"Of course Christmas is only a story. The Romans had a feast in the middle of December, and the Christians just took it over." How often have you heard this from sceptical friends?
As it stands, this is a non sequitur - an argument which does not make logical sense. The Romans did indeed have a feast in the middle of December, and the Christians did indeed take it over, but the story of Christmas had been set down long before, and the accounts we read in Matthew and Luke have no connection with 25 December. The pictures on our Christmas cards of shepherds shivering in the fields, the carols telling us how "frosty wind made moan", the image in our mind of Mary riding her donkey through the snowy streets of Bethlehem, none of these can be found in Matthew's or Luke's account of Jesus' birth.
Indeed, as far as we know, the first Christians did not celebrate an annual festival to remember Jesus' birth. The only annual commemoration they had was to recall his resurrection: something which they also remembered every Sunday. Easter was closely linked with the Jewish Passover, and both Jesus and the writers of the New Testament saw the connection between the events on Calvary and at the Empty Tomb and the themes of liberation and sacrifice that underlay the Passover. The Passover was also a spring festival, providing a theme of new life, but this scarcely made it a pagan festival.
When the church spread across the Roman Empire, Christians would have come into contact with numerous pagan celebrations. Some of these celebrated the rhythm of the seasons - the shortest and the longest day, and the equinoxes, when day and night were equal, as well as the 'cross quarter days' - the days felt to be midway between these events. Some survive today: dancing round the maypole, lighting bonfires on 5 November (and 1 August!) go back to very ancient times.
Instead of fruitlessly trying to ban these customs, the church took them over, just as the church often took over pagan sacred hills and holy wells as sites for its buildings. Halloween is an example: the fires and mischief connected in pagan minds with frightening away the spirits of dead people were Christianized as celebrations of the eve of All Saints' Day. And the corresponding pagan feast three months later, when fires on hilltops heralded the turn of winter into spring, was transformed into Candlemas, nominally to remember Mary's visit to the Temple when the infant Jesus was forty days old, but also to take over the primitive festivals that took place at the same time.
The same happened with the festivals at midwinter, midsummer and the equinoxes. Mid-autumn was replaced by a celebration of St Michael and All Angels. 25 December celebrated the new beginning brought about through Jesus' birth. Logically, nine months before that, 25 March celebrated Gabriel's Annunciation to Mary that she would conceive a son, and Midsummer Day, 24 June, became a time to remember John the Baptist, who said, appropriately for the longest day, "I must decrease, and he must increase."
At the winter solstice, people in ancient Europe looked forward to a time when the night would pass and the sun would shine, when new life and new hope would return to the earth. What better time to celebrate Jesus' birth! Not by celebrating his birthday, for we cannot tell when that was, but by celebrating the fact of his birth, the fact that God took our nature and was born to share our humanity,
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
HD