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Exploring the pagan roots of Christmas: 5 traditions that originated from pre-Christian practices

Many Christmas traditions have their origin in the winter solstice celebrations of ancient Romans and other pagan people, which were celebrated to welcome seasonal changes.

Synopsis

​From Christmas carols, stuffing gifts into socks, dazzling trees decorated with fairy lights, many evergreen Christian traditions have pagan roots!

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Today, Christmas carols, stuffing gifts into socks, dazzling trees decorated with fairy lights, and delicious plum cakes may be associated with the biggest Christian festival. Still, according to historians, its beginnings were not quite Christian!

The Origins Of Christmas Began In Ancient Rome

Traditionally, Christmas is celebrated all over the world, to commemorate the birth of Lord Jesus Christ, the central figure in Christianity.

However, many Christmas traditions have their origin in the winter solstice celebrations of ancient Romans and other pagan people, which were celebrated to welcome seasonal changes. A lot of popular practices associated with Christmas such as kissing under the mistletoe, and decorating trees with holly were inspired by pre-Christian traditions. These celebrations took place to celebrate the end of the winter season and the advent of spring.

How Christmas Came To Be Celebrated On December 25th

There is an ongoing debate on the birthday of Jesus Christ. Many scholars do not believe that Christ was born on December 25. So why is Christmas celebrated on that particular day?

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This may be a mere continuation of the pagan tradition of celebrating the winter solstice which was celebrated in late December. The Roman festival of Saturnalia (a harvest festival which was held in the honour of the deity Saturn) was also observed from 17th to 24th December.

Pagans were primarily agricultural people. The winter season marked the end of harvest and this signaled a season of merry-making and spending time with the loved ones.

Decorating Trees Can Be Traced Back To The Romans

Other than Saturnalia, another festival that has a very wide influence on the modern version of Christmas is Yule. Yule was a popular festival celebrated by the Norse people in northern Europe. Some of the most important rituals of this festival included the decoration of the Yule tree, making the Yule ham the main attraction of the evening meal (Norse pagans sacrificed boar to the deity Freyr). A lot of these rituals were absorbed by Christians.

Moreover, Romans too used to decorate their trees with small metal ornaments during Saturnalia. Each of these ornament was dedicated to a deity.

How Carols Came To Be Synonymous With Christmas

The tradition of going to your neighbor’s house on Christmas and singing has its roots in pagan traditions. The tradition of going to your neighbour’s homes and signing originates from an ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition called ‘wassailing’. The word comes from the phrase ‘waes hael’ which translates to good health. The minstrels would sing in the homes of villagers and wish them good health. Wassailing groups would carry drinks made from mulled ale, curdled cream, roasted apples, eggs, spices, and sugar.

History Of A Kiss

Today, the rather romantic tradition of stealing a kiss under the mistletoe tree is seen as synonymous with Christmas. However, this practice also owes its existence to the pagans. In ancient Rome, devotees would perform fertility rituals under the mistletoe tree. Kissing under the tree is considered to be a tamed-down version of this ritual.

Who Was Santa?

Globally, this plump, bearded old man with an armful of gifts has become the face of the festival. No Christmas celebration is complete without Santa Claus. Although the red-robed, jolly old man was popularised by the soft drink brand Coca-Cola in the 1930s, he is thought to be a modern version of St Nicholas. Also known as ‘Father Christmas’ Nicholas was the patron saint of poor children and prostitutes. Living around the 4th century AD, this kind-hearted bishop used to regale street kids with gifts. He would sport a big beard and long cloak like Santa.

However, the concept of a merry old man distributing gifts to kids did not originate with St Nicholas. Ancient Germanic tribes worshipped a bearded deity called Odin. Odin would ride an 8-legged horse called Sleipnir, who would descend from the heavens and leave children gifts!

Pagan Roots? 5 Surprising Facts About Christmas

When you gather around the Christmas tree or stuff goodies into a stocking, you're taking part in traditions that stretch back thousands of years — long before Christianity entered the mix.

Pagan, or non-Christian, traditions show up in this beloved winter holiday, a consequence of early church leaders melding Jesus' nativity celebration with pre-existing midwinter festivals. Since then, Christmas traditions have warped over time, arriving at their current state a little more than a century ago.

Read on for some of the surprising origins of Christmas cheer, and find out why Christmas was once banned in New England.

1. Early Christians had a soft spot for pagans

It's a mistake to say that our modern Christmas traditions come directly from pre-Christian paganism, said Ronald Hutton, a historian at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. However, he said, you'd be equally wrong to believe that Christmas is a modern phenomenon. As Christians spread their religion into Europe in the first centuries A.D., they ran into people living by a variety of local and regional religious creeds.

Christian missionaries lumped all of these people together under the umbrella term "pagan," said Philip Shaw, who researches early Germanic languages and Old English at Leicester University in the U.K. The term is related to the Latin word meaning "field," Shaw told LiveScience. The lingual link makes sense, he said, because early European Christianity was an urban phenomenon, while paganism persisted longer in rustic areas.

Early Christians wanted to convert pagans, Shaw said, but they were also fascinated by their traditions.

"Christians of that period are quite interested in paganism," he said. "It's obviously something they think is a bad thing, but it's also something they think is worth remembering. It's what their ancestors did." [In Photos: Early Christian Rome]

Perhaps that's why pagan traditions remained even as Christianity took hold. The Christmas tree is a 17th-century German invention, University of Bristol's Hutton told LiveScience, but it clearly derives from the pagan practice of bringing greenery indoors to decorate in midwinter. The modern Santa Claus is a direct descendent of England's Father Christmas, who was not originally a gift-giver. However, Father Christmas and his other European variations are modern incarnations of old pagan ideas about spirits who traveled the sky in midwinter, Hutton said.

2. We all want that warm Christmas glow

But why this fixation on partying in midwinter, anyway? According to historians, it's a natural time for a feast. In an agricultural society, the harvest work is done for the year, and there's nothing left to be done in the fields.

"It's a time when you have some time to devote to your religious life," said Shaw. "But also it's a period when, frankly, everyone needs cheering up."

The dark days that culminate with the shortest day of the year ­— the winter solstice — could be lightened with feasts and decorations, Hutton said.

"If you happen to live in a region in which midwinter brings striking darkness and cold and hunger, then the urge to have a celebration at the very heart of it to avoid going mad or falling into deep depression is very, very strong," he said.

Stephen Nissenbaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Battle for Christmas" (Vintage, 1997), agreed.

"Even now when solstice means not all that much because you can get rid of the darkness with the flick of an electric light switch, even now, it's a very powerful season," he told LIveScience.

3. The Church was slow to embrace Christmas

Despite the spread of Christianity, midwinter festivals did not become Christmas for hundreds of years. The Bible gives no reference to when Jesus was born, which wasn't a problem for early Christians, Nissenbaum said.

"It never occurred to them that they needed to celebrate his birthday," he said.

With no Biblical directive to do so and no mention in the Gospels of the correct date, it wasn't until the fourth century that church leaders in Rome embraced the holiday. At this time, Nissenbaum said, many people had turned to a belief the Church found heretical: That Jesus had never existed as a man, but as a sort of spiritual entity.

"If you want to show that Jesus was a real human being just like every other human being, not just somebody who appeared like a hologram, then what better way to think of him being born in a normal, humble human way than to celebrate his birth?" Nissenbaum said. [Religious Mysteries: 8 Alleged Relics of Jesus]

Midwinter festivals, with their pagan roots, were already widely celebrated, Nissenbaum said. And the date had a pleasing philosophical fit with festivals celebrating the lengthening days after the winter solstice (which fell on Dec. 21 this year). "O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born … Christ should be born," one Cyprian text read.

4. The Puritans hated the holiday

But if the Catholic Church gradually came to embrace Christmas, the Protestant Reformation gave the holiday a good knock on the chin. In the 16th century, Christmas became a casualty of this church schism, with reformist-minded Protestants considering it little better than paganism, Nissenbaum said. This likely had something to do with the "raucous, rowdy and sometimes bawdy fashion" in which Christmas was celebrated, he added.

In England under Oliver Cromwell, Christmas and other saints' days were banned, and in New England it was illegal to celebrate Christmas for about 25 years in the 1600s, Nissenbaum said. Forget people saying, "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," he said.

"If you want to look at a real 'War on Christmas,' you've got to look at the Puritans," he said. "They banned it!"

5. Gifts are a new (and surprisingly controversial) tradition

While gift-giving may seem inextricably tied to Christmas, it used to be that people looked forward to opening presents on New Year's Day.

"They were a blessing for people to make them feel good as the year ends," Hutton said. It wasn't until the Victorian era of the 1800s that gift-giving shifted to Christmas. According to the Royal Collection, Queen Victoria's children got Christmas Eve gifts in 1850, including a sword and armor. In 1841, Victoria gave her husband, Prince Albert, a miniature portrait of her as a 7-year-old; in 1859, she gave him a book of poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

All of this gift-giving, along with the secular embrace of Christmas, now has some religious groups steamed, Nissenbaum said. The consumerism of Christmas shopping seems, to some, to contradict the religious goal of celebrating Jesus Christ's birth. In some ways, Nissenbaum said, excessive spending is the modern equivalent of the revelry and drunkenness that made the Puritans frown.

"There's always been a push and pull, and it's taken different forms," he said. "It might have been alcohol then, and now it's these glittering toys."

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Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists

For anyone who's ever wished they could take a holiday back in time, Tony Perrottet's tale of following in the footsteps of Ancient Roman tourists is inspired, informative, and frequently hilarious. Writing sections like “The Olympian Money Machine” and “I ♥ Sparta” , Mr. Perrottet deftly connects the surprisingly similar travels and travails of the ancient and modern holidaymaker with wit and panache while making his own grand tour of the Mediterranean world as it was and is.

The ancient Romans were responsible for many remarkable achievements—Roman numerals, straight roads—but one of their lesser-known contributions was the creation of the tourist industry. The first people in history to enjoy safe and easy travel, Romans embarked on the original Grand Tour, journeying from the lost city of Troy to the Acropolis, from the Colossus at Rhodes to Egypt, for the obligatory Nile cruise to the very edge of the empire. And, as Tony Perrottet discovers, the popularity of this route has only increased with time. Intrigued by the possibility of re-creating the tour, Perrottet, accompanied by his pregnant girlfriend, sets off to discover life as an ancient Roman. The result is this lively blend of fascinating historical anecdotes and hilarious personal encounters, interspersed with irreverent and often eerily prescient quotes from the ancients—a vivid portrait of the Roman Empire in all its complexity and wonder.

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