revisionist account. For example, it is quite a popular belief that Christmas is December 25th due to a coincidence with a pagan celebration whereas it is December 25th based on the biblical account of the timing of the birth of John the Baptist. My apologies if this is mere triviality.

Martin,

Are you able to say more about this dating? It is mere triviality, to be sure, but I’m interested nevertheless.

I had long thought it simply irresolvable: nobody really knows how this dating came to be. It seems clear enough, anyway, that different parties have fairly strong motivation to “revise” history in both directions— some Christians to distance their own cherished celebrations from paganism, and some anti-Christians to ridicule the Christian rubes. I don’t have a horse in that particular race, but I do have a curiosity about history, so would be interested if you know any compelling arguments.

Some quick googling turns up defenders of both alleged origins. The wikipedia article on Christmas has a lot of citations, but they’re messy. Something called Christianity Today gives a summary basically matching wikipedia’s, and seems basically to side with pagan origins. It looks like early Christian calculations were all over the map (err, calendar), there was no real celebration for the first several centuries, there was some rejection of the very notion of celebrating a birthday, and it eventually settled on December 25th which may or may not roughly coincide with some pagan celebrations for reasons that may or may not be independent of them.

If you have some clarity on this, though, I’m all ears.

Christmas is one of the tackiest and most annoying holidays ever. Hearing Christmas music makes me want to kill.

Robbie,

I agree with all the messy sources out there. Part of the issue is that Christmas as a feast simply did not have the weight associated with it as it now does.

In terms of the dating within the Bible itself here is what I know. At the time of the Annunciation when Mary is told that she is chosen to be the mother of God she is also told that her cousin is already six months along in her pregnancy with John the Baptist. We also know when John was conceived because his father was struck mute during the Jewish Feast of Atonement which is a temporally confined feast that occurs anywhere between mid-September to mid-October. So if John was conceived in late September and the Annunciation occurs six months later then that makes for the conception of Jesus during late March. Advancing nine months from late March puts us at late December for Christmas.

The part that mystifies me about this whole thing is that if the matter is really that simple, how did alternate theories come to be? I cannot find a reliable answer. The most common reason I have found is that more puritanical sects of Christianity were trying to associate Catholicism with paganism but that explanation seems pretty weak to me.

I take it that the “Jewish Feast of Atonement” you’re talking about is Yom Kippur (though you might call it the “Jewish Fast of Atonement”), which falls around the time you say. But is there another source for the Zechariah-made-mute story than the first chapter of Luke? Because I don’t think it identifies the time as Yom Kippur.

This guy uses a subtle reading of that very passage—and some knowledge of the Hebrew calendar and speculation about Temple practice—to date Jesus’ birth to September or October.

Martin,

Googling around for other sources for this Yom Kippur dating, I found a “limited preview” of a book called The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity in which the author claims that the tradition that this event fell on Yom Kippur appeared in the fourth century. He starts to speculate as to why it would have appeared, and before long the preview gets cut off.

In any case, it seems to me rather hard to justify from the scriptural account. So I guess it depends on your position with regard to such extra-scriptural tradition.

Sorry to have hijacked the comments for historical trivia, Nate. I am still thinking about your post.

The comment I was going to leave was substantially similar to hb’s, so I will merely second his words, and say that, being what Jackson Browne would call “a heathen and a pagan on the side of the rebel Jesus,” Christmas has indeed always been my favorite holy day.

HB & Libby: Sounds like a very worthwhile project. If it helps you have any sympathy for my predicament, I would just note that all of my upbringing centered around focusing as much as possible on the explicitly religious, explicitly Christian aspects of Christmas. Finding other things in the holiday to value might be substantially less difficult for others, whose family traditions had less of a laser-focus on the specific religious import of the Advent and Christmas seasons. It is a useful corrective to the universal tone of my post, though, to note that the emphatically and nearly exclusively Christian content of my own associations with Christmas are particular to me and my history.

Robbie: It may be a personal preference, but I don’t mind tangential conversations in response to my posts to even the slightest degree.

I also don’t think that the historical discussion is actually trivial: it has amorphous and large currents of implication. How true is the traditional Christian claim of divine guidance and momentum in relationship to the emergence of Christian rites and practices? Many Christians place an incredible weight upon the idea of a 2000-year-old Christianity with a tradition of unbroken rites and doctrines. Even seemingly inconsequential claims like the idea that Christmas came to be through a messy admixture with paganism threaten, in a vague way, the story of the clear, unambiguous emergence of the Christian church as the endorsed consequence of God’s incarnation on earth.

I’m trying to limit my web surfing during work to that available on the iPhone, which in turn limits my willingness to type long and thoughtful and well-spelled comments here and other places. Hence, the relative terseness herein.

Martin: I’m not so much concerned with the dating of Christmas when I laud Catholicism’s embrace of the pagan, although I’m glad to learn more about it through your and Robbie’s inquiry. There seems to me to be plenty in the rites of the Church’s celebrations themselves of those big feasts that could broadly be said to be held in common with pagan (that is, non-Christian) practice throughout time and space that I feel confident calling the celebrations cognates with things like Yule or whatever. That is, these are human events of the same parentage.

Nate: I suffered under no such burden as a kid, since theology was a much less prominent part of or Christmas experience growing up than was the storytelling lifted straight from the Gospel. It seems like it’s easier (and perhaps right) to be hostile to towards theology, but less easy to be hostile towards myth.

This tells a little bit about why Christmas is December 25th.

Any case, despite being an atheist, I really enjoy Christmas (Thanksgiving, however, is a close second). Despite my parents and grandparents being Christian, Christmas for me has always been more about getting together with your family (my grandparents alternate between visiting us and visiting my cousins). I love seeing other people prepare for Christmas, buying presents for their kids and decorations for their house. Everyone seems happier because they are looking forward to Christmas and we are all connected because we are doing the same thing (strictly speaking, not true since not everyone celebrates Christmas, but whatever). Even going to Christmas Eve service does not remind me much of Jesus’ birth (I’m not sure it ever did). Instead, I enjoy being part of a community, singing some songs, and participating in a tradition I’ve been part of as long as I can remember.

That said, I have not been hope for Christmas since college. Even this Christmas I am going home late because my parents will be with my sister who is in Syria. So maybe I’m just nostalgic.

What vanity! Individual “loss of faith” after obsessive attendance at Church? Sad but boring. It may be hard to realize but the Church is not about you. What is truly sad is that displays of “faith” by such people deceive the innocent faithful.

Nick: My one Christmas spent oversees made me intensely nostalgic for the season, more so than I have ever been since. Hope you make it home some year soon.

Dan: It’s interesting that you focus on church, whereas I talked purely about my own faith in the post. Would you go so far as to say that my beliefs are not about me? Or that my relationship with a church is not about me?

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say… Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round— apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that— as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not of another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
- Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

An honest atheist would spend the 25th of December reading ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’.

Having had a similar change a few years ago, I can see how this is a tricky area, especially during the holidays themselves. I was highly involved in Church (on a more informal level) during my middle and high school years. As that changed, Christmas services and events. became more and more awkward.

I guess an important thing to note is that I never really enjoyed going to Christmas services anyway. It always seemed like something I had to do, not something I wanted to do.

Anyway, as I leaned away from the church and more towards a more introverted view on faith, I started to find Christmas more enjoyable. I began to think that if Christmas had been reinvented through out the years, why could I not reinvent it for myself. I did not leave behind the traditional Christian elements of the holidays, but I did decide to leave behind a great deal of the formality.

I began to look at Christmas from an emotional and spiritual perspective, as opposed to the (what I considered) rigid celebratory aspects. It’s a time of rebirth, of gathering together… basically all the stuff Dickens said a crap ton better than me in Rebekah’s comment.

So “Is there a Christmas worth resurrecting from Christianity’s ashes?”. Yeah, I think so. But for me it took separating faith from the church and ceremonies themselves. It seems that those were really essential to you, so perhaps there is something else to focus on that help create the same type of separation.

Here’s, essentially, what I tried to do when I realized that though I was raised Christian, I never actually believed that Jesus was more than an interesting man whose words were worth considering. I don’t really know how this compares to your experience—realizing that you’ve been deceiving yourself (and consequently others) about your beliefs is different than having beliefs change over time. But certainly I shared and continue to share a sense of pain and loss over this realization and the effect of it on some of the people I love. In many ways it might continue to be a year of ritualized grief with little you can do to change this or your feeling of being on the outside, and I suspect that will last well past this year. Let yourself grieve this loss and struggle with these changes. But also try to find and focus on what memories and moments you can wrest from your past that are not connected to faith. Some of mine seem quite trivial, but hold great emotional significance and resonance for me. At the Christmas eve service at our church, we sang hymns by candlelight. The hot wax dripped on my skin as the candle grew shorter. Though this was couched in the church experience, it’s something I’ve come to love outside of that context. (Incidentally, they recently got new candle holders at church so that this no longer happens, much to my entire family’s disappointment! As though a physically uncomfortable sensation should not be a part of worship!) I’ll burn candles on my own and shape the wax on my skin. This example seems weirder and less helpful the more I write about it. I know it’s not much. But what I mean to get at is this—can you think of little things like this in your own experiences? Can you think of just a few new, nonreligious ways to incorporate them into the holiday seasons to ease your grief just a little?