First of all, we need to establish from the beginning that December 25th is in all probability not the date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

The year of the Christian Nativity must be ascertained by historical and chronological research, since there is no certain and harmonious tradition on the subject. The "Anno Domini" dating system, which was introduced by the Roman abbot Dionysius Exiguus, in the sixth century, and came into general use two years later, during the reign of Charlemagne, puts the Nativity Dec. 25, 754 Anno Urbis, that is, after the founding of the city of Rome. Nearly all chronologers agree that this is wrong by at least four years. Christ was born 750 AU (or 4 BCE) if not earlier.

According to Matthew 2:1 (comp. Luke 1:5, 26), Christ was born "in the days of King Herod" I, "the Great," who died, according to Josephus, at Jericho, 750 AU, just before Passover. This date has been verified by the astronomical calculation of the eclipse of the moon, which took place March 13, 750 AU, a few days before Herod's death.

Allowing two months or more for the events between the birth of Christ and the murder of the Innocents by Herod, the Nativity must be put back at least to February or January, 750 AU (or 4 BCE), if not earlier.

( note to Millinialists: the real year 2000 has therefore come and gone ...... )

So why do we celebrate it on December 25th?

December 25th occurs about the time of the Winter Solistice, the shortest day of the year. The shortening days were taken as a sign that the Sun was getting weaker. After the Solistice, the days begin to get longer ...... and pagan peoples thought that was an indication that the Sun was getting stronger.

Thus, the Winter Solistice became the "birthday" of several gods: Attis, Frey, Thor, Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis, Mithra, Tammuz, Cernunnos and so forth. It is a "solar holiday," marking the time that the sun becomes apparently stronger day by day.

Mithra, by the way, was born on December 25, of a virgin. His birth was witnessed by shepherds and magicians [magi]. Mithra raised the dead and healed the sick and cast out demons. He returned to heaven at the spring equinox and before doing so had a last supper with his 12 disciples (representing the 12 signs of the zodiac), eating mizd, a piece of bread marked with a cross (an almost universal symbol of the sun). Any of that sound familiar?

We also have a Jewish festival near that date: Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights (another solar reference) which occurs on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, approximately in December by the Roman calendar, and the Zoroastrian Yalda, the celebration of the victory of good over evil.

The Christian holiday was not always celebrated on December 25th, however.

For the first three hundred years of the current era, there was no festivity of the birth of Jesus. Some churches celebrated Jesus' birthday in the spring time and some celebrated it on January 6 (Epiphany).

Early in the fourth century, the Roman church decreed that December 25 would henceforth be recognized as the birthday of Christ. The Eastern churches refused to accept Christmas until 375 C.E., and the churches in Jerusalem rejected the December 25 date until the seventh century.

There are still some Eastern Rite churches that continue to celebrate the Epiphany date.

The Pilgrims outlawed Christmas. They also refused to use the 1611 King James Bible!

The Winter Solistice was the season of a major celebration of fertility in ancient Rome called "Saturnalia," starting on December 17th. This honoured the "good old days" when the god Saturn ruled a supposed "Golden Age", and there were no masters and no slaves, and everything was easy. Thus, it became a reversal-holiday, when the masters served the slaves, and a slave was chosen to temporarily rule the household. The Romans were civilized enough to not kill him afterwards, as seems to be the custom with such holidays in more primitive cultures.

They also exchanged presents, were allowed to gamble in public, and in general had a good time. It was the greatest holiday of the year.

It should come as no surprise then that the Christian Church co-opted this seasonal holiday, celebrated by the city that ruled the world -and- celebrated by Christianity's major competitor (Mithraism). It was simply a very astute political move.

St. John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople at the end of the fourth century wrote: "On this day also the Birthday of Christ was lately fixed at Rome in order that while the heathen were busy with their profane ceremonies, the Christians might perform their sacred rites undisturbed. They call this (December 25th), the Birthday of the Invincible One (Mithras); but who is so invincible as the Lord? They call it the Birthday of the Solar Disk, but Christ is the Sun of Righteousness."

This custom of the "Feast of Fools" was continued in medieval Western Europe, with a "Lord of Misrule," mummers doing traditional plays, feasting with a boar's head, games, dancing and other such merriment. This could last for more than just Christmas Day, going on until at least Epiphany (January 6th) in many cases ..... these are our "Twelve Days of Christmas."

Christmas even started out controversially in North America. Reverend Rel Davis writes:

The festival of Christmas has always been a controversial one in Christianity. The Puritans banned Christmas altogether and during the Cromwellian period in England, anyone celebrating Christmas was jailed for heresy. Probably the most hated of all Puritan laws was the one abolishing Christmas and probably led to popular acceptance of royalty (nb: the Restoration) -- at least the King allowed the masses to celebrate Yule!

In America, Christmas was generally outlawed until the end of the last century. In Boston, up to 1870, anyone missing work on Christmas Day would be fired. Factory owners customarily required employees to come to work at 5 a.m. on Christmas -- to insure they wouldn't have time to go to church that day. And any student who failed to go to school on December 25 would be expelled. Only the arrival of large numbers of Irish and northern European immigrants brought acceptance of Christmas in this country.

Christmas did not even begin to be a legal holiday anywhere in the United States until very late in the nineteenth century CE, with Alabama being the first state to make it so.

Now let's look at some Christmas customs:

The name "Yule" is not derived from Chaldaean, as some would have you believe, but rather from the Old Norse "Jol" or "Jul" thru Anglo-Saxon "Geol" to Middle English "Yule." It means "Winter Solistice," or "Christmas." It is found in the Germanic languages, but not in the Romance languages like French, Spanish and Italian, who have names for Christmas that mean closer to "The Birthday" than anything else. There is, of course, no connection linguistically between Chaldaean and the Germanic languages .... or with the Romance languages either, for that matter.

I have also heard some folks thundering against the use of the abbreviation "Xmas" as being "against Jesus." Frankly, nothing could be more absurd. This usage derives from a common medieval abbreviation for "Christ" using a Cross rather than the name. This was most common in signatures, and thus you would see a signature of "Xtoph" rather than "Kristoph." It is simply an abbreviation, and nothing more.

The name "Christmas" derives, of course, from Middle English "Cristes mæsse" or "Christ's Mass," that is, the Roman church's standard ritual celebration. This alone, being Roman Catholic, seems to render it suspect in the minds of many hard-core Protestants .... though they seem to forget that at the time Middle English was spoken, the Roman Catholic Church was pretty much the only game in town.

The night before, Christmas Eve, was called "Modranect" or "Modranecht" by the Germanic pagan peoples (this seems to be Old English / Anglo-Saxon, and apparently means "Mother's Night"). This is obviously in honor of the Mother Goddess who bore the solar Child of Promise.

The Magi, or the Three Wise Men: The "Magi" were, in antiquity, priests of Zoroastrianism ..... and reputed to be expert Magi-cians (see the derivation of the word there?) and astrologers. Mithraism is associated with Zoroastrianism much like Christianity stems from Judaism. The "Three Kings" bits are a later interpolation, and there may very well be a "Triple God" aspect slipping in here from folk-memory, too.

The Star of Bethlehem? Well, this page might give us some leads. It may have been a planetary conjunction noticed by the magician-astrologers. That theory at least explains why there are no other accounts of a miraculous star in historical records of the time.

I have heard several remarks over the years about how much the Wiccans must like Christmas, because they can buy so many nicely made pentagrams then. Not to worry, though, because as shown in the medieval poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and in Mallory's "Morte d'Arthur" the pentagram is very much a Christian symbol too.

The Yule Log is pretty obvious. Sympathetic magic, with its rule of "As in Heaven, so on Earth" (a re-stating of the more usual wording of 'As above, so below") means that to have a blazing fire on earth would encourage the sun to grow stronger. Therefore, the Winter Solistice is a "fire festival," with bonfires and Yule logs being lit to "help" the sun grow stronger between then and Midsummer. It also served a more practical purpose of warming up the home during a cold night in which many people stayed awake for much longer than they usually did.

Mistletoe is an old Celtic symbol of regeneration and eternal life. The Romans valued it as a symbol of peace and this eventually led to its usage as one of the common symbols of Christmas. Kissing under mistletoe was a Roman custom, due to its' being regarded as a symbol of fertility.

We also find the mistletoe figuring in the Norse story of Balder, and in medieval legend as the wood from which the Cross was made .... which legend was probably derived from the Balder story, as it was a twig of mistletoe that killed him.

It was considered a protection against evil, the devil, and witchcraft ..... and, when laid on the altar of a church (as done as late as the 18th Century CE at York cathedral in England) signified a sort of general amnesty.

Many primitive societies, such as the Ainu of Japan and the Wallas of West Africa also regarded the mistletoe with veneration.

During the "Druid craze" (an interest in alleged "Druidic customs," mostly entirely spurious) of the 18th and early 19th Century CE the Church began to distrust mistletoe as a "pagan" plant and banned it from the churches. This is curious in view of the old legends that the plant was the wood used for the Cross, the "sanctae crucius lignum," called the "l'herbe de la croix" in France. Supposedly it was once a strong tree, but it's use for the Cross degraded it.

It became fashionable in England to have your very own mini-Stonehenge in your garden, and one fellow with more money than sense even hired a white-bearded man to play the part of a Druid priest and come out of a fake cave occasionally and gibber at the wealthy man's guests. All of this spurious Druidism is connected with the "British Israelite" sort of thing so popular then, when British antiquaries were trying to connect the Druids of the British Isles with Biblical nations and races, Freemasonry, the "religion of Noah," "Helio-Arkites," and many other fanciful blind-alleys. Some of the more luminous (?) names of this movement were William Stukeley, Edward Williams (who called himself "Iolo Morganwg" and can be viewed as one of the classic British cranks, forging documents right and left to back up his theories), John Williams ab Ithel, Owen Morgan (who called himself "Morgan O. Morgan"), the epic-forger James MacPherson (he wrote the "Ossian" stuff), Edward Davies, Godfrey Higgins and James Bostwick, and others. With the later serious archaeological digs, all this was shown to be the fabrication that it really was.