4000 Years of Christmas

"Some people look at this book and don’t do the calculation in the title – obviously, if Jesus was born approximately 2,000 years ago it means there’s a great pre-history to Christmas. This is a tiny little book – barely 100 pages long, with small pages and big print – written by an episcopal priest with a background in anthropology. It was originally published in 1912, and I’m not sure that there’s been anything better published since. In a very brief way, he gives an indication of the pre-Christian roots of winter festivals, especially in central and northern Europe – with all kinds of traditions that Christianity then borrowed or morphed for its own purposes. What I think about the festival is this: Winter is hard for human beings to survive. It’s cold and it’s dark. Even today – with the benefit of electric lights and thermostats – we still have trouble in winter. Imagine what it was like for people in Europe in the Middle Ages to survive. So it’s very understandable that all kinds of culture would develop a mid-winter party to distract them. It would likely be when the days stop getting shorter and start getting longer – in other words late December. And you could guess what it would involve. It would feature lights, like candles and burning logs. It would feature evergreens, because they look alive when everything else seems to have died. You would have people gathering together and feasting. All those things are for many of us our favourite parts of Christmas. Christians came along later, started a party, and put it right in the middle of these pre-existing winter festivals. Every time they moved to a new culture, they encountered some kind of winter festival that probably then became wrapped up in Christmas. We have no document that tells us clearly why they placed it on the 25th. What we do know is that when it was started, sometime in the 4th century, the Roman empire already had three winter parties. One was the Saturnalia, which was a late harvest festival. The second was a new year’s celebration lasting five days. And in between there was the birthday of Mithras, god of the “unconquerable sun”, which was on December 25th. Maybe Christians chose the middle date because the symbolism worked – you have worship of a sun god, and Jesus is talked of as the light of the world pushing back the darkness. Another way to think of it is taking the birthday of the sun god, and turn it into the birthday of God the Son. Or it might simply be that Christians were trying to hijack the popularity of the mid-winter parties, or trying to tame them because they were too wild."