Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

While the big shops put up enormous wreaths and the little shops spray on the Santa Snow window stencils, churches iron out the creases on the Put Christ Back Into Christmas posters for the glass cases on the street front. Their struggle is not new.

The Church, or at least Cromwell's puritan Commonwealth, tried to stamp out Christmas, all feast days and anything fun more than three centuries ago.

A tract author with the central casting-puritan name of Hezekiah Woodward wrote, in 1656: The old heathens' Feasting Day, in honour of Saturn, their Idol-God, the Papists' Massing Day, the Profane Man's Ranting Day, the Superstitious Man's Idol Day, the Multitudes' Idle Day, Satan's – that Adversary's – Working Day, the True Christian Man's Fasting Day ... The fact is, old Hezekiah Woodward, in part, made a pretty fair point. Christmas was, indeed, in its origins a heathen day of feasting for Saturn. And Baal. And Mithras. Christmas, ironically, antedates the Nativity of Christ, and December 25 is a fudge. In the third century CE the Church fathers chose that day as Jesus Christ's birthday, with good reason. It happens to fall approximately on the Northern Hemisphere's Winter Solstice, and December 25 (Midwinter's Day/Winter Solstice/Yule) has been from time immemorial a day sacred to the rebirth of the light of the sun in the depths of winter. This day was the Festival of Natalis Sol Invictus (the Birth of the Undefeated Sun) in ancient Rome. Ancient peoples also commemorated the Babylonian Queen of Heaven, Osiris in Egypt, Dionysus, Helios, Adonis, the Celtic horned god Cernunnos, the Syrian Baal, Attis, Mithras, Balder and the Norse god Frey – all celebrated on the ancient Winter Solstice, and mostly solar saviours and dying gods. Most of these deities were given similar titles: the Light of the World, Sun of Righteousness, and Saviour. (More on ancient Gods and saviours similar to Jesus.)

I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible, looking for loopholes.
WC Fields (b. 1880), American comedian, who died on Christmas Day, 1946, spoken on his deathbed