How ‘Christmas’ evolved from pagan Saturnalia

A book by J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue entitled The Making of the Modern Christmas explains how our Christmas celebration evolved from the pagan Saturnalia. It says:

"Early Christians did not celebrate the birth of Christ. Birthdays in themselves were associated with pagan practices; the Gospels say nothing about the actual date of Christ’s birth, and within the early church the second coming of Christ was expected imminently, so the incarnation may well have seemed of lesser importance. It was not until the fourth century that Christmas was officially established as a feast of the church by Julius I, Bishop of Rome, although it had almost certainly been celebrated before then. Christmas is, in fact, the classic example of the Christian church coming to terms with the traditional customs and rites of the people, superimposing a Christian festival upon the pagan mid-winter holiday. However, we find from the beginning an ambiguity in the attitude of fervent Christians to the festive season; there is an emphasis upon the fact that it is Christian and, with Easter, the most important of the festivals, yet, at the same time, there is an uneasy feeling that many aspects of the celebration are wordly or pagan.

"Thus we find St. Gregory Nazianzen, who died in AD 389, warning his flock against ’… feasting to excess, dancing and crowning the doors’ and urging ‘the celebration of the festival after an heavenly and not after an earthly manner‘. Many a priest, prelate or minister has preached to his congregation in similar vein, from AD 389 to AD 1986. The ‘gross’ elements of Christmas – gluttony, drunkenness and the challenge to public order and discipline represented by indecent plays, the reversal of social roles and dressing up as the opposite sex or as animals – all became the standard targets of austere and reformist prelates. The fear that the ‘true spirit of Christmas’ and the central miracle of the Christian religion – God becoming man – were in danger of being lost amidst the revelry of Saturnalia, or Yuletide, has been perceived since Christianity first chose to celebrate the birth of its Saviour at that time and season.

"In Anglo-Saxon England the Christian festival dovetailed easily into existing pagan practices, for 25 December was the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon year and the time of the Yule festivities."

During the Spanish times, Christmas was known as The Nativity. After the coming of the Americans, Santa Claus upstaged The Nativity.

St. Nicolas had been the patron of Russia for over a thousand years, as well as the patron of children and schoolboys, sailors, bankers, pawnbrokers, and captives; long before Santa Claus became the magical gift-bringer of Christmas, children already had the custom of hanging their stockings in fire-places in hopes of receiving gifts from St. Nicholas on his December 6 feastday. In the Netherlands, St. Nicholas comes riding up from Spain on a white horse and to this day, December 6 is the principal gift-giving day. Dutch colonists invariably arrived in the New World in ships that had St. Nicholas as figurehead. They pronounced his name Sinterklass and that is how St. Nicholas got his American name. Thank God, the Filipinos did not Filipinize it to Kulas.