Where did Christmas come from?

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Dave18

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i was wondering where the tradition of Christmas comes from. I wa just on yahoo and every single answer was different. A lot of people said it came from Pagans. One person said that was nonsense. were christians the first to put religion into Christmas? did we just adopt traditions and put our religion into it?
 
As I understand it, people who were recently converted to the Church wanted to celebrate the Solstice, so the Church told them to celebrate the birth of Christ instead. Really that’s not that bad. They allowed practices to be carried over which would not interfere with Christianity. As I understand, things like mistletoe, and yule logs, etc.

Fundamentalists like to belly ache about it, but really this has happened else where (like the wearing of rings for married couples).

Hope this helps,
Pax
 
People have always celebrated Midwinter (late December on various dates) as it is a time of hope, when things are about to warm up. That was the case from the Tropic Line to the North Pole everywhere from the beginning of human history to now. It had more to do with survival than religion.
Jesus Christ was crucified in April, AD 33. The Jewish tradition held that all prophets lived a whole number of years, no fractions, therefore dying on the anniversaries of their conceptions. It takes a standard nine months for a baby to get ready to be born, so, the early Christians figured, He was conceived in late April – born, then, sometime around the feasts of Midwinter. This was a cool thought, because He is our Light and Hope and Life, and it seems fitting to hold the Feast of the Nativity (which various churches had been doing at various times of year, summer, spring, winter and autumn, already) in December, near the physical Solstice. The Early Church Fathers wrote about the difficulty of pinning down His actual birthdate and the problems of having a feast close to a pagan celebration, and finally decided to have Christmas after Midwinterfest but before the late-December Roman hand-me-down days, and avoid merging with those pagan occasions. But giving gifts is natural when we celebrate. They simply asked us to do all we do chastely and appropriately and for Him. We can celebrate the seasons as long as we do so in God’s honor and remember He made the seasons and He is more important than the seasons. But He has declared creation to be very good. We can give gifts as long as we do so in the name of Jesus Christ rather than Saturn. God gives us all we have, and encourages us to be generous, so there is nothing un-Christian about giving gifts, either. The decorations are a combination of seasonal bounty, which it’s sensible to use because it’s what is there, and emblems of Christian faith, hope, love and joy, which are totally appropriate. Some sects like to invent false pagan histories for Christmas decorations. You may have heard the round ornaments/Sun god story. In reality, though, ornaments were preserved fruits and candles, then German glassblowers developed wonderful delicate pictorial tree ornaments, and then the two world wars destroyed someof the factories and simple American-made round glass ornaments came into style instead. Similar rumors about the rest of Christmas are just as easy to root out. :christmastree1: :harp: :aok:
 
Calculating Christmas
Calculating Christmas

William J. Tighe on the Story Behind December 25

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.

To read the rest of the article, click on the link at the beginning of the post.

John
 
thanks

someone said that Mary would not have survived riding a donkey in the desert that time of year. what does everyone think about that?
 
Dave18 said:
thanks

someone said that Mary would not have survived riding a donkey in the desert that time of year. what does everyone think about that?
Click to expand...
I’d think they’d have to show proof of such an unequivocal assertion. If no proof is presented then I’d think they were just blowing smoke.
 
Mark Shea elaborates on the Tighe article prodromos linked to HERE.

It’s a worthy read.
 
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