Free Republic

According to conventional wisdom, Christmas had its origin in a pagan winter solstice festival, which the church co-opted to promote the new religion. In doing so, many of the old pagan customs crept into the Christian celebration. But this view is apparently a historical myth—like the stories of a church council debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or that medieval folks believed the earth is flat—often repeated, even in classrooms, but not true. William J. Tighe, a history professor at Muhlenberg College, gives a different account in his article "Calculating Christmas," published in the...

Two thousand years ago, sometime during the summer, a woman gave birth to a boy child in the Jewish city of Bethlehem, and named him Jesus. The years and time of year are based on the historical, not religious, records. Once the Roman Church was well established, it changed the date of Christmas (literally, “Christ Mass”) from the summer to the end of December, to compete with and overwhelm the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, a generalized party that occupied the five days at the end of the year, left out of the established months. Given the wreckage that the federal...

Merry... merriment! by Greg Swann About my very short Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie story The season's greetings, Mikko Ellilä writes: Swann, I just read your funny little story: Do you think it would be better for atheists to use the old English word Yule instead of Christmas? I've noticed most English-speaking atheists use the term Winter Solstice but I think that's a rather boring meteorological and astronomical term, not a real name for a healthy hedonistic celebration. The only words for Christmas in Nordic languages are still the pre-Christian words "joulu" in Finnish, "jõul" in Estonian, "jul" in Swedish and...