In England and America, our rather conservative approach to religion meant that Christmas never really caught on in the way it has today. However, it never even came close to Easter in that regard. The importance of Christmas waxed and waned over the centuries. Eventually, the old Saturnalia became New Year’s Eve, and Christmas took on a life of its own.

We preserve the Saturnalia tradition by bracketing our end-of-year celebration between Christmas and New Year’s Day. By 274 CE, the Roman Emperor Aurelian established December 25, which marked the birth of the Persian sun-god Mithras, as a holiday.īy 336, Roman Christians countered by celebrating the birth of Jesus, their Son of God, on the same day. The Saturnalia generally lasted a week and was dotted with the celebration of some of Rome’s many gods. The high and the low feasted together and exchanged gifts, as we do to this very day.

Saturnalia was a time when masters and slaves sometimes exchanged places, and the standard social order broke down. By doing so, they could encourage converts from the Roman population during late December’s Saturnalia, an important festival associated with the winter harvest. Their choice of a date around the Winter Solstice was an excellent one. Since Easter was the most important day of the liturgical calendar (and still is), another date had to be chosen for the birthday of Jesus. They already had Easter as a springtime celebration. 25 is now technically January 4.Įarly Christians probably celebrated the birth of Jesus in the winter for more practical reasons. To make up for built-up inaccuracies in the old calendar, Oct. In 1582, Pope Gregory decreed that a new calendar be used to replace the old Roman calendar. 25, we still don’t celebrate the holiday on the correct day. In those days, shepherds “abide with their flocks” (i.e., slept out with their sheep all night) to watch for and protect new-born lambs in the spring, not the winter.Įven if Jesus had been born on Dec. Augustus sent out his taxation decree in 7 BCE (Luke 2:1), and Herod, the villain in the birth story, was dead by 4 BCE.Īlso, Dec. References in the Bible itself determine those years. It’s far more likely that Jesus was born between 7 BCE and 4 BCE. Nine months after conception, he was born. His perfection also dictated that the date must coincide with the creation of the world on March 25. 25.ĭionysius filled in the logic by arguing that the savior’s perfect nature meant that he must have died and been conceived (or, more appropriately, “incarnated” into Mary’s womb) on the same date. That date coincided with the contemporary belief that God had created the world on March 25.Īround the same time, Hippolytus (170–236) claimed that the date of Jesus’ birth was Dec. The exact date of the birth in that year required a somewhat more convoluted argument.Īround 200 CE, Tertullian of Carthage calculated the date of Jesus’s crucifixion as March 25 on the Roman (solar) calendar. 1, Anno Domini 1, the First Year of our Lord. He chose the year in which Rome had been founded and determined, from the scant evidence available to him, that Jesus had been born 753 years later. It seems that the Pope was keen to produce some order in the celebration of Easter.ĭionysius decided to begin with what he considered to be the year of Jesus’ birth. 1, as was incorrectly determined by Dionysius Exiguus, a Roman abbot who lived around 550 CE.ĭionysius Exiguus, a monk from Russia who died about 544, was asked by Pope John I to set out the dates for Easter from 527 to 626. Jesus of Nazareth was not born during the year we now call 1 CE or A.D. Thus, at the risk of incurring some readers’ displeasure, I would like to point out a few “astronomical” aspects of the two holidays and the week that separates them. The juxtaposition of the two holidays may seem strange until we consider how the holidays got their starts. We will soon be in the midst of our traditional period of rest between the spiritually significant solstice celebrations like Christmas and Chanukah, and the more worldly revelries of New Year’s Eve.

Lo saturnalia