“Christmas is in no way a heathen way? That’s literally exactly what Christmas is! It is just that! So do non-Christians celebrate Christmas? Of course they do. It is not a holy, Christian holiday. God specifies exactly how we are to worship Him. He never instructs us to use a pagan/evil day as a means to honor Him. Never! He commanded just the opposite.”
It is CHRISTmas. If non-Christians want to adopt certain cultural traditions, like Jews putting up a tree doesn’t take away from the fact it is CHRISTmas.
“You are terribly mistaken brother. Do some simple research on the origin of Christmas. It is FAR from what you think it is. The Bible commands us clearly HOW to worship God and how not to. It clearly instructs us to NEVER worship God in the same way heathens did. He will not accept that as worship. Literally time and time again, story after story in the OT tells of people trying their own way to worship God and doing things in ways He did not instruct. And they were destroyed and God did not accept it. Why would God want us to use a pagan/evil holiday to worship Him? Why? What are we doing? Again, you have to look at the history behind Christmas. It’s horrible.”
I’d recommend learning about the history of Christmas from a scholarly source instead the uncited, nonsensical webpages on geocities and angelfire these absurd argument come from.
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Christmas does not have Pagan origins. It has Christian origins, it started as a Christian celebration, and continues to be today. The “pagan origins of Christmas” is a long-repeated falsehood that is not rooted in serious historical scholarship. We actually do know how Christmas started, and it started with Christians, it is the celebration of the Incarnation, of Christ’s Holy Nativity.
The reason why we celebrate Jesus’ birth on December 25th is because it is exactly 9 months after March 25th. It was a common opinion among early Christians that if Jesus died on a March 25th, then He was either born on or conceived on a March 25th. If Jesus was conceived on March 25th (which remains, to this day, the Feast of the Annunciation) then add 9 months and you get December 25th. There is no evidence of a pagan celebration on December 25th until the mid-4th century. The Chronograph of 354 is a significant archeological piece of evidence of a calendar owned by a wealthy Christian from the mid-4th century. Two things to note about it: It explicitly presents the Feast of Christ’s Nativity as occurring on December 25th; and it also is the first mention of a pagan festival of the “Unconquered Sun” or Sol Invictus. There is a claim that Christians co-opted the Sol Invictus holiday, but there is no evidence of a Sol Invictus holiday before it being mentioned in this 354 calendar text; while Christians at that point had speculated that Christ’s birth was on December 25th for over a century by that point.
We have no idea when the Sol Invictus cult started celebrating their holiday, but who is to say that the pagans didn’t co-opt a Christian holiday? We can’t make that assertion because there is insufficient evidence to say it–but it is a more plausible argument than Christians co-opting a pagan holiday. When we consider the time period of 354 AD, this is right in the middle of the Christian revolution going on in the Roman Empire, 40 years after Constantine ended the persecutions through the Edit of Toleration, and 30 years before Theodosius proclaimed Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. This is right smack in the middle of a cultural transformation where Christianity went from a persecuted religious minority (though a very large minority) to becoming legalized, favored, and eventually the official religion. There was strong Pagan push-back. Again we can’t say this is what happened, but it isn’t a crazy theory to imagine that some Pagans would have tried to co-opt aspects of the “new religion” as part of an attempt to “sell” Paganism back to the public. A kind of “culture war” of the 4th century.
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