Whose Christmas is it anyway?

Did the Christians hijack Christmas? It seems strange that the pagans used to celebrate the winter solstice on the 21st of December to celebrate the rebirth of the Sun (not Son).

Apparently, the season of good cheer did not start out as exclusively a Christian festival. According to Pagans, the early Christian church hijacked December 25 to celebrate the birth of Jesus because they saw that everyone was already having a good time and decided to take advantage of it.

news.bbc.co.uk...

It was in 601 that Pope Gregory I wrote to Melitus (his missionary in England) telling him "not to stop such ancient Pagan festivities" but to "adapt them to the rites of the Church, only changing the reason of them from a heathen to a Christian impulse". So all those who have been claiming for years that Christmas was, in fact, actually a pagan holiday - you were right and Pope Gregory I handily put it in writing for you.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk...

It would have been interesting to see a world where these ancient nature religions had survived in their native homelands.

reply to post by woodwardjnr


the commies only got two place to go... Islam or China!

Christmas is for Christ Mass over 3/4 of the globe yo...

reply to post by woodwardjnr


Why don't we just say its everyones Christmas

Or perhaps its the corperate worlds holiday... They're the only ones not losing money around this time

oh well... the commies can't even escape it in China!

Akragon
reply to post by woodwardjnr

 

Why don't we just say its everyones Christmas

Or perhaps its the corperate worlds holiday... They're the only ones not losing money around this time

I think whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs are, we can all agree Christmas has become too commercialised over the years. I mean the popular image of Santa is a coca cola invention.

Just an excuse to have a few days off with family and pals..Iam not complaining I will get some satsumas from Father Christmas (Not Santa he sucks).
Oh and a good piss up
Oh I wish that fella would stop bleating on about Commies...

reply to post by woodwardjnr


I believe that the Roman Saturnalia festivities took place between December 17th - 23rd. The Pope infiltrated that and spread it among the nations where the Catholic Church was established. Much of the Roman festival is strikingly similar to our take on Christmas;

Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honor of the deity Saturn held on December 17 of the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities through December 23. The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves.[1] The poet Catullus called it "the best of days."[2]

from Saturnalia Roman Festival

reply to post by boymonkey74


Father Christmas is blatantly a commie, the red suit, the Karl Marx beard.free toys to kids It's all there starring you in the face.

I just think its interesting that there is a history to Christmas that most people are unaware of, yet probably has more of a meaning and makes more sense to some than the Christian version.

Sol Invictus ("Unconquered Sun") was the official sun god of the later Roman Empire and a patron of soldiers. In 274 the Roman emperor Aurelian made it an official cult alongside the traditional Roman cults. Scholars disagree whether the new deity was a refoundation of the ancient Latin cult of Sol,[1] a revival of the cult of Elagabalus[2] or completely new.[3] The god was favored by emperors after Aurelian and appeared on their coins until Constantine.[4] The last inscription referring to Sol Invictus dates to 387 AD[5] and there were enough devotees in the 5th century that Augustine found it necessary to preach against them.[6]

It is commonly claimed that the date of 25 December for Christmas was selected in order to correspond with the Roman festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun", but this view is challenged.[7]

Sol Invictus

reply to post by woodwardjnr


Father Christmas is not a communist! commies get coal for Christ's Mass...

Father Christmas is not a socialist either! modern socialist do not share anything with each other, it's just a disguise... soft-communism if you will.

Jesus hate both of them!

reply to post by woodwardjnr

Let's distinguish between Christmas and the 25th of December.
The 25th of December can be anybody's. Only 365 days a year, no point in anybody trying to claim a monopoly in any of them.
Christmas itself, by definition, is a celebration of the birth of Jesus, as it would be if celebrated on any other day. I believe in some areas it used to be January 6th, until conformity was reached on the basis of Dec 25th = Christmas, January 6th = Epiphany.

So what your discovery amounts to is that two different traditions are celebrating something on the same day. Ho hum, no great harm done.

I wrote this on a previous Christmas thread some time ago, I don't want to write it all again, it is a potted history of 'Christmas' of sorts.

www.simpletoremember.com...

E. The DePascha Computus, an anonymous document believed to have been written in North Africa around 243 CE, placed Jesus birth on March 28. Clement, a bishop of Alexandria (d. ca. 215 CE), thought Jesus was born on November 18. Based on historical records, Fitzmyer guesses that Jesus birth occurred on September 11, 3 BCE.

II. How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on December 25?

A. Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. During this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the weeklong celebration. The festival began when Roman authorities chose “an enemy of the Roman people” to represent the “Lord of Misrule.” Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival’s conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.

B. The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in his time. In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).

C. In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.[2]

D. The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus’ birthday.
E. Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, “In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been.” The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.



F. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that “the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”[3] Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.[4] However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.

G. Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.”

H. As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.”[6] On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies that led to riots across the country.

More about the 'traditions' of Christmas.

www.simpletoremember.com...

A. The Origin of Christmas Tree Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas Trees”.[7] Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.
B. The Origin of Mistletoe Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim.[8] The Christian custom of “kissing under the mistletoe” is a later synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult.[9]
C. The Origin of Christmas Presents In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas (see below).[10]



D. The Origin of Santa Claus
a. Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December 6th. He was only named a saint in the 19th century.
b. Nicholas was among the most senior bishops who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Testament. The text they produced portrayed Jews as “the children of the devil”[11] who sentenced Jesus to death.
c. In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas’ death, December 6.
d. The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden –their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw. Woden had a long, white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each Autumn. When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing.
e. In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25th instead of December 6th.
f. In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) wrote a satire of Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History. The satire refers several times to the white bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus.
g. Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…” Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.
h. The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern picture of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly. Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad children of the world. All Santa was missing was his red outfit.
i. In 1931, the Coca Cola Corporation contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking Santa. Sundblom modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful, chubby face. The corporation insisted that Santa’s fur-trimmed suit be bright, Coca Cola red. And Santa was born – a blend of Christian crusader, pagan god, and commercial idol.

reply to post by theabsolutetruth

So, as I said, two different traditions choosing the same day for a celebration.
Not so much "hi-jacking Christmas" as "hi-jacking December 25th".

DISRAELI
reply to post by theabsolutetruth

 

So, as I said, two different traditions choosing the same day for a celebration.
Not so much "hi-jacking Christmas" as "hi-jacking December 25th".

Or a contrived celebration of a pagan festival cloaked in the pretense of being Jesus's birthday wrapped in a heavy cloak of commercialism, sprinkled with advertising psychology sparkly dust and marketed to the hilt.

reply to post by woodwardjnr


You are so right. As a Christian I say we should change the date of Christ's birthday celebration closer to when it really occurred, close to Easter. We should demand the word Christmas be removed from all references to the December 25th "joyful holiday" as Nick Jr called it in one of their cartoons. Christ is not the real reason for the holiday after all, Christians who believe this are in denial of the real history of Christmas on Dec. 25th.

I am fed up with the commercialization and overspending and greedy and gluttonous thing that the holiday has become. It has nothing to do with loving ones neighbor, or giving (without expectation of getting). It is just an excuse to run up credit cards and party hardy.

Christians of the world unite! Demand an end to this pagan and commercially ugly day of self indulgence and greed. Celebrate Christ's birth a week before Easter without all the commercialism and really remember the true life of Christ from birth do death.

I couldn't find the original article I was looking for, so this one will have to do. Albeit, it doesn't have the proper references I was looking for.

Here is a list of some of the of Pagan gods that had “birthdays” or are associated with December 25th:

Apollo
Attis
Bacchus
Dionysus the son of Zeus
Helios
Hercules
Horus
Jupiter
Mithras
Nimrod (who eventually came to be worshipped as Baal) – According to ancient Babylonian tradition, Semiramis (later known as the goddess Astarte/Asherah/Ashtoreth/Isis/Ishtar/Easter in other pagan religions) claimed that after the untimely death of her son/husband Nimrod, a full grown evergreen tree sprang up overnight from a dead tree stump. Semiramis claimed that Nimrod would visit that evergreen tree and leave gifts each year on the anniversary of his birth, which just happened to be on December 25th. This is the true origin of the Christmas tree.
Perseus
Sol Invictus (The “Unconquered Sun”)
Tammuz

Source
Celebrating December 25th(and its varied traditions) stretches way back in history. That the Catholic church would choose that day is apropo, actually. That was the best day to usurp, so as to replace all the previous gods with their own. The paganistic traditions were carried over and revamped to reflect Christianity.

It seems even to have been hijacked from the Christians by those who worship the all-mighty dollar. Now everyone who bows to corporate interests celebrates Christmas.

I thought it was common knowledge (well at least on this site) that Christmas was hijacked.
I think it was also the Bday of Mithra and Dionysius amongst others.
That said, who cares. Christmas has never held any religious significance for me or anyone I know.

To me Xmas is the only day I ever got to see all my family in the 1 place at the 1 time, its some of the best and happiest memories I have.

I dont say this often but, thank you Catholic Church

You know what? I don't care. You celebrate whatever you want on this day, and I will use the occasion to celebrate the birth of Christ with my friends and family.