Christmas - Christian & Pagan?

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Myths and Controversies

One of the persistent rows about Christmas is whether, in essence, the festival is a Christian occasion celebrating the birth of Jesus or an older pre-Christian or pagan time with long-standing traditions whose meaning continues to hearken back to the time in which they originated.

churchstar This is really a bit of a non-starter for a couple of reasons. The first is to wonder why anyone needs a narrative stretching back into the mists of time in order to justify their view of Christmas, or Yule or any of the season's other names. The second is a question prompted by quests for the 'real' meaning of anything - where is this meaning found? Is it something that is inherent in a custom and can be traced back to an origin? Or is the custom a vessel which is given meaning by the beliefs of those enacting it?

All this raises some interesting questions about history and whether the past is a narrative justifying the present or a subject to be met on its own terms. At Christmas Matters we like history and think it's worth cutting through the fog to get close to the past. Talk of the 'real' meaning of Christmas is probably a red herring or, worse, a quest for this meaning might end up re-writing and simplifying a complex and interesting narrative.

So here are some of the pagan myths surrounding Christmas, in addition to those mentioned elsewhere in this section. They're put together here not really for the purpose of knocking them down, but more to stress the importance of finding historical truth in evidence rather than assertions. Put it another way, you don't have to be interested in the history, but if you are we think it's a good idea to try and get it as accurate as possible.

We know these are contentious topics - do contact us and let us know if you think we've got it wrong! The same goes for any other mistakes on the rest of the site.

Christmas is a colonised pagan festival

Or really, a number of colonised pagan festivals, depending on whether your focus is the Rome of Late Antiquity or pre-Christian Europe, which itself cannot be described as one coherent 'pagan' body. Taking the Roman stories first, for many people the claims that Christianity simply co-opted the festival of Saturnalia for Christ's birth leads to the belief that Christmas is at the bottom of it pagan rather than Christian. This is the big idea that's at the bottom of a lot of unnecessary friction between different people's views of Christmas.

Druids Picking your way through the morass of, by turns, convincing, unconvincing, suggestive, coincidental and utterly absent evidence is a job in itself. It is one of the areas in which the internet is of almost no use whatsoever. There is little to convince us of the survival of a coherent belief system, embodied in Christmas customs, past the conversion period and through the middle ages. The same is true for Yule which, despite being a non-Roman custom from the Barbarian north appears to be used interchangeably with Saturnalia as the 'true' pagan meaning of Christmas. The appropriation of the word 'Yule' is no evidence of a continuous custom - more likely it reflects the persistence of the name to describe the entire winter period.

There seems little doubt that the decisive promotion of a Christian festival of Christ's birth by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century was an adaptation of the pagan Sol Invictus celebration. Whether this had any religious, rather than customary, significance at the time of the change is open to debate. It would be logical to assume it was custom rather than 'pagan' belief, given the ease with which people appeared to move from one to the other. And this is an important point worth dwelling on a moment. To put it one way, custom is something you do because you've always done it; a religious belief is something you invest in each time you do it. You could argue that for many, or most, people in 21st century Britain, Christmas is more custom than religious festival. This enables people to re-define the festival as they wish, but there's no need for any historical justification of this.

Winter So is the history of Christmas just available to Christians? Of course not - the only people to claim this are the miserable descendants of the puritans. For all that folk custom in these islands since the medieval period has been informed by what you might call an ordinary Christian religion, it has always been a pretty complicated mix. At several points when discussing Christmas traditions we have used the word 'secular' in order to distinguish certain folk traditions. The idea that in the Middle Ages and beyond ordinary people existed in some kind of state of constant piety is obviously ridiculous. There is no reason for us to take the side of dour moralists and Christmas-banning puritans and judge people in the past on how they balanced their christian religion and their secular customs. In the interests of understanding the periods during which so many of our customs have their roots, it's important to look at them on their own terms rather than rather arbitrarily divide what people got up to into separate areas carrying radically different meanings. So many of 'our' traditions come from a more or less harmonious mixture of sacred and secular, profound and daft. As we have found out while researching this website, these Christmas customs have arisen from a combination of piety, nostalgia for a lost Catholic past, secular customs with little or no religious significance and more ancient and mysterious relics of previous times, transformed over time. Within this mixture there's plenty for everyone to share.

There are a few other myths that we've come across that we'll just tack onto the end here. We'll add more as we come across them!

Father Christmas is really Norse God Woden

We've read this in numerous places. There's an old story on the BBC website, referring to theories put forward by a Dr Brian Bates, who is apparently the director of the 'shaman research programme' at the University of Sussex and has written some New Age books. It's set out with no disclaimers in Stella Collins' otherwise admirable 'Christmas!' book. It's an example of a coincidence in form between two occurrences of what is a fairly universal custom - gift-giving. As you can read in our discussion of the development of the figure of Father Christmas, his gift-giving appears to originate in the stories of St Nicholas from the sixth century onwards which have nothing whatsoever to do with Norse mythology but more to do with almsgiving and charity.

The Christmas Tree is a survival of pagan nature worship

The basis of this myth appears to be nothing more than the Christmas Tree is a tree, the pagans of Northern Europe worshipped sacred trees, therefore the Christmas Tree is a sacred pagan tree. It's pretty flimsy. I should point out again that there is nothing at all wrong with neo pagans putting their own interpretation upon bringing in the evergreen tree and decorating it with beautiful things. If we can all do the same thing and share our traditions it does not matter at all why we do it or how old the traditions are. But do it because you want to do it, not out of some misplaced belief that tree-worship somehow survived in medieval Europe. As you can see from some of the stories on our Christmas Trees page, paganism appears to have been added into the traditions at a relatively late stage. The apparent sources of the tradition as it's come down to us are the mystery plays about the biblical trees in Genesis and Revelation - which moved into the private sphere, as it were, with the demise of the performances of these plays in church; and also there are early accounts of trees hung upside down to represent both the Cross and the Trinity - which to us bear the authentic hallmarks of a rustic Christianity.