Why Christmas is Celebrated on December 25
—Chrissie
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In the early centuries of Christianity, the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was not commemorated. Easter was, and is, the high holiday in the Christian calendar because the Resurrection is the central tenet of the faith. Compared to this, the Nativity, miraculous though it may have been, was not as significant.
While the story of the Nativity was well-known among early Christian communities, when it happened was far less important than where. As the prophesied Messiah, Jesus needed to be associated with King David, thus his birth in the city of David, Bethlehem. In terms of the historical Jesus, getting his parents to Bethlehem when they likely lived in the city of Caesarea, required some poetic license. This was accomplished by the introduction of a census into the narrative, one which is not otherwise attested in historical sources and one that irrationally required people to travel to, and be counted in, a place where they did not live. This not only places them where they need to be to fulfill the prophesies, but also established the coercive control held by the Romans over the people of Judea, an issue that would prove important throughout the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
Christianity did not become Romanized, and vice versa, until the acceptance of the religion by the Emperor Constantine, who converted after a miraculous win at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in October 312 CE. Constantine was a pragmatist and, while we cannot at this distance say whether his conversion was genuine, it was a political move, done in hopes of using the faith as a unifier within the Empire. Rome had become fractured in the previous century, split between the West and the East, encompassing many different societies and cultures, and far too large to maintain without a core commonality. Unlike nearly every other religious cult practiced in the Roman territories, Christianity was without a political association; it could come to stand in for “Roman” in the parts of the Empire for whom “Rome” was simply a far-away government. Easter, important as it was to Christianity, would not be a good holiday to emphasize, as it is so closely associated with Passover; reminders of the Jewish origins of Christianity would have undermined Constantine’s efforts. The Christians themselves had already begun to distance their ideology from that of the Jews, most notably by not requiring circumcision or a Kosher diet. A logical substitution came from the various celebrations of the Winter Solstice that were practiced across the Mediterranean world and the feast of Constantine’s favored god prior to his conversion, Sol Invictus (“the Unconquered Sun”).[1]
There are early references to 25 December as the day of the Nativity, even prior to Constantine’s conversion. Sextus Julius Africanus makes note of this in his Chronology in the early third century. He notes the Feast of the Annunciation (when it was announced to Mary that she was miraculously pregnant) was on 25 March, which places the birth on 25 December. There is also a fourth-century Roman almanac that notes 25 December as “natus christus in betleem judeae,” the day “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.” This timing also coincided well with the mid-winter feast of another of the more widespread religions of the era, the Cult of Mithras, and with the long-standing Roman Saturnalia, which had been celebrated for centuries, though a week prior to the solstice.
It is difficult to point with certainty at any one of these as the defining factor, and it was likely elements of all of them together. Scholars have argued about this for centuries and are likely to continue doing so. The origins of some modern Christmas customs are equally murky and intertwined with practices of disparate cults and belief systems that date back centuries, if not millennia.
[1] Note to English speakers, the homonym between “Sun” and “Son” should not be considered as part of the original idea, as that does not exist in either Latin (where it is “Sol” and “Fils”) or Greek (where it is “Helios” and “Huios”).