Christmas Was Not "Stolen" From Pagans.
Seasons Greasons! As your friendly neighbourhood folklorist, I wanted to address some popular NeoPagan memes that spring up around holidays like Christmas. The history of the festival is complex, and there are definitely pre-Christian aspects that made their way into celebrations, but the language of “theft” is not accurate.
FIRST: if you want to talk about Christians actively stealing religious beliefs and practices, their primary victim has always been Judaism. The entirety of the Christian religion is founded upon an appropriation and twisting of Jewish religion; please look up the doctrine of “supersessionism.” The ultimate goal was, of course, destruction of Judaism, but only after it had been extensively strip-mined.
Paganism, on the other hand, was to be straight-up destroyed. Strip-mining, when it happened, was more a matter of convenience than theological imperative.
Some pagan practices did stick around, for a variety of reasons.
Sometimes these pagan holdovers were a form of resistance. Sometimes converts just added Jesus to what they’d always done, with no worries. Sometimes Christian authorities deliberately adopted pagan practices to make coerced conversion more palatable. Sometimes Christian authorities didn’t consider whatever was happening important enough to fuss about. And so on.
Many European pagan cultures—but not all—had festivals set at or around the winter solstice. The most important ones for our purposes are the Roman Saturnalia and the Germanic/Norse Yule.
In early Christianity, the single most important festival, by a long shot, was Easter. Christ’s Nativity, when they bothered with it at all, was very [shrug emoji].
The textual evidence of the Gospels, insofar as they can be relied on, suggests a spring birthday—that’s when shepherds would have been out watching their flocks by night, for example.
The Roman date of the feast of the Nativity was fixed at December 25 in the mid-4th century; it absolutely was placed there to take advantage of the existing holiday of Saturnalia, as well as the feasts of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus) and (possibly) Mithras’s birthday. Jesus had to be born sometime, and this was as good a choice as any.
Christians could also spot a good seasonal metaphor—the saviour is born at the darkest time of the year, and the light grows in power every day thereafter.
While Gregory the Great (601, Epistola ad Mellitum) is the most famous advocate for appropriating existing religious sites and festivals and plastering Jesus over them, the practice had been happening for a while already.
Because the authorities cared so little about policing the festival, tons of earlier celebratory traditions and symbolism just… carried over. Gift-giving, centrality of family/household, carnival atmosphere, Lords of Misrule, feasting (especially on boars), Yule logs/fire symbolism, evergreens as decoration… all of these customs are holdovers from either Saturnalia or Yule.
What didn’t carry over is the specifically religious elements: Saturnalia was a feast for Saturn, celebrating a lost golden age of peace and plenty. Yule was (probably) linked to some form of ancestor veneration and/or a feast for the dead.
You can make a slightly better case for theological influences from Sol Invictus or Mithras’s birthday; Christianity certainly appreciated the symbolic value of linking their god to the rebirth of the sun. But Sol Invictus is a relative latecomer on the Roman festival scene, and there is considerable dispute about December 25 as Mithras’s natal festival.
Once Christianity had successfully colonized and suppressed the majority of pagan religious practice, the most fanatical started getting upset about Christmas customs, because they now had more time to play orthodoxy police instead of, you know, murdering people and passing laws to compel conversion.
From, like, the 600s on, there is always some churchman bitching about the decadence, drunkenness, and extravagance of Christmas celebrations. Lots of them argued that it wasn’t a properly Christian festival at all.
The high point of anti-Christmas whining came during the Protestant reformation, when many hardliners forbade the festival altogether, citing a) lack of Biblical support, b) holdovers from paganism, and c) riotous behaviour from the ~lower orders~. Christmas was banned in Puritan New England for exactly this reason.
Modern “War on Christmas” narratives that insist that Christmas is, and always has been, a 100% Jesus holiday are pretty laughable: it was never all that theologically important, and their own co-religionists kept trying to ban it for most of the festival’s history.
To sum up: Christmas was not “stolen,” per se. Jesus’s birth is described in the Gospels, so there needed to be some kind of festival. December 25 was as good a time as any, because there were existing festival infrastructures, and the symbolism of the solstice is useful. Because it was such a minor festival, a fair amount of the less-overtly-religious folk elements from Saturnalia and Yule celebrations just kept going, and nobody in the early days cared enough to police that. Once Christianity had crushed active pagan resistance, then some theologians found time to bitch about how un-Christian the festival was, because of the arbitrary date and the continuance of earlier customs. This sense of “Christmas isn’t properly Christian” has been flaring up periodically ever since, particularly among fundamentalist Protestant groups; it’s also proven useful to modern Pagans who enjoy the customary trappings of Christmas, which is fine—I’m one of them!
But the language of “theft” isn’t useful here: advantage was taken of existing practices, but in a more hands-off way than Christians usually behaved—which is the reason so many of those pre-existing practices survived! If you want to talk about theft from pagans, you’re on much firmer ground when talking about things like the destruction of pagan sanctuaries to build churches. But remember: Jews are the primary victims of Christian religious appropriation, not pagans!
If you want some academic sources, Ronald Hutton's Stations of the Sun is the most useful and accessible. There's also The Battle for Christmas, by Stephen Nissenbaum, for an in-depth look specifically at American practices.
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