The Christmas Question: Full Documentary

to [Music] [Music] peter says every time a fail rings an angel gets his wings oh my gosh my favorite part of christmas was definitely the presents giving a gift to a child does something inside that child think about the greatest gift that we have god sent his son into the world and gave his only begotten son a gift the greatest gift the world has ever seen so christmas brings that wonderful gospel influence because it's a christian holiday it can never be broken from that christmas was really fun growing up yeah um my dad made a big deal about it when we were really really young he used to do this thing where he would dress up like santa oh claus god and then he would go around the house shouting ho ho ho merry christmas and it would be like five o'clock in the morning i couldn't wait to have kids of my own and do christmas with them like to have like those kind of memories [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we realize um if we are christian just how important the nativity is that that god has come to earth in the shape of the most fragile helpless thing that the divinity that created the universe is crammed into this this tiny thing that can't control its own bowels or control its own limbs christmas is a fabulous invention that's why it's the most popular thing in the world there's nothing like it there's no rock stadium rock tour world cup gathering political event pilgrimage riot nothing is like christmas we spend 10 of our life under the spell of christmas first and last or yeah just tell us your name and that's it i'm abraham lockwood we met um in illinois i was fresh out of boot camp and i met her at the mall drug her halfway across the united states and funneled her into ohio i'm michelle and i'm kate i'm the older sister so obviously makes me the younger one yeah so people cannot keep asking themselves for twins twins i know that'll be great we get that all the time my name is angie moss stellar i came from a home where my parents became christians when i was a little bit older about 10 so during those younger years of my life we we really didn't have traditions that incorporated or focused on jesus or our christian faith so as a new mom i was wanting to just think about how can we build traditions that really um build up our children and the faith and an understanding of our history and that's how i got started on the road to researching christmas and some of the other holidays last year i went on a facebook page and it was uh it's called wiccan inspirations it's a witches page and one of their mottos was pagans are the reason for the season and they were saying like you know that christians were trying to steal their holiday um the winter solstice and when i went on the page i was shocked each kind of pre-christian society had their own way of celebrating this time of year but most of them did celebrate some type of aspect of the winter solstice modern day pagans try to claim christmas they say we invented christmas you know this is ours here we really just you nicked it from us and and the answer is that's a silly statement uh the celebration of nativity is is purely a christian um celebration i didn't really consider the origins of christmas one way or the other um i just kind of i guess took everybody else's word for it that this is what we should be doing i was reading in deuteronomy i think chapter 12 it was um god was telling the israelites don't don't worship your god the way you see the pagans worship their gods don't these things i've commanded you to do don't add to them or take away from them is it a sin for christians to celebrate christmas to sin for them to celebrate christmas i don't know i don't know why everybody should be able to celebrate it any way they want yeah you know it's like if you want to celebrate it your way that's fine if you want to celebrate the pagan way if you want to celebrate it another way then you know and i think the birth of jesus christ and the death and resurrection of jesus christ are two of or let's just say the two most important events in human history not to mark them in some way by way of special celebration would be folly it seems to me how could there be any harm in celebrating his birthday [Music] originally in christianity for several centuries there was no such thing as a feast of christmas so nobody knew and nobody celebrated the date of the birth of jesus christ and the question why and from where that originated does obviously enter scholars and christians as well does the bible actually tell us to observe christmas and the answer is unfortunately no paul for example never mentions his tool it's not what he's about none of the apostles say remember the birth of jesus so there is this tension here within christianity that we have to be honest with ourselves and say well this christmas is as big a deal as we think it is i i had heard a lot of rumors about the pagan kind of associations with christmas and as as i was thinking about how i wanted to bring traditions into my home i you know i had some concern about do i want to bring pagan traditions into my home and so i found that a lot of other new parents as well as teachers and friends had these same questions and i'm a little bit of a researcher by nature and so i thought i'm gonna just look into these uh these some of these claims about the history of christmas that's when i started to question okay has do we see christmas anywhere in the bible no so maybe we should go back and rethink the way we're looking at christmas [Music] winter solstice is really key to what christmas is it's the birth of the sun the days start becoming longer they're getting shorter and shorter and shorter as you go into wintertime and then at the winter solstice the days start becoming longer i'm ronald hutton professor of history at the university of bristol england and one of my specialities is the history of seasonal festivals stonehenge is probably the most famous prehistoric monument in the world the greatest of those doorway-like three-stone settings was aligned precisely on the setting sun at midwinter now this is the type of monument you find around western europe all the way from sweden down to spain and corsica and sardinia the sun's important in places as different as ancient egypt uh ancient mesoamerica like the mayan civilization the toltecs and also places like cusco fixating on the sun is kind of something that most ancient peoples do and the further north you are the more important this is [Music] i think that the celebration of the winter solstice must must have begun in connection to the worship of the sun and we know that people in scandinavia worship the sun during the bronze age we have found loads and loads of pictures and pictograms and sculptures of the sun for obvious reasons we actually almost lose the sun for parts of the air so dongji is one of the really most important festivals in china so it's a winter festival we'll have a shortest time of daytime and the longest time of night time so the original holiday chased back all the way like 28 hundreds years ago and we say it's almost 3 000 years ago they will go out outside of the palace to worship the heaven the practice of yule goes back pretty far because with yule what we're really talking about is the winter solstice yule is quite simply the old scandinavian i.e the viking name for midwinter it's the name of their midwinter festival it's one of the greatest festivals of their year because way up in scandinavia in the olden times there wasn't a whole lot you could do around winter it's exceptionally long and hard up there and so you'll getting to its center and knowing that things are going to get better eventually is the obvious time for a tremendous heathen party we have the tradition of the yule log that is definitely a symbol that fire of the rebirth of the sun um so that's another tradition that does represent that that aspect of the winter solstice and the sun being reborn it's probably a fertility symbol in some places a human figure is chalked on it called the mock and some historians say well it may be the last remnant of a human sacrifice but there are some lovely ceremonies attached to it what you say to the tree when you bring it in you sprinkle it with grain which is a sign of fertility or wine and say a little prayer over it and so on during new celebrations they would bring in this boar who was called the sooner god it means the boar of atonement and people would actually swear oaths on the bristles of this boar and you could also it's also said that that you could make a divination uh from like touching the bristles of this big boar and it was obviously sacrificed and eaten this this board was dedicated to the godfrey and then it was like okay well where did all the traditions come from this is before we even saw the wicken page we decided to start looking into it for ourselves in description and then we were kind of like where did this stuff come from [Music] the modern christmas celebrations tie around saturnalia the pagan god saturn who among other things was eating his children until he was overthrown by his own son some people claim that that was christians were trying to christianize this roman festival but the dates don't really line up so um there are definitely some difficulties associated with the claim that you know they're trying to christianize a pagan celebration now here i must make the absolutely essential point that christmas is not a day it's a season and it's a very long season had you shown up in the the middle ages um in early december you would have been living in the christmas period the date of the saturnalia is uh the 17th of december but it evolves into a festival that lasts several days actually goes right up until let's say the 23rd and a date in that third week of december i think must be connected to astronomical knowledge about the timing of the winter solstice we know about the festival of saturnalia in roman pagan times from a number of different authors so we have uh seneca and microbias chiefly and poets like horus and marshall talk a little bit about it it shares a lot of elements in common with christmas we might think gift giving feasting a sense of carnival a sense of celebration a focus on light in the middle of the darkness of winter one of the traditions at saturnalia was present exchange which of course is very similar to modern christmas people go around exchanging gifts little figurines called sigularia were popular these could be quite cheap little pottery things but there were other sorts of gifts as well cloaks and a pencil case and wine and parasol and a parrot saturn being the god of of agriculture and he's also associated with the color red so that's where we get a lot of that red color along with holly which is a symbol of saturn you have the red berries can you describe what trees and holly and mistletoe have to do with the christmas story in the bible you got me on that one i don't know uh maybe mary and joseph like kissed under the mistletoe i don't know i don't know symbols like holly and mistletoe and greenery in general um they're really just symbolic representations of fertility and vitality at this time of year so they really just inspire hope that if mistletoe if holly can grow in the depths of winter so can i christians fought these saturnalia celebrations they were originally prohibited in christian circles for obvious reasons because again they understood where they were coming from most infamously would be the mistletoe now modern people think it's a quaint custom to hang a mistletoe and if you see a pretty girl give her a kiss under the mistletoe well anyone versed in religious knowledge is gonna know that's a fertility ritual when you're kissing a girl under the mistletoe now the mistletoe not only is beautiful it's a mysterious thing to traditional peoples it's actually a parasite it grows on trees it doesn't grow in the earth but to the ancients that makes it magical it grows in the sky that's why the druids in celtic tradition the druids are class of priests would collect the mistletoe [Music] but it gets even stranger if you crush the berries of the mistletoe it resembles in texture human semen that's the tie into fertility uh that's why again in distorted form people are kissing girls under the mistletoe in fact it's kind of a obscene right saying we want to have sexual intercourse with you mistletoe really is quite rare as a plant and so it becomes fashionable really in richer more sophisticated times like the 17th 18th century and nobody kisses under it until around about the time of george washington it's the late 18th century in london that produces the custom first for servants in big houses and then their mistresses and masters rather sportingly instead of discouraging the practice imitate it the pagans would practice what's called the world upside down during this period teachers would follow orders from students students would give them assignments during this period masters would serve slaves at the table and slaves would provide well give them orders so you have the feast of fools this is often connected to um street parades um finding the local village idiot and parading him around as as king now the time we found the king of fools [Music] wild carryings on but collins was really um a bigger festival than saturnalia it was the new year festival with all that that may imply the notion of sort of reconstituting everything the world being born again the romans would celebrate the calendar on the 1st of january which is where we have new year's day to this very moment so that kind of shiver most people get as the clock ticks towards midnight on the 31st of december is really old the notion that gifts given on new year's are christmas gifts is a is an idea that exists even today in france where they're more likely to to hand out gifts uh on on new year's before the 1800s uh you do not get presents at christmas you get partying and feasting the presents get given on new year's day when christians think about the pagan tie-ins what they're wrestling with is the purity of the faith right they're saying is this really a good thing melissa and i get a lot of letters from people who are newly out of the new age which is paganism and they don't want to be deceived so they they get hyper vigilant about anything that smacks of paganism so we get a lot of letters from people who are afraid that it's that the roman catholic church appropriated pagan holidays of the winter solstice and put a christian veneer over it to make it palatable to new christians for pagans leaving paganism to come and become christians right so the winter solstice is what date the 21st 21st yeah 21st 22nd so since the solstice is the 22nd that's the day where the sun stands still for for those two days the 25th is a different date so if they were wanting to expropriate the winter soldiers they would have made jesus born on december 22nd that's true [Music] [Applause] caesar julius caesar the famous one in his calendar reform of 45 44 established this winter solstice as the on the 25th of december okay and he said that's bulma and bulma means the mid-winter everybody knows that the winter solstice is on the 21st of december but that is actually not the original idea of julius caesar who was the originator the inventor of our calendar so to speak he fixed the date on the 25th of december so that would be the real the older julian date for the solstice but that calendar is not entirely precise so basically roughly speaking one day per century it shifts so by the fourth entry when christmas originated the date from the 25th had shifted to the 21st and that's the day that has been later restituted by pope gregory the 13th in the 16th century to be the standard winter solstice which is valid until today and that's what our calendar still says the winter solstice has nothing whatsoever to do with christmas because the bible simply doesn't speak about any form of soul steals shortest day the sun or whatever it just speaks about the birth of a child in a manger but christmas preserves the older julian date for winter solstice that is the 25th of december [Music] we don't know when jesus was born the gospel stories don't tell us they give us some clues that we think it was probably gen generally in the autumn season but we really don't know no one knows when the date was but almost all the evidence is sometime late september early october the answer is no one knows so why are we celebrating it on the 25th [Music] by about 200 there's a calendar of antiochus which says the 25th of december is the birthday of helios of the sun so there is definitely an idea of birthday already by 200 a.d probably the first usage of the day 25th december for a big festive occasion is in the early 270s a.d or ce when a roman emperor called aurelian dedicates a huge temple at rome to the unconquered sun sole invictus aurelian's a military hard guy who's pulled the empire back together after decades of invasion and civil war and he's trying to produce a religion around which all the pagans the empire can unite and the sun up there in the sky giving warmth and life to the world could be the symbol and so he dedicates this big temple at rome to the sun on the 25th of december one of the theories now is that aurelion actually chose december 25th to co-opt a popular christmas date that christmas had already been enough of a whoop for an emperor who who wanted to emphasize the sun god and victory to steal it as a date [Music] it is my view and i think it's the view of the majority of uh scholars of this of this uh period that are really indeed dedicate his temple on the 25th of december 274. unfortunately there's no direct effort evidence for the date of that inauguration it will have been inaugurated some time and it is probably a plausible hypothesis to think that it was the 25th of december it's a good option it's a good guess but there's no hard evidence for that date it is still very controversial as to what's going on about the choice of the 25th of december as being an important day for sole invictus now the important thing to bear in mind here is that quite independently of soul invictus december 25th was already widely regarded to be the date of the winter solstice and this state had already a certain degree of solar symbolism built into it because obviously the state marks the transition from decreasing daylight length to increasing daylight length and as a result it made a lot of sense on a symbolic level to argue that the sun is born on this date and as the sun grows older the days grow longer from for my part the evidence points very strongly that aurelian chose that date because of the association with the solstice and with the festival of light that that already existed at that time and i think we then come to the slightly more controversial problem of well then how do you understand uh that same date being adopted as the birthday of christ 354 is the first year in which christ gets officially given a birthday on the 25th of december [Music] the roman empire has become christian okay it's constantine i can't think of anything where the word christmas ever comes up in the reign of constantine but because of that december the 25th and because that was the feast day for the gods sole invictus it eventually becomes a convenient day to for christians to to celebrate the birth of christ uh the first record we have of this happening is in a surviving calendar from the year 354. it's called the phylochalian calendar and it's a bizarre it's kind of like an almanac it's got all kinds of pictures and dates and distances of one city to another it says this is the day of sole invictus and it's also the day in which christians celebrate the birth of christ it was prepared for a christian and yet it had all the pagan holidays in it and all the things that christians were supposed to despise the need for christmas was felt in the 4th century and not before that because the general religious culture culture changed and the grown interest in the sun is certainly part of that new religious culture in the fourth century late antiquity and without that grown interest in the sun probably christmas would not have originated or if it originated it would probably not have fallen on the 25th of december and this solar symbolism could be in principle also applied to jesus because in early christian sources jesus is sometimes being given as solar attributes he's referred to as the son of justice as christ the true son you sometimes get representations of christ with rays you sometimes do get a nimbus meaning a golden zone around the head of christ and later of other saints as well you do get for example in the apps of santa polinarian clase in ravenna a sun rising above the horizon which is christ recognizable because there's a cross in that sun and it also says that it is christ if christ is his majesty and christ is also justice there are two reasons for assimilating him to the son and if the birth of the son is the 25th it's perfectly possible to make this the date of his birth [Music] when heretics of the gnostic variety started suggesting that christ had never had bodily form that he had merely been spirit christians then realized they had to start emphasizing things like the birth the observance of the nativity then becomes uh openly celebrated toward the end of the 20th century people thought that the church was unlikely to adopt anything pagan so they looked for another theory uh to explain it and they came up with what's called the calculations theory and the calculation theory comes in and tries to explain why christians arrived at the conclusion that jesus was born on december 25th and it leaves the question of how christmas first came to be celebrated pretty much alone that's a separate issue there was kind of this tradition in judaism that a prophet's death was the same day as his birth so they would be born and die on the same date well that would help us pick the date for the birth of jesus we know that he was crucified in the late spring and a popular date for that in the early church was march 25th so was march 25th then the birthday of jesus no they thought uh that would be the conception of jesus so nine months from march 25th gives us december 25th so if the theory has to do with birth and death didn't anyone notice that they switched birth and conception right so hans firsta's main criticism of the calculation theory is that it cannot account for one of its founding assumptions he criticizes the calculation theory for assuming that at some stage christians would have sort of switched their assumption and all of a sudden would have started parallelizing the conception and the death which is not even tested in the sources before the fourth century according to him i believe that christians did have a reason for switching and that's precisely because they had this independent assumption that christ would have probably been born in winter because of the way they read or rather misread the first chapter of luke in the gospel of luke in the first chapter you have this encounter between the priest zacharias and an angel in the temple and the angel prophesies that zacharias's wife elizabeth will conceive a son who goes on to become john the baptist and the same chapter also informs you that christ was conceived about five or six months after this episode so if you take this information you could argue that christ was born maybe 15 months after this encounter between zacharias and the angel and we know that some christians possibly already in the second century believe that this episode happened on the day of atonement in the jewish calendar also known as yom kippur which roughly speaking happens every year in late september early [Music] october [Music] then you count forward the month and you figure out that christ must have been born in winter and this influenced the way they carried out these calculations that eventually led them to accept december 25th so you're saying they misread luke because they thought zachariah served in the temple on yom kippur right yeah i mean we have quite a few sources which expressed this assumption that zacharias was the high priest of the temple that he went into the temple on the day of atonement because according to the old testament that's what the high priest does he goes into the holy of holies once every year on yom kippur the day of atonement but how do we know zacharias wasn't a high priest the crucial piece of evidence the gospel of luke gives you in this regard is to say that zacharias entered the temple as a member of abiya abhiya is one of 24 priestly divisions or priestly causes and the purpose of these priestly courses was to take turns when it came to officiating in the temple burning incense sacrificing animals and so on so by virtue of being in the course of abijah zacharias was an ordinary priest and not a high priest right exactly and doesn't that also mean that according to leviticus i think if he tried to serve as a high priest he would die yeah and they tried to use chronological arguments to get to this result even though it says clearly that he's a member of abia [Music] you're unlikely to come on the basis of the information given in the bible to the 25th of december but once it was installed then it was relatively easy to find theories covering that date too and you could even go further and say if you take the gospel look too seriously it is unlikely that it happened in winter because the shepherds were out in the fields and even in palestine where it's warmer than in middle europe or northern europe even in palestine in at the end of december shepherds would not normally be out on the fields with their sheep during night [Music] the church had a really good marketing strategy they were great marketers so um they any culture they went to they would um incorporate what those people cared about most into christianity and that's part of the reason why there are so many variations of christianity too in part because each culture around the world is is going to care and and value different things and have different celebrations and and christianity took those and incorporated that as a way to to help um inspire that conversion process it took four or five hundred years to get to all of europe the last part of europe that it went to was scandinavia and always when they went when when the christian church went somewhere they had to negotiate with local political rulers and so christmas came to different parts of europe at different times but the catholic church always found it convenient to fold local custom into their own church hawken did good he had a plan of converting norway to christianity but in a sort of soft way so he began with the christmas celebration now they didn't celebrate christmas obviously because they were pagan but they did celebrate yule and they had this big celebration of yule around the 12th of january so hawk on the good he changed the date and said he demanded that they start to celebrate on the 25th of december so instead of celebrating the first sightings of the sun in the north they were supposed to celebrate the birth of christ obviously and people accepted the change of date that's okay so as long as they got the party they were fine with that rulers made the decision to become christians kind of funny you know a prince or a duke would make a decision for the whole kingdom to say okay you'll now all believe this but you have to do things even when you're an authoritative authoritarian ruler you have to do things to make the people accept it so this was easier to do that to celebrate these old pagan holidays some people in the church that we were going to started to say things like okay well um you know the roots of christmas is pagan we were like we don't care okay we don't care where it came from the point is is that we're celebrating christ we're celebrating his birth i don't care what those people were doing i had little sneaking suspicions that had pagan roots um but it's not until we started really getting into it and doing a little bit of research that i really felt uncomfortable with it but i didn't say anything because i thought that the rest of the family would not only have a problem with it but i didn't want to be the black sheep and be like as christianity goes on now we're talking the um what's called late antiquity of the early middle ages the church is warning people about clinging to the collins and they're saying you gotta stop this cross-dressing the common christmas ritual known as mumming actually involves cross-dressing between men and women you're going to stop dressing up like animals you got to stop dancing in the streets it's a church writer warning people not to practice this tradition which would be they talk about going about to houses with the heads of beasts the december period the christmas period was a time in which groups at the margins of society uh the despised the poor the unmarried kids would be allowed to go around and demand gifts so they would go to door door to door singing a song or making threats or offering a little something young women for example would carry a bucket of beer a wasp hail bowl and give you a sip when they knocked on your door in return for either some food or some money law sailing was a form of begging which always sort of had an implicit threat if you give us what we want alcohol food even money we'll wish you a wonderful luck in the next year if you don't um we can do damage as a child not coming from a christian home i had a lot of just common questions i mean what does saint nicholas have to do with the birth of christ [Music] [Applause] [Music] saint nicholas was though we've mostly forgotten him the greatest male saint for a thousand years he was almost as powerful and as venerated as the virgin mary hundreds of churches around the world are saint nicholas churches the first church in north america is the saint nicholas church he is a patron saint of just about everything now aren't there legends about saint nicholas yes this is the one that really makes really makes the headlines so here's the story three students so probably they're young men not kids but they're always presented as kids they're going off to study and they stop at this inn where the innkeeper has this nasty habit of killing his guests chomping them up and pickling them in barrels in the basement and then serving the meat in meat pies so he kills the kids chops them up puts them in the barrel and st nicholas comes visiting a few days later and spidey senses are tingling there's there's something going on here and he says you've got three kids in the basement chopped up confess yes yes so he goes down to the basement and resurrects the children they are reassembled and so you very often see three kids coming out of a tub he is the patron saint of barrel makers pickle makers innkeepers the innkeeper turned good by the way and and students and kids and there was a custom that this character would come door to door on christmas time and he would ask knock on the door he'd be in disguise and say was little johan a good boy and if the mother said yes he'd give him some candy [Music] krampus is an assistant of saint nicholas the two of them will go door-to-door and nicholas's job is to check in with the children and see ask other parents how they've been doing that year and the krampus job is to punish them if they've been bad this is actually a tradition that's acted out in certain towns in austria and bavaria it's pretty rare now in this form where they go house to house but where that happens nicholas will as i said talk to the kids there's a little traditional rhyme that he says when he enters and he does give them a little small gifts he's costumed as a traditional as like a medieval bishop and this is how the krampuses were originally you just take an old coat turn it inside out so you see the fur and my austrian fans that his grandfather would take a rug off the floor and so it was just like how do you disguise yourself and make yourself look like something other so it's always a fur clad smutty faced glowing character might carry chains or a whip this compass is often shown with the chains and these chains are held by saint nicholas who's the santa claus and they say that this might symbolize how santa claus i guess as a christian figure was able to chain and control these pagan elements uh at the time as opposed to modern day santa who is in charge of both giving gifts and keeping track of who's naughty uh those responsibilities were split between the two so st nicholas would give out treats small toys things like that and krampus would be the one who would be used by parents to threaten their kids if you're bad krampus is going to come and take you away you know these masking traditions can go back to the 1100s or so or even older to the roman empire [Music] when we first heard about the um the pagan roots is they were saying like the christmas tree was pagan and that is something that we shouldn't be doing but we were like well we're celebrating the birth of christ we're not worshiping the chief yeah we're not we're not worshiping the tree we're not carving it into an idol we're just cutting down a tree and bringing it into our house and we're like okay well where did this christmas tree thing come from [Music] the earliest evidence we have of evergreens being brought into the houses is early folklore it's from the middle ages we just know that people have been taking evergreen branches for example of evergreens mistletoe juniper holly and or other pine pine tree branches into the houses during it it has been important to put it into the houses as a way of protection warding of evil and as a symbol of of life basically during this time of death and darkness but the first notion of an evergreen tree-like object comes from the late 1400s it's a pole stuck up outside decorated with evergreen branches and and we know of one at least one in london and uh two in the baltic area estonia and latvia where german merchants had set up trading posts now as to who is the first uh it's a heated topic in estonia and latvia the story of the christmas tree is documented in the brotherhood of blackheads chronicles from the year 1509 1510 written in the all-german language according to the chronicles logs will burned during the winter solistus and pagan traditions and it's likely that the first christmas tree was originally meant to be set on fire at town hall square noriga riga claims to have put up the first ever christmas tree in this very town square right here in the year 1510 it says on the ground this is obviously a big tourist attraction because uh you know christmas trees are european-wide tradition everyone knows about them lots of tourists have come along and taken a photo with this the only issue is that estonia where i've just come from also claims to put up the first christmas tree in 1441 in thailand town square by the brotherhood of blackheads merchant association [Music] in the 1500s say you know half a century or so later people are moving the trees inside this happens in germany they will go out into the forest and lock the top off an evergreen tree they'll bring it inside and they'll hang it upside down from the ceiling by the late 1500s people start cutting down the whole tree and bringing it inside and setting it we would say right side up it becomes a great fashion across germany in the 17th 18th centuries and german refugees fleeing from napoleon bring it to england the 1790s 1800s and it becomes an english fashion largely because of one very influential german he's prince albert queen victoria's husband who introduces it's the royal family in the 1840s and that's when it becomes a pretty well universal tradition probably the true association of the christmas tree came also from germany where they would conduct these paradise plays during the christmas season in which it was very popular to have the the you know tree in the garden of eden and they would represent you know the first sin when adam and eve fell the focal point of this play was a pine tree and that that gradually moved into the home of the homes of christians who would on that tree they you know had would have fruit hanging on it representing the first tree in the garden of eden and then they would also put little wafers representing the body of christ but what i think is interesting is that when this ultra tradition came or returned from the south then lots of christians were upset about it because they thought it was a pagan tradition and then some other people came and said no no it's not a pagan tradition this is a symbol of the the tree in the garden of eden trees especially evergreen trees are very important in ancient symbolism a lot of northern pagan peoples have the idea of one enormous tree that connects all the levels of the world from the top of the sky through to the underworld scientific thought we always ignore the irregular the exception to the rule in magical thought is the reverse the ordinary doesn't attract attention the unusual does so because the tree remains green when all trees other trees are dead this and gives special significance to the evergreen tree what's ever unusual is magical and powerful now we have a christian source it may not be reliable but it it's it could be describes this tree in uppsala sweden we have reason to believe our modern christmas tree is a grossly distorted version of this now it's described by christians though as the center of a what they would view as a horrific human sacrifice cult but this is during easter now time of life so it's it's been switched and it's this large tree and they would sacrifice every nine years dogs horses and humans and hang them from the tree and it's there's reason to believe that christmas ornaments hanging from the tree probably symbolizing originally maybe a dead human hanging from a tree one of the hallmarks of the protestant reformation was this desire to restore the purity of the of the apostolic church and this desire led to a wholesale re-evaluation of the entire edifice of christian worship and calvinists puritans and other more radical groups and particularly far in this regard they essentially rejected large parts of the liturgical year as not being grounded in scripture and christmas was an easy target from this perspective because obviously the date of christ's birth is never mentioned in the gospels there's no injunction to celebrate his birth either and then it is now it was the case that the religious content of christmas was overshadowed by popular folkloristic customs and traditions some of which were quite raucous and it was easy to believe that some of those customs have pagan roots it was also widely believed amongst reformers that the catholic church is mired in the vestiges of roman paganism so this argument came to be that they thought well they forced christmas on christianity even though it's not really a christian feast it's some kind of vestige of roman paganism and in the case of christmas the example they pointed to is the birth festival of the roman sun god sol invictus which means the unconquered sun the reformers everywhere in new york would say that the roman catholic church made compromise after compromise for 1400 years to appease the people and they brought in all sorts of non-scriptural things non-christian things and that the church in 1500 looked nothing like the church in 100 or 200 and the biggest part of the reformation was was to roll back all the compromises that have been made in that 1200 1300 year period and return the church to its original purity presbyterians don't realize today that the reformed churches and reformation suppressed christmas celebrations as well because they understood it was pagan so i was raised a catholic um but uh and everything was a sin just about so uh yeah they have encyclopedias of sin so just like you know we didn't have those in my church i couldn't uh no there's no sin to celebrate christmas it's or we're not to celebrate christmas either it's up to the person if we're saying that we're celebrating his birth then why is everything that we're doing all about us and our family and what we want to do what we want to do the new wave of reformers uh are dead set against the cult of saints so out goes saint nicholas and that leaves parents asking the question okay so who who's going to be the magical gift bringer now um catholic countries save saint nicholas and in some pockets of protestant europe like the netherlands they save saint nicholas as well nobody is bringing gifts to kids in england period for centuries there's no magical gift bringer but in other countries it becomes the christ child a perfect theological solution god brings us everything good so why not say to the children the baby jesus the christ child das christ kindle le petitge zou has brought you this so having santa bring gifts and having the christ child bring gifts is like that's a big issue and people will uh have stickers in in really traditional areas they'll have stickers in their windows with a slash through santa claus or the christmas man saying no vinoxman here the ironic thing is you know i think it was in germany they came up with the the kris kringle term which means christ child because they were trying to kind of turn the focus back to jesus to say um he's he's the real giver of gifts and our greatest gift was his his own life giving himself um but it's ironic because i always thought that term meant i thought it was synonymous with saint nicholas but it actually means christ child christmas goes into a decline in england and the english-speaking world after king charles ii comes back to power in 1660 and the puritans are booted out people have lost the taste for christmas in that period or at least to say the upper class seems to have lost its taste for christmas christmas becomes associated with peasants the lower classes the countryside over the next 150 years by 1800 both in england and in american colonies particularly in northeastern america christmas has turned into an outdoor new year's eve bash it's associated with adults alcohol making a nuisance of yourself jostling prosperous citizens off the sidewalk burning down churches belonging to african americans beating up immigrants all the kind of stuff you like to do if you're a thug on new year's eve so that's that's what christmas is associated with um you look at some of the illustrations in england at that time period and um it's it's not does not seem to be a time of of religion or or generosity why was christmas once illegal in america dang you could even be fine for celebrating it oh wow um whoa uh did i i have no idea would it have been um so i don't yeah i don't know what christmas was like before like the 1900s so i'm not really like um would that have been just uh would that have to do with the paganism or would that have to do with maybe the the uh uh something i don't know what could you tell me [Music] [Applause] in northeastern united states it was outlawed the states settled by the puritans like connecticut massachusetts didn't like christmas didn't want to have anything to do with it and apparently it was right until the 1870s that christmas day was a school day a work day yeah well the puritans were real kill joys they were much fun if you go to the american antiquarian society they'll be sermons against the evil christmas the colony records of massachusetts with the colony records of connecticut you can find the laws right there they thought christmas was an immoral holiday if you were in america in boston in 1810 christmas was ignored uh boston was overwhelmingly protestant and it was just a normal day i remember in england they had the same kind of laws people got really rowdy so they they kind of banned it from the mid 1640s to 1660 christmas is officially outlawed businesses had to be open on christmas if you shut down on christmas you're in trouble the sheriff of london would go around and pull down greenery that he saw on the streets christmas services were broken up by the police people thrown in jail so christmas carols were silent christmas services silent christmas festivities were silent for those those periods and it becomes a social problem in both england and northeastern united states there are in boston philadelphia new york gangs that take over the christmas season and let's swamp the ability of the police to handle it so in new york a group of artists and poets and writers try and domesticate christmas try and bring it indoors focus it on the children the charity that was part of christmas before that was charity to your social uh to those socially below you servants so instead of the servants you're giving gifts to children so as a way to sort of domesticate and quiet christmas down and to do that they resurrect saint nicholas i think the first time it crossed my mind that there was something wrong was maybe when i was about five if we're celebrating christ's birth if it's his birthday party why is santa in the foreground santa claus who the heck is santa claus santa claus is a bastardization of the dutch sinterklaas saint nicholas so we can tell that folk memory has preserved it because there is no it's only oral so we have sandy claw sandy claws sinter class santa claus all one word this will sound rather unusual but in fact santa claus is really just a grossly distorted version of the pagan god odin he is the only norse god routinely depicted as old there was still that connection where people were making between paganism mule and christmas so that might be part of it is is making saint nick kind of look like odin a little bit but do keep in mind that's just a theory so st nicholas walks or rides a white horse in in most parts of europe and the eight flying reindeer those probably had their roots in odin's flying eight-legged horse now this is pagan where they would celebrate odin coming down on his horse uh and they would they would put little shoes out with food in it for the horse and odin as a thanks would put you know candy or some kind of treats in that shoe and replace you know the hay or whatever they have put there for the horse sometime around 1 1200 some catholic nuns in an orphanage put a little gift in the shoes of their children that they're caring for on the eve of saint nicholas day so the evening of december 5th kids wake up and there's something lovely and they say saint nicholas brought that well it just seems like such a great idea it spreads all across europe the real magic happens in a poem that appears in 1821 called a children's friend this is a poem about the arrival on christmas eve of a figure called santa claus and he's not wearing a bishop's outfit he's wearing a long robe trimmed in fur nobody knows who wrote this but this is a guy who started a revolution the next year one of these new york aristocrats that wants to domesticate christmas tells to his family the poem that we know is the night before christmas and he's obviously read a children's friend because he comes down the chimney clothed all in fur except this time he's not a full-sized adult he is some dwarfish figure small enough to fit down a chimney now santa claus enters the house through the chimney and leaves that way and people miss the significance in traditional lore the sorcerer the witch the demon does not enter by the door uh your friend an ordinary safe person comes by the door the thief enters by the window witches sorcerers demons enter through the chimney and this old santa claus version again is a demonized version of odin he climbs down the chimney in this poem there's no long black birch and rod there's no horse manure in the stocking there's no switches this is a guy from of whom you don't have to be afraid so this notion of a grandfatherly magical gift bringer who comes on december 24th in a reindeer powered sleigh goes viral [Music] the crowd yelled there's the elmos and they rushed us [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i think there comes a point where the roots are so far gone that the present meaning doesn't carry the pagan connotation anymore [Music] i tend to follow more of a wiccan based paganism but there are many different forms and types of paganism i personally celebrate yule on the 23rd of december usually just to kind of carry it on a little bit to join in with my family's festivities [Music] so we'll start with the gold candle and we'll turn towards the east grandmother i find it amusing when people say put christ back in christmas because if you are christian and you really do want to follow you know the teachings of jesus then yeah it probably doesn't make much sense to to have all of these kind of you know pagan things that represent fertility um because that's not really about the birth of jesus some people say it's not likely that uh the christians would have wanted to uh take a pagan festival and make it christian on the other hand they do appear to have done so so i think one needs to find some other way of explaining what's going on so if you go to the vatican today you'll be surprised to find um full mosaics from pagan temples just in the church in the middle of the square is this giant obelisk there that's not even a roman thing that's an egyptian solar deity monument it's uh created by the egyptians to honor their sun god ra there was a temple to minerva that later got converted into a church and its modern name the name of the church is santa maria sopra minerva which means on top of minerva [Music] the early christians took on from paganism the shape of their churches decorations like statues and hangings and altars and cloths and a great many festivals especially to those connected to obvious turning points of the year like mid-winter and mid-summer i tend to celebrate the eight holidays most commonly associated with wicca and those are all based around the movement of the sun and the seasons so the winter solstice yule or the summer solstice litha and then the two equinoxes where day and night are equal and in the fall the autumnal equinox would be mabon the vernal equinox would be ostara and then you have four points in between so that's how you make the the eight holidays which are all about recognizing those changes in the seasons outside christmas there are plenty of synchronizations of pagan with later christian festivals may day becomes the feast of the apostles philip and james midsummer becomes the feast of john the baptist what we now call halloween the great pagan festival that opened winter becomes the feast of all saints and all souls and so you go on round the earth [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] is it a sin to celebrate christmas i don't think so no it's a joyous celebration i mean you're celebrating the birth of jesus no but i don't know why i mean i don't know is it a sin to celebrate christmas [Music] so what christianity has done over the centuries is to take stuff from the surroundings and tame it christianize it so we don't have human sacrifices anymore we consider that bad manners but we have the ulog you know we we don't do druidic stuff but we have the uh the mistletoe you know we're not dancing naked in the streets uh but we are giving little presents like at calends to kids for people that want to just you know say that it doesn't come from pagan origins my opinion on that is well you're just turning a blind eye to what history has told us i mean these these trends these stories these this is scholars the scholarly work that's that has been done i like to look at robert webber whose institute of christian worship series is pretty much my go-to source he documents these origins it's there secular history historians document these things when we deny that these origins exist we actually do disservice to christianities in what i actually say or argue we do disservice to christian intellect and then we end up just coming to profs as these sort of dumb fundamentalists and that's not helpful this is an important point 19th century scholars discovered that rituals outlive beliefs so what happens is the ritual continues but we forget why we're doing it and then we invent an explanation and the 19th century scholars called this myth to explain why we're doing something you could also call it a rationalization a lot of words that we have today uh have pagan origins uh scandinavian false worship origins for example the days of the week saturn day i mean saturn is a false god is it wrong to say saturday is it wrong to observe thursday which is thor's day do we need to change all the names of the days a week what we've both come to realize is that christmas is something where you're literally saying that this is for me and i'm worshiping you i'm celebrating you in this way i'm not celebrating him by saying today's friday you know what i mean right so it's like i think it makes a big difference when you're actually doing something for him exactly [Music] what really is that like the the bottom line for me is deuteronomy chapter 12 um not worshiping god the way we see other people worship their gods the way the pagans do that in itself is enough to not celebrate christmas knowing that christmas is not in the bible and taking that scripture but i want to suggest something that we have liberty we have liberty in christ paul said i become all things to all men that i may win some the purity of trying to deny or trying to stay away from christmas because of these pagan origins i think is a total misunderstanding of the bible in a classically evangelical theology that understands the whole narrative of the bible god redeems everything so i don't look at passages in deuteronomy and say this is why i shouldn't celebrate christmas there's all kinds of things in deuteronomy i would ask where in scripture is that do we find that you know the father redeemed anything from a pagan god worship and redeemed it for himself i don't see that anywhere in scripture i would say it's really worth the risk if the date itself december 25 was chosen because of some proximity to some kind of pagan festival let's just take it and sanctify and make the most of it because christ is worthy to be celebrated in his birth [Music] so each time that you are presented with an image imagine that the logo and branding are being proposed for use on your church so if you're ready let's begin so this one is the triple goddess the moon is the symbol of the goddess and it's three phases waxing full and waning this leaves me waiting [Music] [Applause] [Music] if you're being redeemed from something you don't bring it with you okay i i can change but i shouldn't be still drinking carrots and doing all that stuff bringing the symbol of the of what it was with you than having to say oh but it's been redefined i think this is the point the scriptures are very clear that we're not supposed to be mixing the holy with the unholy right and so um just because something is tradition does not mean that it's right there's a lot of things that are tradition what the different prophets were told to do with the symbols of baal or dagen or any of the other gods they ran into they were to you know burn them destroy them not incorporate them and and that i think would be the foundation i would use even though that that that's an old testament example um i still believe that that's it's more true if we're gonna take that legalistic approach to christmas then we're gonna have to rethink a whole lot of things and my personal opinion is i reject that interpretation that says because deuteronomy said this we shouldn't do that deuteronomy says a lot of things so am i moderate am i you know bordering on the edge of heresy you be the judge [Music] i think everything should be tested and we you need to every person needs to test everything that they see and the word of god is the best way to test everything that you see instead of observing christmas i we've switched to observing the feast days like we you know sukkot passover [Music] when i started to study more about the biblical feasts i started to wonder why christians are not observing them and when these are things that actually point back to him him being you know the passover lamb exactly that points to him him being the ultimate sacrificial lamb what does christmas tree and carolyn have anything to do with him our daughter she knew that our relatives were celebrating it and she asked why um but i i think the answer we gave her was we don't think that god this is what god wants us to do and um i just told her that christmas was fake i just straight up told her christmas is fake and santa is fake and it's not real and she said oh okay it's it's hard to be gentle and telling your kids the way you think that you should be doing things without saying and not have an explanation as to why your friends and family don't do the same thing um i mean we don't want them to make them look bad at all so i mean i think the only usually the only explanation is well they we don't believe all the same things they do and it just kind of i don't know just kind of leave it at that i guess it's a pagan ceremony through and through there's absolutely nothing to do with the birth of christ regarding christmas i know it sounds alarming and i don't mean to say that christians should stop should stop celebrating the festival because again it's a wonderful festival for children and frankly myth is important to our lives you know ultimately the earth is the lord's and everything in it and you know i look back to to paul's teaching in terms of food sacrifice to idols and he says you know what there's no other god but our god so whatever other pagans did with you know some of these whatever they did with greens or whatever they did with some of these traditions it i don't have that association at all my associations are christian and so i feel very comfortable making these traditions a part of our home you can have it both ways and deciding how pagan christmas actually should be or can be viewed as being on the one hand it definitely was a time of year sacred pagans all over europe on the other hand uh the symbolism of the return of the sun and the birth of the son of god is fairly self-evident too and so you can if you like have a christian concept of christmas well i mean as historian was you must say if you want to get rid of all christian traditions that are now strictly speaking and tested in the bible then you have to get rid of get rid of many many things i mean christianity has grown over centuries and the whole package what it means to be a christian today is shaped certainly by biblical editions but also by many other elements so um you would really in terms of christian feasts you would have to get rid of many many things not just christmas and liturgy and so on that is one thing the other thing is that [Music] i think it is important to bear in mind that christmas is not tested in the bible but it is certainly not anti-biblical while sin is transgression against the law and in his law the father does tell us not to do not worship me the way the pagans worship their god where we worship him as we pick his worship to god when we were involved in the christmas trend traditions we were doing all the same traditions the interesting thing at the same time at the same time and we were saying that we were doing it for him that like like we just we saw it it's our part of our like christian religion that said so we were that was we were worshiping him we were thinking in order to be a christian that how could we not celebrate his birth yeah like you know that so it was a form of worship it was a former worship so and so in based on that criteria yeah and we were i think we were sinning i think we were instant like obviously unknowingly clearly so yeah i would say that celebrating christmas could definitely be a sin be a sin [Music] it's hard to come to that conclusion isn't it but that's really we realized was the main question if it's not a sin but it doesn't really matter does it it's not a sin does it matter i think it does you know why because you see the reason why i think that even even if someone could say okay you prove to me that somebody christmas is not a sin i think it still matters because that is almost like me saying to my husband that as long as i don't commit adultery against you that you know we're we're like there's no reason for you to divorce me what kind of a marriage would that be don't i want to make him happy do i want to do what what pleases him it's way bigger than whether it's a sin it's a sad place that that's where the discussion goes yeah oh well it's not a sin so i can do it oh well it's not it's not it's not it's not going to cause my salvation like you know so therefore i can do it it's like where have we come how how did we get to this point that we just want to do the bare minimum we say that it's all about him we sing the songs that oh i give myself away i give myself away but then we will give ourselves until a certain limit oh i'm not giving away my christmas i'm not i'm not i'm not giving away those traditions because it's not a sin and i'm not going to lose my salvation so you know no i'm not letting go of that then are you giving yourself away of course he still loves you what about loving him you know what i mean and honestly thinking what it just breaks my heart like what about loving him [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: 119Ministries

Views: 28,672

Rating: 4.8417268 out of 5

Keywords: 119Ministries, torah, bible, hebrew roots, Christmas, Should Christians Celebrate Christmas, Nativity, Santa Claus, Saint Nicolas, Sinterklaas, Jesus, Baby Jesus, Saturnalia, Winter Solstice, Paganism, Odin, Krampus, Kris Kringle, Yule, wreath, Mistletoe, Evergreen Tree, Christmas tree, Wiccan, The pagan roots of Christmas, Christmas Traditions, Christmas Origins, Sol Invictus, Father Christmas, Wassail, Wassailing, Kalends, Catholicism, Reformation, yuletide, The Christmas Question

Id: Yei17uJeKuw

Length: 84min 15sec (5055 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020