Is Christmas Pagan?

Question

http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5172

Can you believe this?! No wonder you can't get the facts through some Christians heads, it's filled with this kind of nonsense. This goes completely against everything ever written about the holiday in history and they say it like it is fact. What do you guys think of this?

Let me make this clear, I have absolutely no problem with Christmas and Christians celebrating Jesus' birth. My issue is this article does not have the facts straight. You can look it up in any encyclopeida, heck, even the history channel's website has all of the facts listed for people to read. My issue is with the article, not Christmas! You can celebrate whatever you want, however you want, but can we please at least stick to the facts? Christmas, as of today, is not a Pagan holiday. But it was and then altered to make it palatable for Pagans so they might be converted to Christianity. So this is for all of those that say it was ALWAYS about Christ. For the record, it wasn't.

Answer 1

I don't know why either, but a VAST majority of Christian holidays and special days are really stolen from the Pagans. And I don't know why Christians fight these truths, even though they are well documented.

Answer 2

I think it would have been difficult to pick a day for Christmas that was NOT on or around a pagan holiday. The church leaders just wanted to agree on a day.

But which pagan holiday did we steal? Saturnalia, Mithra's feast day, yule? Make up your minds people! They're all celebrated around the solstice.

How many of you realize that exchanging wedding rings and throwing rice is pagan? Does that change the meaning of what we do now or demean it? Nope.

And if Christmas borrowed from pagan celebrations - who the eff cares? What difference does it make? Does it somehow prove that God doesn't exist or something?

One last question - instead of putting all this energy into something as mean-spirited as trying to bring down christians, why don't you use your time for something more useful....oh like volunteering at a homeless shelter or perhaps designing a cheaper solar panel so we can all afford one and stop using so much oil/gas?

Cripes! Get a life dude!


PS - XX, Halloween is not a religious holiday.

Answer 3

The birth of Jesus Christ was positioned purely by the Christian church ridiculously close to the Pagan traditions of Yule and Lithe, which glorify nature and the winter solstice. The christmas tree, the holy, ivy, etc, that's all got Pagan roots. Christians built churches over the Pagan places of worship to try to convert them, so what else is to be expected when the dress up Jesus like that?

Answer 4

I read it and he blatantly states that because of the Saturnalia festivities of the Winter Solstice, the "Christians" took the idea and because their "Church" said they could use any day to celebrate Jesus' birth, they decided to use the pagan date to woo the pagans to their side. The "Christmas" is not Pagan but the celebration and it's origins as well as the decorations are. My question to him would be, why not pick the Jewish New Year on their Jewish calendar to use as Jesus' birthday instead of the Roman and western Pagan date?
Thank you for letting us know that some Christians are thinking in the right direction but are still holding fast to the old dictates of the Roman Catholic Church of old.

Answer 5

Concerning the Christmas celebration as it is generally known all over the world, The Encyclopedia Americana says: "Most of the customs now associated with Christmas were not originally Christmas customs but rather were pre-Christian and non-Christian customs taken up by the Christian church. Saturnalia, a Roman feast celebrated in mid-December, provided the model for many of the merry-making customs of Christmas. From this celebration, for example, were derived the elaborate feasting, the giving of gifts, and the burning of candles."

Answer 6

Yes, like most holidays it was swiped from pagans by the early church. Solstice celebrations were very common amongst pagan culture. Dec. 25 was the last day of the Roman holiday Saturnalia. The date was then used by the later Sol Invictus and Mithras cults as the birth of their deity, from which the Christian's likely got the date.

Since then they've co-opted most of the symbols and rituals to support their beliefs

Then capitalism got involved and twisted Saint Nicholas, and you get modern Christmas.

Answer 7

Christmas is not a "birthday", so the article is right - we can celebrate any time we want, and the solstice was perfect, for man's darkest hour was before the saviour came. Christmas stands for "Christ Mass" and is the feast on the church calendar that celebrates the birth of Christ.

The tradition of starting it near the beginning or end of the year traces back to the Christians of Alexandria, Egypt, around 200 AD. A number of pagan feasts celebrated at this time of year, so it seemed like a natural time for Christians to pick their feast as well.

The reason being that the church year culminates with Easter, which is always after the equinox (since passover is on the day of the first full moon after the vernal equinox.) So starting the liturgical year as the year approaches the winter solstice, when light is needed to come into the world makes a lot of sense, since Christ himself was the light that came into the world at its darkest hour.

As for all the stuff you tend to read about "christmas trees came from pagans" don't believe a word of it - that's urban myth. Christians did not adapt these things until the Rennaissance, a thousand years after Christians began celebrating Christmas (which was originally just a religious feast, and had no secular element.)

In the original Christmas, priests would vest in red (red for royalty) and the readings would be the ones about the nativity, just as today. They would sing a number of Christmas hymns - not the ones we know today, of course, but chants that are now lost to history.

Answer 8

I think that christmas does have a pagan history. But I don't think it's wrong to celebrate christmas because we are not celebrating pagans but rather the birth of Christ. To worship pagans is a sin but to worship Christ is not a sin. So if I celebrate Christ on a pagan holiday, so be it. I'm not sinning. I celebrate Christ on EVERY DAY not just christmas.

Answer 9

Yeah....okay....whatev....

Christmas came about as part of the attempt to convert people to Christianity. Like the article says...the church CHANGED their celebration (from Spring) in order to subvert the Pagan celebration. Later some of the Pagan elements (xmas tree, yule log, mistletoe, etc...)were incorporated to the Christian practices to further attempt the conversion of Pagans.

Answer 10

Christmas was originally Pagan (and of course not known as Christmas by them) and was their way of acknowledging how the sun did not go any lower in the sky for the 22,23,24th December and began going higher on the 25th. On the 25th they'd celebrate the rebirth of the sun by decorating pine trees with colourful cloths and feast on a dinner.

Answer 11

Christ-mas means mass of the Christ. Just as Michaelmas means mass of St. Michael, and Lammas means mass of the (new) loaves, and Candlemas means the mass of the blessing of candles.

By definition, Christmas is not Pagan.

Are the seasonal winter celebrations, and the very timing of the celebration of Christmas in the mundane calendar Pagan? Certainly! And the borrowing and re-definition of Pagan symbology and customs (everything from "decking the halls" onwards) is just as much a choice of long-ago Churchmen trying to compete with, and supplant, existing belief systems.

That very fact led to multiple iterations of Reform in Christianity, from Luther and Calvin to the infamous "Puritans" (if ever there was a sect dedicated anything EXCEPT religious freedom...excepting only their own!)...
To the point that the Puritans did not even celebrate Christmas--decorations and greenery and gifts were all just perversions of their dour and downtrodden teachings.

As for the link you refer to, it's a case of the Christian viewpoint of the matter (well, one Christian viewpoint) compared to other Christian viewpoints.

Christmas ain't Pagan. But Yule is (Asatru and Vanatru). So is Winter Solstice, and Alban Arthan (Druid), and Hogmanay (Scots).