People the world over celebrate Christmas. But did you know Christmas and many of its popular customs are nowhere set forth in the Bible?
Historians tell us the Christmas celebration came from questionable origins. William Walsh summarizes the holiday’s origins and practices in his book The Story of Santa Klaus: “We remember that the Christmas festival . . . is a gradual evolution from times that long antedated the Christian period . . . It was overlaid upon heathen festivals, and many of its observances are only adaptations of pagan to Christian ceremonial” (1970, p. 58).
How could pagan practices become part of a major church celebration? What were these “heathen festivals” that lent themselves to Christmas customs over the centuries?
Christmas customs’ ancient origins
During the second century B.C., the Greeks practiced rites to honor their god Dionysus (also called Bacchus). The Latin name for this celebration was Bacchanalia. Because of the drunken sex parties associated with this festival, the Roman Senate suppressed its observance in 186 B.C. Suppressing a holiday was unusual for the Romans since they later became a melting pot of many types of gods and worship. Just as the Romans assimilated culture, art and customs from the peoples absorbed into their empire, they likewise adopted those peoples’ religious practices.
In addition to the Bacchanalia, the Romans celebrated another holiday, the Saturnalia, held “in honor of Saturn, the god of time, [which] began on December 17th and continued for seven days. These also often ended in riot and disorder. Hence the words Bacchanalia and Saturnalia acquired an evil reputation in later times” (p. 65).
The reason for the Saturnalia’s disrepute is revealing. In pagan mythology Saturn was an “ancient agricultural god-king who ate his own children presumably to avoid regicide [being murdered while king]. And Saturn was parallel with a Carthaginian Baal, whose brazen horned effigy contained a furnace into which children were sacrificially fed” (William Sansom, A Book of Christmas, 1968, p. 44).