Christmas: Ever Ancient, Ever New

    Every culture that knows winter knows a winter feast. And the themes of such feasts are dictated by the season: light in the midst of darkness, warmth in the midst of cold, generosity in the midst of scarcity, joy in the midst of depression, and life in the face of death. Winter festivals are acts of defiance, of subversive jubilation. That’s why we love them so. A December fire in the hearth sparks far more wonder than any summer grill.

    The earliest Christians concerned themselves with but two holidays: Sunday, the day of Resurrection; and Pascha, the Passover of Our Lord, which served as Sunday for the entire year. The liturgical calendar which we know and love today, with all of its festivals and feasts, arose over time and grew out of these original two. The most glaring ancient omission from our postmodern perspective would appear to be Christmas.

    Yet Christmas is not quite the latecomer some would have us believe. Christians were already commemorating the Nativity of Our Lord by the second century. In AD 204, Hippolytus of Rome affirmed a date of 25 December for Christ’s birth, a tradition which St Augustine (354-430) identified as apostolic, and which St John Chrysostom (347-407) boldly asserted to be backed up by the Roman census records extant in his day.

    The West took that 25 December date rather seriously. Whether this was due to Chrysostom’s records; or to adding nine months to the traditional date of the Annunciation on 25 March; or even to a messianic prophecy linked to Hanukkah on 25 Kislev as Pope Benedict XVI has indicated; we don’t particularly know. It seems clear, however, that this date was not based on any preexisting Roman festival, such as Saturnalia or Sol Invictus.

    The Eastern Church, meanwhile, celebrated Christ’s Nativity not on 25 December but 6 January, with the festival of Epiphany. Epiphany originally commemorated all the ways in which God reveals Himself to us in Jesus Christ: the Incarnation, the Visitation of the Magi, Jesus’ Baptism, and the Wedding at Cana. Rather than choose between East and West, the Church rather pragmatically linked the two traditional dates—25 December and 6 January—to fashion what we now term the Twelve Days of Christmas.

    The prominence of Christmas, interestingly enough, appears to have waxed and waned over the centuries. It grew initially with devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and reached an early climax with the Arian Controversy of the fourth century. Arians claimed that Christ was not God, but a creature made by God. Christmas, which explicitly celebrated the Incarnation of God as one of us, merrily thumbed its nose at this heresy.

    As Arianism died down, so did Yuletide cheer, until the holiday received a shot in the arm with the imperial coronation of Charlemagne by the Pope, on Christmas Day of AD 800. Known today as the Father of Europe—rather literally, according to genealogists—Charlemagne became the first Western Emperor since the Fall of Rome centuries earlier. His Christmas crowning raised the profile of the Nativity on the liturgical calendar.

    For much of the Middle Ages, Christmas became something of an embarrassment to the Church; not because of the Christ-child, of course, but because of the ways in which common folk expressed their enthusiasm. While pious hymns were sung in the sanctuary, raucous debauchery ruled in the streets. Baptismal records from the time display a noticeable uptick in the birthrate right around nine months afterward.

    But the nineteenth century changed all that. Clement Moore, Washington Irving, and Charles Dickens transformed Christmas into a pleasant, domestic celebration centered around family, children, and charity. Christmas trees moved into the home next to the hearth. St Nicholas, the most famous wonderworker in the world, shifted from his early December day to Christmas Eve. And all the traditions we know and love—which seem so profoundly, truly ancient—arose relatively recently, much to our collective delight.

    Christmas is only pagan insofar as it is seasonal, one in a procession of winter festivals transcending both cultures and times. But it is specifically Christian in its celebration of God come down to earth, the Creator entering Creation, within a family, as a little Child, vulnerable and poor yet deeply, dearly loved. This juxtaposition of the infinite within the finite, the holy in the home, the wondrous in the mundane, and the divine within humanity, is precisely what makes Christmas most miraculous.

May we honor Christmas in our hearts, and keep it all the year.

In Jesus. Amen.

-Eminent Grand Prelate Sir Knight Ryan Stout