Your Christmas Celebration is Pagan

Most people have heard that many of our traditional Christmas traditions--the tree, the gift giving, caroling from door to door, candles, excessive eating and drinking come from Roman traditions of Saturnalia, the Mithras Sol Invictus celebration, and Northern European traditions of Yuletide.  The story is more complicated.  Christian missionaries moved into areas where these traditions had a powerful hold on the culture.  If forced to choose between the gluttony and mood-bolstering practices of winter solstice festivals and the disciplined fasting of Christian spirituality, most people will choose the festival every time.   That's true today.  The seasonal shopping, the endless parties with their jovial games, the Christmas songs, bells and candles are all devised to help people withstand the sadness of cold, shorter days, longer nights, and boredom. 

So, the missionaries had a dilemma.  Either require austere asceticism or find ways to give Christian meanings to embedded cultural practices.  The success of Christians had in infusing the native winter solstice festivals with Christian meanings is the reason that Christmas is the biggest holiday on the planet. The success did not come without compromise.  Just as the values of Christian faith influenced these native winter solstice practices, the values embedded in the cultural practices did not disappear.  The influence was mutual and reciprocal. Christians today struggle to differentiate between the joyful celebration of incarnation and the self-absorbed gluttony of our culture. When we learn to remember experience that do not belong to us personally, we see that Christians in every generation have struggled with the very same tension.