The Ever Changing Selection points to an article in Touchstone magazine arguing that the dating of Christmas had nothing to do with pagan festivals. In those days it was believed that prophets were born or conceived on the same day they died, so the Annunciation would have fallen on Good Friday, hence birth on Dec. 25.

From this whole discussion, however, I’ve gathered that there’s very little primary source material on this, so pretty much every conclusion involves speculation. In the old Julian calendar Dec. 25 was the day of the winter solstice, so probably a lot of cultures had festivals on that day (on top of Saturnalia, there was also the birth of Mithras), and certainly the way we do Christmas today is also a celebration of winter. So I doubt we can be 100% sure about the origin of Christmas, but I don’t think it’s worth a whole lot of worry.

I took a look at the article from which Pen drew his information about the pagan origins of Christmas, and noticed it drew rather heavily on Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons. The name rang a bell, as it came up in the extremely long comment thread to this post by Lynn.

For some reason, Caldwell dates the work at 1959, but it was actually written in the 1850s. The original subtitle was “The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife,” which should give you a pretty good idea of where he was coming from: he was out to prove that Catholics were idolatrous pagans. Hislop apparently didn’t just call Christmas pagan — he called communion, confession, baptism, last rites, and just about every other Catholic practice pagan. Recently the preacher Ralph Woodrow wrote a book in support of these theories, only to write another book retracting it all once he checked out Hislop’s sources. (Another, longer deconstruction is here.) So, I’m no expert on this, but he sounds like a very dubious source.

Anyway, Lee Anne Millinger has a nice response to Pen’s post up, where she addresses the paganism angle quite sensibly:

But before we go to pitching out all of our beloved Christmas traditions, perhaps we should give them a second look. As Augustine’s “City of God” let the metanarrative of Christ enter into and encompass the pagan story, I think that the church today can do the same thing with Christmas. Jesus’ story can encompass the lights, the trees and the gift-giving — infusing them with a meaning deeper and more profound than the pagan origins. After all, there were whispers of truth, touchstones of faith, even in Greek and Roman paganism.

Pen says: “Bah! Humbug!”

Personally, I think he’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. If the date of Christmas and the Christmas tree had their origins in the pagan past somewhere, I don’t see why that matters unless people actually think they’re worshipping Saturn or whoever. I don’t know exactly when or why the Church chose Dec. 25 as “Christ Mass”, but it was a long time ago, and up till the 19th century it was apparently a fairly modest holiday, taking a back seat to Easter. So if you’re running up the credit card and drinking too much eggnog on Christmas, I don’t think that’s Saturn’s fault.

Secondly, gift-giving holidays may not be Christian per se, but they aren’t an invention of consumer culture either. Cultures all over the world have them as a way of sharing possessions and cementing bonds between friends, relatives, and allies. That’s basically what Christmas means to me. It’s a chance for me to get together with my far-flung family, celebrate, and think about what the others want and need. It’s not Christian, but my family isn’t Christian. I don’t think that makes it bad, though.

Of course, as Pen says, a lot of people don’t enjoy Christmas this way. They get stressed out and spend their money on useless junk that others don’t really want. And certainly that’s not the right way to do it, and is not Christian either. But I don’t think that should slip into a puritanical distrust of anybody having a good time. The pastor at my former church pointed out that Jesus loved going to weddings, which in ancient Judea were huge wingdings with lots of eating, drinking and dancing that could go on for days. You might call it wasteful, but Jesus didn’t seem to see it that way. In fact, his most notable act at a wedding was to replenish the booze.

Yeah, yeah, I know weddings have a symbolic meaning in the Gospels. I’m just saying, a big party, with or without an explicit religious purpose, doesn’t have to be a bad thing.