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Christmas controversies

Christmas ideological, political and religious disputes

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In the 17th century, the Puritans had laws forbidding the ecclesiastical celebration of Christmas, unlike the Catholic Church or the Anglican Church, from the latter of which they separated. With the atheistic Cult of Reason in power during the era of the French Revolution, Christian Christmas religious services were banned and the three kings cake was forcibly renamed the "equality cake" under anticlerical government policies. Later, in the 20th century, Christmas celebrations were prohibited under the doctrine of state atheism in the Soviet Union. In Nazi Germany, Christmas celebrations were propagandized so as to serve the ideology of the Nazi party.

Modern-day controversy, colloquially known as the "war on Christmas", occurs mainly in China, the United States and—to a much lesser extent—the United Kingdom. Some opponents have denounced the generic term "holidays" and avoidance of using the term "Christmas" as being politically correct. This often involves objections to government or corporate efforts to acknowledge Christmas in a way that is multiculturally sensitive. In China, the government not only does not recognize Christmas as a statutory holiday, but local governments restrict Christmas celebrations in some places.

History

Date of Christmas Day

There are two competing theories on why 25 December was chosen as the date of Christmas, although theology professor Susan Roll writes that liturgical historians generally accept that it had some relation to "the winter solstice and the popularity of solar worship in the later Roman Empire". One theory is that the Church chose 25 December as the birthday of Jesus to appropriate the Roman festival of the "birthday of the Sun" at the winter solstice, which was on the same date; this is known as the "history of religions hypothesis". Another theory, the Calculation Hypothesis, posits that the birthdate of Jesus was calculated as nine months after a date chosen for Jesus's conception: 25 March, the Roman date of the spring equinox.

In Christian belief, the teaching that God came into the world in the form of man to atone for the sins of humanity, rather than the exact birth date, is considered to be the primary purpose in celebrating Christmas; the exact date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is considered a non-issue.

History of religions hypothesis

The earliest document to place Jesus's birth on 25 December is the Chronograph of 354 (also called the Calendar of Filocalus), which also names it as the birthday of the Invincible Sun. Proponents of the "substitution theory" argue that pagan Romans were celebrating the winter solstice as the birthday of a Sun god before Christians began celebrating it as Jesus's birthday. The Calendar of Antiochus of Athens, c. second century AD, marks 25 December as the "birthday of the Sun". From AD 274, the Roman festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (birthday of Sol Invictus, the 'Invincible Sun') was held on 25 December. Sol Invictus became the chief god of the Roman Empire under Aurelian. Gary Forsythe, Professor of Ancient History, says: "This celebration would have formed a welcome addition to the seven-day period of the Saturnalia (December 17–23), Rome's most joyous holiday season since Republican times, characterized by parties, banquets, and exchanges of gifts". The Christian treatise De solstitiis et aequinoctiis, from the late fourth century AD, associates Jesus's birth with the "birthday of the sun" and Sol Invictus:

Our Lord, too, is born in the month of December ... the eighth before the calends of January [25 December] ... But they [the pagans] call it the 'birthday of the invincible one' (Invictus). But who then is as invincible as our Lord who defeated the death he suffered? Or if they say that this is the birthday of the sun, well He Himself is the Sun of Justice.

In a mid fifth century Christmas sermon, Pope Leo I rebukes those "who hold the pernicious belief that our celebration today seems to derive ... from, as they say, the rising of the 'new sun'." The theory is mentioned in an annotation added to a manuscript by 12th-century Syrian bishop Jacob Bar-Salibi. The scribe wrote:

It was a custom of the Pagans to celebrate on the same 25 December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and revelries, the Christians also took part. Accordingly, when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day.

According to C. Philipp E. Nothaft, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, though the history of religions hypothesis "is nowadays used as the default explanation for the choice of 25 December as Christ's birthday, few advocates of this theory seem to be aware of how paltry the available evidence actually is."

Calculation hypothesis

Proponents of the "calculations theory" such as Louis Duchesne, Hieronymus Engberding and Thomas Talley, argue that Christmas was celebrated on 25 December before the Natalis Solis Invicti and suggest that Aurelian established it in order to compete with the Christian feast. They point out that in AD 221, Sextus Julius Africanus suggested the spring equinox, 25 March in the Roman calendar, as the day of creation and of Jesus's conception. While this implies a birth in December, Africanus did not offer a birth date for Jesus, and he was not an influential writer at the time. Adam C. English, professor of religion at Campbell University, has argued for the veracity of 25 December as Jesus's date of birth. The Bible in Luke 1:26 records the Annunciation to Mary to be at the time when Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, was in her sixth month of pregnancy. English assumes that Zechariah's ministry in the Temple, as described in Luke 1:5–23, took place on Yom Kippur the year before Jesus's birth; he then traces the narrative in the Gospel of Luke through the Annunciation and the birth of John the Baptist to conclude that Jesus was born on 25 December. Susan Roll, a critic of the calculations theory sees it as merely an attempt by early Christians to retroactively justify the winter solstice date.

Origin of customs

The Christian Council of Tours of 567 established Advent as the season of preparation for Christmas, as well as the season of Christmastide, declaring "the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany to be one unified festal cycle", thus giving significance both to 25 December and to 6 January, a solution that would "coordinate the solar Julian calendar with the lunar calendars of its provinces in the east".

During the winter, the burning of logs was a common practice among many cultures across Northern Europe. In Scandinavia, this was known as the yule log and originally had a pagan significance; after the Christianization of Scandinavia, it may have been incorporated into the Christian celebration of Christmas there, with the pagan significance no longer remaining. However, as there are no existing references to a Christmas log prior to the 16th century, the burning of the Christmas block may have been an early modern invention by Christians unrelated to the pagan practice.

Many other Advent and Christmastide customs developed within the context of Christianity, such as the lighting of the Advent wreath (invented by Lutherans in 16th century Germany), the marking of an Advent calendar (first used by Lutherans in the 19th century), the lighting of a Christingle (invented by Moravians in 19th century Britain), and the viewing of a Nativity play (first enacted by Catholic monks in 11th century Italy).

Puritan opposition during the English Interregnum

Prior to the Victorian era, Christmas was primarily a religious holiday observed by Christians of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran denominations. Its importance was often considered secondary to that of Epiphany and Easter.

The Puritans as Calvinists objected to the Christian feast of Christmas. As previously with Calvin in Geneva during the English Interregnum, when England was ruled by a Puritan Parliament. Puritans sought to remove elements they viewed as unbiblical, from their practice of Christianity, including those feasts established by the Anglican Church. In 1647, the Puritan-led English Parliament banned the celebration of Christmas, replacing it with a day of fasting and considering it "a popish festival with no biblical justification", and a time of wasteful and immoral behaviour. Puritans disliked traditions that inverted social hierarchies, such as wassailing in which the rich were expected to give to the poor on demand, and which with the addition of alcohol sometimes turned into violent intrusions. Protests followed as pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans. The book The Vindication of Christmas (London, 1652) argued against the Puritans, and makes note of Old English Christmas traditions, dinner, roast apples on the fire, card playing, dances with "plow-boys" and "maidservants", old Father Christmas and carol singing. The Restoration of King Charles II in 1660 ended the ban. Poor Robin's Almanack contained the lines: "Now thanks to God for Charles return, / Whose absence made old Christmas mourn. / For then we scarcely did it know, / Whether it Christmas were or no." Many clergymen still disapproved of Christmas celebration. In Scotland, the presbyterian Church of Scotland also discouraged observance of Christmas. James VI commanded its celebration in 1618, but attendance at church was scant.

17th and 18th centuries

In Colonial America, the Pilgrims of New England disapproved of Christmas. The Plymouth Pilgrims put their loathing for the day into practice in 1620 when they spent their first Christmas Day in the New World building their first structure in the New World—thus demonstrating their complete contempt for the day. Non-Puritans in New England deplored the loss of the holidays enjoyed by the laboring classes in England. Christmas observance was outlawed in Boston in 1659, with a fine of five shillings. The ban by the Puritans was revoked in 1681 by an English appointed governor, Edmund Andros; however, it was not until the mid-19th century that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the Boston region. Before the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it was not widely celebrated in the American Colonies.

When the state sponsored atheistic belief system, the Cult of Reason in power during the era of Revolutionary France, Christian Christmas church services were banned and the three kings cake was forcibly renamed the "equality cake" under antireligious government policies.

19th century

With the appearance of the Oxford Movement in the Anglican Church, a revival in the traditional rituals and religious observances associated with Christmastime occurred. This ushered in "the development of richer and more symbolic forms of worship, the building of neo-Gothic churches, and the revival and increasing centrality of the keeping of Christmas itself as a Christian festival" as well as "special charities for the poor" in addition to "special services and musical events". Historian Ronald Hutton believes the current state of observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday, spearheaded by Charles Dickens, who "linked worship and feasting, within a context of social reconciliation". Dickens was not the first author to celebrate Christmastide in literature, but it was he who superimposed his humanitarian vision of the holiday upon the public, an idea that has been termed as Dickens's "Carol Philosophy".

Historian Stephen Nissenbaum contends that the modern celebration in the United States was developed in New York State from defunct and imagined Dutch and English traditions in order to refocus the holiday from one where groups of young men went from house to house demanding alcohol and food into one centered on the happiness of children. He notes that there was a deliberate effort to prevent children from becoming greedy in response. Christmas was not proclaimed a holiday by the United States Congress until 1870.

20th century

In the early 20th century, Christian writers such as C. S. Lewis noted what he saw as a distinct split between the religious and commercialized observance of Christmas, the latter of which he deplored. In Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus, Lewis gives a satire of the observance of two simultaneous holidays in "Niatirb" ("Britain" spelled backward) from the supposed view of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (484–425 BC). One of the holidays, "Exmas", is observed by a flurry of compulsory commercial activity and expensive indulgence in alcoholic beverages. The other, "Crissmas", is observed in Niatirb's temples. Lewis's narrator asks a priest why they kept Crissmas on the same day as Exmas. He receives the reply:

"It is not lawful, O Stranger, for us to change the date of Crissmas, but would that Zeus would put it into the minds of the Niatirbians to keep Exmas at some other time or not to keep it at all. For Exmas and the Rush distract the minds even of the few from sacred things. And we indeed are glad that men should make merry at Crissmas; but in Exmas there is no merriment left." And when I asked him why they endured the Rush, he replied, "It is, O Stranger, a racket ..."

The Soviet Union (until 1936), and certain other Communist regimes, banned Christmas observances in accordance with the Marxist–Leninist doctrine of state atheism. In the 1920s USSR, the League of Militant Atheists encouraged school pupils to campaign against Christmas traditions, such as the Christmas tree, and encouraged them to spit on crucifixes as protest against this holiday; the League established an antireligious holiday to be the 31st of each month as a replacement. Additionally the League of Militant Atheists organised festivals "specifically to denigrate religious holidays" in the USSR.

Most customs traditionally associated with Christmas, such as decorated trees (renamed as New Year Trees), presents, and Ded Moroz (Father Frost), were later reinstated in Soviet society, but tied to New Year's Day instead; this tradition remains as of the present day. However, most Russian Christians are of the Orthodox community, whose religious festivals (Christmas, Easter etc.) do not necessarily coincide precisely with those of the main western Christian churches (Catholic or Protestant), because of continued connection of the church calendar to the Julian calendar.

In Nazi Germany, Christmas celebrations were propagandized so as to serve the ideology of the Nazi party, including denial of the Jewish origin of Jesus.

The December 1957 News and Views published by the Church League of America, a conservative organization founded in 1937, attacked the use of Xmas in an article titled "X=The Unknown Quantity". The claims were picked up later by Gerald L. K. Smith, who in December 1966 claimed that Xmas was a "blasphemous omission of the name of Christ" and that "'X' is referred to as being symbolical of the unknown quantity." Smith further argued that Jews introduced Santa Claus to suppress the New Testament accounts of Jesus, and that the United Nations, at the behest of "world Jewry", had "outlawed the name of Christ". There is, however, a well-documented history of use of Χ (actually a chi) as an abbreviation for "Christ" (Χριστός) and possibly also a symbol of the cross. The abbreviation appears on many Orthodox Christian religious icons.

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