History of Xmas from the Wall Street Journal Website

I think that everyone really needs a winter solstice holiday, regardless of one's belief, or lack thereof, in supernatural deities. It's a time when we can all look past the gloomy darkness of winter and celebrate the days getting longer again. The suns starts to climb higher in the sky and we anticipate the renewal of the Earth in the coming springtime. This visceral reason to mark the occasion makes it not very surprising that the Winter Solstice has been celebrated almost universally throughout vastly different cultures and eras. Of course, in ancient times this was put in terms of gods, spirits, and assorted other religiously significant entities being "reborn" or "resurrected" et cetera. What may be surprising to some is how many of the "modern" Christmas rituals are taken from earlier Solstice holidays, as detailed by John Gordan from the Wall Street Journal online.


FROM WSJ.com
COMMENTARY
A Brief History of Christmas
By JOHN STEELE GORDON
December 21, 2007; Page A19
Christmas famously "comes but once a year." In fact, however, it comes twice. The Christmas of the Nativity, the manger and Christ child, the wise men and the star of Bethlehem, "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" is one holiday. The Christmas of parties, Santa Claus, evergreens, presents, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Jingle Bells" is quite another.
But because both celebrations fall on Dec. 25, the two are constantly confused. Religious Christians condemn taking "the Christ out of Christmas," while First Amendment absolutists see a threat to the separation of church and state in every poinsettia on public property and school dramatization of "A Christmas Carol."
A little history can clear things up.
The Christmas of parties and presents is far older than the Nativity. Most ancient cultures celebrated the winter solstice, when the sun reaches its lowest point and begins to climb once more in the sky. In ancient Rome, this festival was called the Saturnalia and ran from Dec. 17 to Dec. 24. During that week, no work was done, and the time was spent in parties, games, gift giving and decorating the houses with evergreens. (Sound familiar?) It was, needless to say, a very popular holiday.
In its earliest days, Christianity did not celebrate the Nativity at all. Only two of the four Gospels even mention it. Instead, the Church calendar was centered on Easter, still by far the most important day in the Christian year. The Last Supper was a Seder, celebrating Passover, which falls on the day of the full moon in the first month of spring in the Hebrew calendar. So in A.D. 325, the Council of Nicea decided that Easter should fall on the Sunday following the first full moon of spring. That's why Easter and its associated days, such as Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, are "moveable feasts," moving about the calendar at the whim of the moon.
It is a mark of how late Christmas came to the Christian calendar that it is not a moveable feast, but a fixed one, determined by the solar calendar established by Julius Caesar and still in use today (although slightly tweaked in the 16th century).
By the time of the Council of Nicea, the Christian Church was making converts by the thousands and, in hopes of still more converts, in 354 Pope Liberius decided to add the Nativity to the church calendar. He also decided to celebrate it on Dec. 25. It was, frankly, a marketing ploy with a little political savvy thrown in.
History does not tell us exactly when in the year Christ was born, but according to the Gospel of St. Luke, "shepherds were abiding in the field and keeping watch over their flocks by night." This would imply a date in the spring or summer when the flocks were up in the hills and needed to be guarded. In winter they were kept safely in corrals.
So Dec. 25 must have been chosen for other reasons. It is hard to escape the idea that by making Christmas fall immediately after the Saturnalia, the Pope invited converts to still enjoy the fun and games of the ancient holiday and just call it Christmas. Also, Dec. 25 was the day of the sun god, Sol Invictus, associated with the emperor. By using that date, the church tied itself to the imperial system.
By the high Middle Ages, Christmas was a rowdy, bawdy time, often inside the church as well as outside it. In France, many parishes celebrated the Feast of the Ass, supposedly honoring the donkey that had brought Mary to Bethlehem. Donkeys were brought into the church and the mass ended with priests and parishioners alike making donkey noises. In the so-called Feast of Fools, the lower clergy would elect a "bishop of fools" to temporarily run the diocese and make fun of church ceremonial and discipline. With this sort of thing going on inside the church to celebrate the Nativity, one can easily imagine the drunken and sexual revelries going on outside it to celebrate what was in all but name the Saturnalia.
With the Reformation, Protestants tried to rid the church of practices unknown in its earliest days and get back to Christian roots. Most Protestant sects abolished priestly celibacy (and often the priesthood itself), the cult of the Virgin Mary, relics, confession and . . . Christmas.
In the English-speaking world, Christmas was abolished in Scotland in 1563 and in England after the Puritans took power in the 1640s. It returned with the Restoration in 1660, but the celebrations never regained their medieval and Elizabethan abandon.
There was still no Christmas in Puritan New England, where Dec. 25 was just another working day. In the South, where the Church of England predominated, Christmas was celebrated as in England. In the middle colonies, matters were mixed. In polyglot New York, the Dutch Reformed Church did not celebrate Christmas. The Anglicans and Catholics did.
It was New York and its early 19th century literary establishment that created the modern American form of the old Saturnalia. It was a much more family -- and especially child -- centered holiday than the community-wide celebrations of earlier times.
St. Nicolas is the patron saint of New York (the first church built in the city was named for him), and Washington Irving wrote in his "Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York" how Sinterklaes, soon anglicized to Santa Claus, rode through the sky in a horse and wagon and went down chimneys to deliver presents to children.
The writer George Pintard added the idea that only good children got presents, and a book dating to 1821 changed the horse and wagon to reindeer and sleigh. Clement Clarke Moore in 1823 made the number of reindeer eight and gave them their names. Moore's famous poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," is entirely secular. It is about "visions of sugar plums" with nary a wise man or a Christ child in sight. In 1828, the American Ambassador Joel Roberts Poinsett, brought the poinsettia back from Mexico. It became associated with Christmas because that's the time of year when it blooms.
In the 1840s, Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol," which does not even mention the religious holiday (the word church appears in the story just twice, in passing, the word Nativity never). Prince Albert introduced the German custom of the Christmas tree to the English-speaking world.
In the 1860s, the great American cartoonist Thomas Nast set the modern image of Santa Claus as a jolly, bearded fat man in a fur-trimmed cap. (The color red became standard only in the 20th century, thanks to Coca-Cola ads showing Santa Claus that way.)
Merchants began to emphasize Christmas, decorating stores and pushing the idea of Christmas presents for reasons having nothing whatever to do with religion, except, perhaps, the worship of mammon.
With the increased mobility provided by railroads and increasing immigration from Europe, people who celebrated Christmas began settling near those who did not. It was not long before the children of the latter began putting pressure on their parents to celebrate Christmas as well. "The O'Reilly kids down the street are getting presents, why aren't we?!" is not an argument parents have much defense against.
By the middle of the 19th century, most Protestant churches were, once again, celebrating Christmas as a religious holiday. The reason, again, had more to do with marketing than theology: They were afraid of losing congregants to other Christmas-celebrating denominations.
In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law a bill making the secular Christmas a civil holiday because its celebration had become universal in this country. It is now celebrated in countries all over the world, including many where Christians are few, such as Japan.
So for those worried about the First Amendment, there's a very easy way to distinguish between the two Christmases. If it isn't mentioned in the Gospels of Luke and Mark, then it is not part of the Christian holiday. Or we could just change the name of the secular holiday back to what it was 2000 years ago.
Merry Saturnalia, everyone!
Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).

Interpreting Away

Compare the following two statements:

Statement I: The biblical prohibition against eating pork (Leviticus 11:8 and Deuteronomy 14:8) doesn’t apply in modern times since it was primarily intended to prevent parasitic diseases, such as trichinosis, that can contracted by eating pigs. At most, the injunction should be considered a “good suggestion.”

Statement II: The biblical prohibition against touching a pig carcass (Leviticus 11:8 and Deuteronomy 14:8) doesn’t apply in modern times since it was only intended to prevent ritual contamination ("tumah" in biblical terminology) during pilgrimage festivals when one would visit the sanctuary, which was prohibited to someone in a state of tumah (eg. Leviticus 15:31, Numbers 5:3). At most, the injunction should be considered a “good suggestion.”

[See the end of the post for additional context]

Individuals making statement I in the presence of certain Orthodox Jews should do so only if prepared for a vigorous debate. The assertion that some Biblical commandment is “obsolete” due to changing circumstances directly contradicts a major religious tenet - that G-d’s laws are immutable and transcend the rationalizations of mere mortals to explain away. Ritual law, they will say, is just as imperative now as when Moses transcribed it directly from heaven. By the end of the conversation, one would likely run a serious risk of being labeled a heretic or worse, “Reform."

Statement II, in contrast, represents the normative traditional interpretation (Rashi commentary quoting the Babylonian Talmud Rosh HaShanah 16b. See also Rashbam and Ramban) even though it is logically the same as Statement I, just applied to the second half of the same verse!

This is not merely an academic discussion. Pig consumption is one of the most powerful and pervasive taboos in Judaism. There are many disaffected Jews that, while observing no other kosher stricture, will still avoid eating any pork. However, there are plenty of completely observant Jews who would never dream of eating anything even suspected of being unkosher but would willingly touch a piece of leather made from pigskin, reasoning that everyone is considered to be in a state of ritual contamination in modern times anyway.

The importance of interpretation highlighted here is one of the reasons I am so skeptical of people who use Biblical quotes in lieu of rational arguments to prove a point, expecting others to be awed into agreement by "G-d's incontrovertible Word." Besides the whole issue of whether listeners should automatically accept the divine origin and/or inerrancy of any particular scripture (which is, ultimately, always just book that people told you was important without any actual proof), by appealing to the authority of an ambiguous and often contradictory book, one is really arguing for one's own interpretation to have the same weight as if divinely proclaimed. This is a very common issue in the debate over Gay marriage. For a Cristian to assert that since the Bible calls homosexual intercourse an "abomination" means that Gay marriage is out of the question is not sufficient, since there are many, many things that the Old Testament forbids (eating shellfish, wearing garments made of both wool and linen, etc) that Christians have no problem with. The example with Jews touching but not eating pork shows how easily even a deeply ingrained taboo can to modified just by applying a particular interpretation.

REFERENCED TEXTS:

Deuteronomy 14:3-8

3 Do not eat any detestable thing.
4 These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat,
5 the deer, the gazelle, the roe deer, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope and the mountain sheep.
6 You may eat any animal that has a split hoof divided in two and that chews the cud.
7 However, of those that chew the cud or that have a split hoof completely divided you may not eat the camel, the rabbit or the coney. Although they chew the cud, they do not have a split hoof; they are ceremonially unclean for you.
8 The pig is also unclean; although it has a split hoof, it does not chew the cud. You are not to eat their meat or touch their carcasses.

Leviticus 11:1-8

1 God spoke to Moses and Aaron, telling them
2 to speak to the Israelites, and convey the following to them: Of all the animals in the world, these are the ones that you may eat:
3 Among mammals, you may eat [any one] that has true hooves that are cloven and that brings up its cud.
4 However, among the cud-chewing, hoofed animals, these are the ones that you may not eat: The camel shall be unclean to you although it brings up its cud, since it does not have a true hoof.
5 The hyrax shall be unclean to you although it brings up its cud, since it does not have a true hoof.
6 The hare shall be unclean to you although it brings up its cud, since it does not have a true hoof.
7 The pig shall be unclean to you although it has a true hoof which is cloven, since it does not chew its cud.
8 Do not eat the flesh of any of these animals. Do not touch their carcasses, since they are unclean to you.

Rosh HaShanah 16b

Rashi ibid.

(*NOTE* The discussion in the Talmud about touching a carcass from an unkosher animal should not be so obscure, as it immediately proceeds what is probably the most quoted passage in High Holiday Sermons: The "Three Books opened on Rosh HaShana." )