Most people don't know how Christmas came to be celebrated on Dec. 25th, but historians do- and we thought we'd share how that date came about (Jesus was actually thought to be born in the summertime, - so where did the date come from? A Roman Holiday known as Saturnalia or Sol Invicta. Here are a couple of articles to educate everyone. Very interesting stuff.
HISTORY TODAY: Christmas
Day Came from Roman Holiday
By Matt Salusbury
Published in History Today 2009 Volume: 59 Issue: 12
Did the first Christian Roman emperor appropriate the
pagan festival of Saturnalia to celebrate the birth of Christ? Matt Salusbury
weighs the evidence.
It was a public holiday celebrated around December 25th
in the family home. A time for feasting, goodwill, generosity to the poor, the
exchange of gifts and the decoration of trees. But it wasn’t Christmas. This
was Saturnalia, the pagan Roman winter solstice festival. But was Christmas,
Western Christianity’s most popular festival, derived from the pagan
Saturnalia?
The first-century AD poet Gaius Valerius Catullus
described Saturnalia as ‘the best of times’: dress codes were relaxed, small
gifts such as dolls, candles and caged birds were exchanged.
Saturnalia saw the inversion of social roles. The wealthy
were expected to pay the month’s rent for those who couldn’t afford it, masters
and slaves to swap clothes. Family households threw dice to determine who would
become the temporary Saturnalian monarch. The poet Lucian of Samosata (AD
120-180) has the god Cronos (Saturn) say in his poem, Saturnalia:
‘During my week
the serious is barred: no business allowed. Drinking and being drunk, noise and
games of dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked,
clapping … an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water – such are the
functions over which I preside.’
Saturnalia originated as a farmer’s festival to mark the
end of the autumn planting season in honour of Saturn (satus means sowing).
Numerous archaeological sites from the Roman coastal province of Constantine,
now in Algeria, demonstrate that the cult of Saturn survived there until the
early third century AD.
Saturnalia grew in duration and moved to progressively
later dates under the Roman period. During the reign of the Emperor Augustus
(63 BC-AD 14), it was a two-day affair starting on December 17th. By the time
Lucian described the festivities, it was a seven-day event. Changes to the
Roman calendar moved the climax of Saturnalia to December 25th, around the time
of the date of the winter solstice.
From as early as 217 BC there were public Saturnalia
banquets. The Roman state cancelled executions and refrained from declaring war
during the festival. Pagan Roman authorities tried to curtail Saturnalia;
Emperor Caligula (AD 12-41) sought to restrict it to five days, with little
success.
Emperor Domitian (AD 51-96) may have changed Saturnalia’s
date to December 25th in an attempt to assert his authority. He curbed
Saturnalia’s subversive tendencies by marking it with public events under his
control. The poet Statius (AD 45- 95), in his poem Silvae, describes the lavish
banquet and entertainments Domitian presided over, including games which opened
with sweets, fruit and nuts showered on the crowd and featuring flights of
flamingos released over Rome. Shows with fighting dwarves and female gladiators
were illuminated, for the first time, into the night.
The conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity in
AD 312 ended Roman persecution of Christians and began imperial patronage of
the Christian churches. But Christianity did not become the Roman Empire’s
official religion overnight. Dr David Gwynn, lecturer in ancient and late
antique history at Royal Holloway, University of London, says that, alongside
Christian and other pagan festivals, ‘the Saturnalia continued to be celebrated
in the century afterward’.
The poet Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius wrote another
Saturnalia, describing a banquet of pagan literary celebrities in Rome during
the festival. Classicists date the work to between AD 383 and 430, so it
describes a Saturnalia alive and well under Christian emperors. The Christian
calendar of Polemius Silvus, written around AD 449, mentions Saturnalia,
recording that ‘it used to honour the god Saturn’. This suggests it had by then
become just another popular carnival.
Christmas apparently started – like Saturnalia – in Rome,
and spread to the eastern Mediterranean. The earliest known reference to it
commemorating the birth of Christ on December 25th is in the Roman Philocalian
calendar of AD 354. Provincial schisms soon resulted in different Christian
calendars. The Orthodox Church in the Eastern (Byzantine) half of the Roman
Empire fixed the date of Christmas at January 6th, commemorating simultaneously
Christ’s birth, baptism and first miracle.
Saturnalia has a rival contender as the forerunner of
Christmas: the festival of dies natalis solis invicti, ‘birthday of the
unconquered sun’. The Philocalian calendar also states that December 25th was a
Roman civil holiday honouring the cult of sol invicta. With its origins in Syria
and the monotheistic cult of Mithras, sol invicta certainly has similarities to
the worship of Jesus. The cult was introduced into the empire in AD 274 by
Emperor Aurelian (214-275), who effectively made it a state religion, putting
its emblem on Roman coins.
Sol invicta succeeded because of its ability to
assimilate aspects of Jupiter and other deities into its figure of the Sun
King, reflecting the absolute power of ‘divine’emperors. But despite efforts by
later pagan emperors to control Saturnalia and absorb the festival into the
official cult, the sol invicta ended up looking very much like the old
Saturnalia. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, was brought up in the sol
invicta cult, in what was by then already a predominantly monotheist empire:
‘It is therefore possible,’ says Dr Gwynn, ‘that Christmas was intended to
replace this festival rather than Saturnalia.’
Gwynn concludes: ‘The majority of modern scholars would
be reluctant to accept any close connection between the Saturnalia and the
emergence of the Christian Christmas.’
Devout Christians will be reassured to learn that the
date of Christmas may derive from concepts in Judaism that link the time of the
deaths of prophets being linked to their conception or birth. From this, early
ecclesiastical number-crunchers extrapolated that the nine months of Mary’s
pregnancy following the Annunciation on March 25th would produce a December
25th date for the birth of Christ.
ORIGINAL STORY: http://www.historytoday.com/matt-salusbury/did-romans-invent-christmas#sthash.4lX9uP12.dpuf
FROM Ancient
History.about.com: Celebrate the
Saturnalia
By N.S. Gill,
Saturnalia was a time to honor the god of sowing, Saturn.
Like Christmas, it was also a festival
day on which a public banquet was prepared. The
poet Catullus describes Saturnalia as the best of days. It was a time of
celebration, visits to friends, and gift-giving, particularly of wax candles
(cerei), and earthenware figurines (sigillaria). The best part of the
Saturnalia (for slaves) was the temporary reversal of roles. Masters served
meals to their slaves who were permitted the unaccustomed luxuries of leisure
and gambling. Clothing was relaxed and included the peaked woollen cap that
symbolized the freed slave, which looks an awful lot like Santa Claus's peaked
red hat . A member of the familia (family plus slaves) was appointed
Saturnalicius princeps, roughly, Lord of Misrule.
