Why Christmas Is at the Beginning of Winter

Some say that Christmas is just a Christianization of a pagan Roman holiday, such as Sol Invictus (“the invincible sun”), but historians are realizing that it is more likely that the day devoted to the sun god was more likely an imitation of Christmas, rather than vice versa.  Nor is Christmas a Christianization of  the Roman holiday supposedly for children, Juvenalia, which was actually about growing out of childhood and was never celebrated much.

The birth of Christ was first said to have been on December 25 very early, in 204 A.D.  The reason Christmas was placed in the liturgical calendar on December 25, as we blogged about four years ago, is connected to the Annunciation, when the angel appeared to Mary and the Christchild was conceived.  The commemoration of that event, which some experts think the early church might have celebrated even before it made a big deal about Christmas, was on March 25.  You take that date, which is actually fairly well attested, count nine months, and the Child’s birthday would be on December 25.

I happen to think, as a pious opinion rather than doctrine, that the Holy Spirit would cause the church to get the date right, just as He would cause Christians to imagine Jesus as He really was (long hair, beard, etc.).  But the bigger question is what the December date means.

Spencer Klavan reflects on this in his Daily Wire post The Case for Advent Maxxing:

Just as the exuberance of Easter is preceded by the 40 somber days of Lent, the 40 days of Christmas are preceded by days of preparation known as Advent. This is the key to understanding the rhythm of the whole liturgical calendar: it goes through successive periods of grief and joy, silence and music, death and resurrection. It takes the natural ebb and flow of the light throughout the year as raw material in a grand work of art, using the solar system itself to construct a symbolic picture of Jesus’ life. In Genesis, when God sets up the stars as “signs to mark the seasons,” the rhythm of the year becomes a language for conveying the order of creation. The Jewish calendar, pinned to the cycles of the moon, established the pattern. The Christian calendar, founded on the schedule of Jewish feasts that Christ observed, grows out of it.

The winter solstice, when the daylight becomes shortest, makes for a natural beginning to this yearly sequence. Unlike Easter, which took place firmly during the festival of Passover, Christmas isn’t identified with a specific date in the Bible. Many people now think Jesus was born sometime in the Spring. But the winter date was fixed already by the 4th century A.D. St. Augustine of Hippo loved to preach about the symbolic appropriateness of December 25th as an entry point for God into the world, precisely because of the dark and the cold: “He, therefore, who bent low and lifted us up chose the shortest day, yet the one whence light begins to increase.” As the day wanes to its lowest ebb and the year rolls into its most brooding silence, the light of the world slips in and begins to grow.

This is deep and ancient magic. Every people and tribe has long since recognized that the earth wheels through a cycle of death and rebirth. Christians saw in their lord and savior the answer to a promise whispered through the very structure of creation, written in the very bones of the year.

To be sure, pagan religions had their Winter Solstice observances.  But Christianity reverses what they meant.  The darkest and longest day of the year would have been an odd time to celebrate “The Invincible Sun,” since that date looked more like the time when the Sun was defeated.  That may be why the artificial holiday promoted by a few emperors didn’t really catch on.  More meaningful was the Yule of the Germanic tribes, a time of huddling around the Yule log in the darkness, making sacrifices to keep away the evil spirits.  Christmas upended that, teaching that our darkest hour is exactly when Christ came.

Here is more from Augustine’s Sermon 192:

He was born on the day which is the shortest in our earthly reckoning and from which subsequent days begin to increase in length. He, therefore, who bent low and lifted us up chose the shortest day, yet the one whence light begins to increase. By such a coming, though silent, He urged us, as with the sound of a mighty voice, to learn how to be rich in Him who became poor for us; to accept freedom in Him who took the form of a slave for us; to possess heaven in Him who sprang from earth for us.

I realize this applies to those of us in the Northern hemisphere.  In the Southern hemisphere, December 25 is near the beginning of summer, so that countries such as Australia celebrate Christmas by cooking out at the beach.  They celebrate the victory of the light over the darkness, so that works symbolically too.

Photo:  A field with a bunch of dry grass in the foreground. Grain winter snow via Picryl, public domain.