The Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us “the first Christians … continued to observe the Jewish festivals, though in a new spirit, as commemorations of events which those festivals had foreshadowed” (11th edition, Vol. 8, p. 828, “Easter”). But over the following centuries, new, nonbiblical observances such as Christmas and Easter were gradually introduced into traditional Christianity.
These new days came to be forcibly promoted while the biblical feast days of Apostolic times were systematically rejected. “Christmas, the [purported] festival of the birth of Jesus Christ, was established in connection with a fading of the expectation of Christ’s imminent return” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, Macropaedia, Vol. 4, p. 499, “Christianity”). The Christmas celebration shifted Christianity’s focus away from Christ’s promised return to His birth, something the Bible does not direct Christians to do.
Gerard and Patricia Del Re explain the further evolution of December 25 as an official Roman celebration: ” … the tradition of celebrating December 25 as Christ’s birthday came to the Romans from Persia. Mithra, the Persian god of light and sacred contracts, was born out of a rock on December 25…. and in the third century [274] the unchristian emperor Aurelian established the festival of Dies Invicti Solis, the Day of the Invincible Sun, on December 25.
“Mithra was an embodiment of the sun, so this period of its rebirth was a major day in Mithraism, which had become Rome’s latest official religion with the patronage of Aurelian. It is believed that the emperor Constantine adhered to Mithraism up to the time of his conversion to Christianity. He was probably instrumental in seeing that the major feast of his old religion was carried over to his new faith” (The Christmas Almanac, 1979, p. 17).
Although Christmas had been officially established in Rome by the fourth century, later another pagan celebration greatly influenced the many Christmas customs practiced today. That festival was the Teutonic feast of Yule (from the Norse word for “wheel,” signifying the cycle of the year). “During this time log-fires were burnt to assist the revival of the sun. Shrines and other sacred places were decorated with such greenery as holly, ivy, and bay, and it was an occasion for feasting and drinking.
“Equally old was the practice of the Druids… to decorate their temples with mistletoe, the fruit of the oak-tree which they considered sacred. Among the German tribes the oak-tree was sacred to Odin, their god of war, and they sacrificed to it until St Boniface, in the eighth century, persuaded them to exchange it for the Christmas tree, a young fir-tree adorned in honour of the Christ child …” (L.W. Cowie and John Selwyn Gummer, The Christian Calendar, 1974, p.22).
It wasn’t long before such non-Christian rites and practices were assimilated into a new church religious holiday supposedly celebrating Christ’s birth. William Walsh describes the rationalization behind it: ” In order to reconcile fresh converts to the new faith, and to make the breaking of old ties as painless as possible, these relics of paganism were retained under modified forms …Thus we find that when Pope Gregory [540-604] sent Saint Augustine as a missionary to convert Anglo-Saxon England he directed that so far as possible the saint should accommodate the new and strange Christian rites to the heathen ones with which the natives had been familiar from their birth…. On the very Christmas after his arrival in England Saint Augustine baptized many thousands of converts and permitted their usual December celebration under the new name and with the new meaning” (p. 61).
Even colonial America considered Christmas more of a raucous revelry than a religious occasion: “So tarnished, in fact, was its reputation in colonial America that celebrating Christmas was banned in Puritan New England, where the noted minister Cotton Mather described yuletide merrymaking as ‘an affront unto the grace of God'” (Jeffery Sheler, “In Search of Christmas,” U.S. News and World Report, Dec. 23, 1996, p. 56).
