Origins of Christmas Festival

Like millions around the world, our family is making preparations for Christmas. We're gathering again at our Colorado mountain retreat in Pagosa Springs. Very few of us stop to consider when the festival began. I dug around in my files and came up with this. I do not know if the research was done by one or many.

Most of the stories link Christmas to corrupt pagan practices. The moral in most cases is that the best way to celebrate Christmas is to not celebrate Christmas. It is true that the consumerism of the last century has warped the meaning of Christmas for many, but the origins are not so warped as the rumors would have us believe. 

We know that Christmas was celebrated in Rome by the year 336, after Christianity had become official by Emperor Constantine's decree. From there, the celebration spread throughout the Roman Empire and the East. The church of Jerusalem finally accepted the feast day sometime in the second quarter of the 5th century. In some churches Christmas, Epiphany, and the visit of the wise men were all celebrated on separate days, but over time all these have tended to merge. 

There are two theories for the origin of the Christmas (Christ Mass) holiday. In each, the central purpose of the holiday was to celebrate the birth of Jesus. The first theory was based on 3rd century ideas regarding the date of the Earth. It was held by some that the day of creation was March 25. This was arrived at through the a literal interpretation of the Biblical genealogies and some questionable logic (even so, it was a more sophisticated understanding of the creation of the universe and closer to the truth than those held by most cultures at the time). It was reasoned that God's perfection required the second great act of creation (Jesus' incarnation) should coincide with the date of the first creation. Therefore, they believed that Jesus was conceived on March 25. Add a perfect nine months to that, and you arrive at December 25.

The second theory is that Christmas was originally set up as a positive rival to a Roman pagan holiday that was very popular. This would have been consistent with the activities of Christians in the New Testament. We see the original Apostles interacting creatively with the cultures that they were trying to reach with the gospel. They became all things to all people as long as the changes did not compromise the core beliefs of their faith. The Apostles were not counter cultural as we understand the idea. Instead, they looked for ways to redeem culture rather than destroy it. Christmas was one of the successes, seeing that the particulars of the Roman festival are forgotten by all but a few students of history, while Jesus remains the center of Christmas. 

There is no evidence that Emperor Constantine decreed the observance of Christmas in Rome. It began as a festival in one church and then spread throughout the broader Church. The current struggle over Christmas is of the opposite nature. Now, commercialism and institutional pluralism threaten to rob Christmas of its value. Schools design Christmas pageants as though Christmas has no religious roots, and Wall Street would like us to believe that the holiday was created for our local mall, but this is no reason to abandon Christmas. The meaning of Christmas will be maintained in its observance, not in its abandonment. 

To give up is to lose any influence this Christian holiday has and to allow it to go the way of the Roman holiday it replaced. "