And now we Pagans have taken them back and resanctified them for ourselves. In my family, we choose to celebrate Yule (Winter Solstice) as a sacred holiday and Christmas as a secular one, where we honor the delights of seeing, hearing from, and talking with family that we rarely see (my most immediate family is usually on 2 or 3 separate continents, so Skyping is a great way for the four of us to get together) and exchanging gifts of love and friendship. There is much to love and celebrate in the winter holidays no matter what religion we are, and we aren’t all the same religion in my family. Luckily, with no Scientologists in the family, nobody’s been ordered to disconnect from my mom, whose doctorate is in Social Welfare and who is eminently qualified to be a therapist if she chooses.

My tradition is *much* smaller than Scientology, but then, we don’t lie about our size, either. While we have been around since 1962 and do have a founder (we have two but one is no longer living), he is hardly honored the way Hubbard was; I was on the board of directors as the elected member at large when we had to draw a few lines that left him rather more separated from day to day functions than he wanted, and no clergy member has been able to make even an impoverished living with our tradition alone. Paganism isn’t a way to get rich or evade taxation.

Holiday before the internet … Even before Charlie Chaplin movies …

Wait! Minor edit: “Until then we’ll have to evolute somehow.”

J.T., I understand all you’ve said. Thank you for sharing what is all grist for my “curiosity mill” about the early Christian period beginning with the passing of Christ up until the 4th century AD when Constantine I renounced his own paganism for Christianity and ordered that everyone else do so as well.

Thanks for your interesting comment, Peacemaker. It makes sense to me that trying to convert a world of pagans to Christianity was no small task and that Christian holidays were “positioned” with pagan holidays , keeping a lot of the same practices, and and well established traditions etc., to make it easier for them to become monotheists after having been polytheists for hundreds (thousands?) of years. For the same reason it also makes total sense that Easter was made to coincide with Jewish Passover. If I had the time I’d immerse myself in learning about religions and their origins. I’m particularly interested in the early Christian period between the passing of Christ and the Council of Nicea in the 4th century. I’ve read that Christianity had different sects and was VERY different during that period.

Lol and eeewww at the same time!

Have yourselves a Ne-an-der-thal Christmas
Let your fires burn bright
Next year all those tigers will be out of sight.

Have yourselves a Ne-an-der-thal Christmas
Put your clubs away
Next year bears and tigers will be far away!

Once again in our caves we meet
To devour raw meat and gore
Anthropoids who are dear to us
Gather near to us, once more.

Someday soon we all will become Humans
If the fates allow
Until then we’ll have to muddle thru somehow
So have yourself a Ne-an-der-thal Christmas now.

Aqua, Easter definitely has pagan origins and connections to fertility figures, though some of the specific theories such as about Ēostre or Ostara are open to question. It’s based on the “quarter” halfway between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice, and in the Eastern Orthodox Church Easter and May Day (the actual pagan quarter celebration) sometimes fall on the same day.

There were a number of pagan gods popular around the time of the origin of Christianity, who had a mythology including some sort of rebirth, and so it’s speculated that Jesus’ resurrection story was created to give a similar miraculous aura. The resurrection of Ishtar or Inanna was also said to have been celebrated at the first full moon after the Spring Equinox.

And it shouldn’t be forgotten that Easter more or less coincides with the Jewish Passover, which may have been the most direct reason for early followers of Jesus to create an observance of their own around that time.

The notion that Christmas was simply an attempt to co-opt Pagan Saturnalia and make early Christianity more palatable to Roman Pagans basically derives from a number of factors. Nearly all cultures throughout history have celebrated the winter solstice in some fashion, and every culture to which early Christianity spread had some form of celebration or holiday when Christianity reached them. Romans weren’t the first either! I don’t mean to suggest that Christians were the first people in the whole of human history to celebrate a holiday around the date of the Winter Solstice.
The date of December 25th became a holiday under the Emperor Julian the Apostate, who had been a Christian (came after Constantine) and had left Christianity to return to the Roman Pagan religion. Although we cannot know exactly when Christmas began being celebrated, we know that by the time Julian became emperor there were already annual Christmas celebrations on December 25 in Rome; Julian, embittered towards his former faith, chose this date in order to displace the new Christian religion and its celebration of Christmas. This was after Constantine had stopped the persecution of Christians.

It may seem more credible than it actually is because the Catholic Church has, much, much later, co-opted certain Pagan practices for this very reason. Mary worship, for example, derives from the Pagan celebration of the mother-son worship, and Pagan statues devoted to this worship could easily be repurposed to Mary worship. This doesn’t bother me since I am not Catholic and I do not regard Catholicism as essentially Christian.