All over the Internet, you'll find all kinds of theories that explain how our present time Christmas celebrations came into existence. Some trace Christmas back to Roman or pre-Christian European celebrations that celebrate the Winter Solstice, the day when the days stop getting shorter and begin getting longer. The idea is that the Christian Churches deliberately selected these earlier festival dates so people would accept the new traditions.
It seems very logical, but it's very easy to draw connections in the past, especially when you are working with clues gathered from information drawn from remnants of the past that reflect little of the teeming lives and cultures of our ancestors.
These findings are based on the type of history studies most of us learned in school, a snapshot of earlier times, mainly a study of the sequence of important or well documented information from the past. For the most part, it's a study of important people and events that affected large numbers of people. Kings, Queens, battles, major disasters, Church dates and so on.
But then, as now, the life of ordinary people goes on and is scarcely mentioned historically. If you think about,
history is being made all the time in the evening news, but it really doesn't have all that much of an effect on our lives. It's interesting and sometimes appalling, but tomorrow we will take our children to school and plan our weddings and live our day to day lives. The big difference between earlier centuries and now is that we have mass communication systems capable of spreading information instantaneously to millions and millions of people and transportation systems that make it possible to be on the other side of the planet in less than a day.
Before mass transportation and mass communication, people were much more isolated and life revolved around family, the local town and in very early times, the domain of the noble who owned the land you lived on. You lived and worked locally. Traveling anywhere took time, for you walked, traveled by horse or traveled by sea. News spread slowly, by word of mouth spreading out from town criers or community meetings, brought by seafaring traders and spreading out from central points like Churches or rulers.
Each family handed down its own traditions, mother to daughter, father to son, with each generation adding its own personal touch to meet the changes and challenges of their own generation. These traditions were the culture of much smaller groups of people, families, tribes, villages, and on a slightly larger scale the townships with Churches and markets, each a small pocket of culture and tradition.
Over time, the scale of group awareness has grown, with nations coming into existence with cultures that are "American" or "British" and so on. But if you really look past the mass media and educational systems, you'll find that even now, Christmas really lives in the heart of the family, and is a reflection of its values, beliefs and the communities to which it belongs, passed down through generations.
For the record, the word Christmas comes from the Middle English word Chistemasse and the Old English word Cristes maesse and is a contraction meaning "Christ's Mass".
As to December 25th as the birth date of Christ, there is a relatively simple explanation that seems to make sense. Simply take the date of the conception of Jesus Christ, which was thought to be March 25th in the early days of the Christian Church, and add nine months. You can read the full
explanation at Touchstone Magazine:
Calculating Christmas
In our countdown to Christmas, we'll touch on some of the traditions from the past and from around the world that have contributed to our modern day Christmas celebrations. You can't exactly connect the dots, but it's fun and interesting to explore the past and see how things used to be and how they might have come to be!
