Is Christmas Pagan?

[Augustus]

So given the current story of Santa Claus, Did St. Nicolas watch all children to see if they were good or bad as did Frau Holle. Did St. Nicolas then fly through the air delivering presents to good children and delivering coal and switches to those who were bad as did Frau Holle? Was St. Nicolas associated with snow/winter as Frau Holle?

St Nick was associated with his day on 6 Dec which was in the winter. The modern cultural representations are far too recent to be a cause of the celebration itself, the question is about to what extent the modern cultural representations are 'pagan'.

You get many things that might seem "pagan" as they are non-Biblical, but that ignores the large folk-Christian cultural contexts over 1500 years.

Something like Krampus looks 'obviously' pagan at first glance, but is more likely the product of medieval plays featuring St Nick and the devil. Ditto watching over children.

“A report from the late 1600s by the Augustinian monk Abraham a Sancta Clara of Vienna stresses this mostly academic function, describing Nicholas coming “to test the children and to examine whether they had been well instructed … in matters of faith, spelling, syllable divisions, reading, writing, arithmetic, and languages.”

Al Ridenour - The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas


The problem with these claims about Frau Holle though is that they are also likely to be far more modern than you think.

A load of "pagan" mythology is really roughly contemporary to the 19th c German Romantic tradition and volkische movement.

The works of Jacob Grimm set the tone for many of these ideas, but he tends to assume everything reflects an ancient context as he was motivated to construct a unifying German national identity based on an ancient lineage of Germanic myth. Simply assuming anything that looks 'pagan' is genuinely pagan despite the paucity of evidence is not particularly rigorous and modern scholars, with better evidence, often posit a much more recent origin for many of the folk tales.

Folk tales have always existed and evolved around common themes, but 'authentic' pagan traditions are unlikely to survive in a recognisable form in a non-literate culture for 1500 years.

Even if you have a genuinely ancient figure, that the stories about them are authentically 'pagan' rather than folk-Christian from the early Modern period is hard to demonstrate.

For example the Perchta (also associated with Frau Holle):

Which bring us to the intractable problem, while it is possible that such stories reflect a pre-christian past, there is usually no actual evidence for this, and assuming it to be the case is based on a failure to understand medieval and renaissance folk-Christianity.

So you do not think that known Germanic/Norse ideas including magical reindeer (deer recorded in Irish and Norse mythology including stories associated with King Author, Placing the location in area most associated with snow associated with Frau Holle - the north pole, Santa being helped by elves which are clear Germanic origin (unless you have some sources that St, Nicolas used elves to make the presents), Watching children throughout the year to see if they were naughty or nice (unless St. Nicolas recorded this is what he did). Rewarding the good and giving a negative reward to those who were bad?

Most of these are the literary creations of various 19th C individuals that have been amalgamated into modern culture.

Look at a major artistic work and read literary criticism of it, everyone insists there is some different meaning behind the text: "well Shakespeare is obviously alluding to..."

Find one where the author has commented on it and you see them reject most of these supposed 'meanings' as pure fantasy where the critic is projecting their own desires onto the text.

It's a bit like claiming Harry Potter was 'pagan' because it has elves and goblins in it, and that JK Rowling was using consciously using pagan symbology rather than common Western cultural tropes.

Do you have any evidence that these are genuinely old traditions, rather than 19th C imaginations and projections (or 18th, 17th, 16th C imaginations)?

 

[Bear Wild]

St Nick was associated with his day on 6 Dec which was in the winter. The modern cultural representations are far too recent to be a cause of the celebration itself, the question is about to what extent the modern cultural representations are 'pagan'.

You get many things that might seem "pagan" as they are non-Biblical, but that ignores the large folk-Christian cultural contexts over 1500 years.

Something like Krampus looks 'obviously' pagan at first glance, but is more likely the product of medieval plays featuring St Nick and the devil. Ditto watching over children.

“A report from the late 1600s by the Augustinian monk Abraham a Sancta Clara of Vienna stresses this mostly academic function, describing Nicholas coming “to test the children and to examine whether they had been well instructed … in matters of faith, spelling, syllable divisions, reading, writing, arithmetic, and languages.”

Al Ridenour - The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas


The problem with these claims about Frau Holle though is that they are also likely to be far more modern than you think.

A load of "pagan" mythology is really roughly contemporary to the 19th c German Romantic tradition and volkische movement.

The works of Jacob Grimm set the tone for many of these ideas, but he tends to assume everything reflects an ancient context as he was motivated to construct a unifying German national identity based on an ancient lineage of Germanic myth. Simply assuming anything that looks 'pagan' is genuinely pagan despite the paucity of evidence is not particularly rigorous and modern scholars, with better evidence, often posit a much more recent origin for many of the folk tales.

Folk tales have always existed and evolved around common themes, but 'authentic' pagan traditions are unlikely to survive in a recognisable form in a non-literate culture for 1500 years.

Even if you have a genuinely ancient figure, that the stories about them are authentically 'pagan' rather than folk-Christian from the early Modern period is hard to demonstrate.

For example the Perchta (also associated with Frau Holle):

View attachment 46473
Which bring us to the intractable problem, while it is possible that such stories reflect a pre-christian past, there is usually no actual evidence for this, and assuming it to be the case is based on a failure to understand medieval and renaissance folk-Christianity.

View attachment 46474



Most of these are the literary creations of various 19th C individuals that have been amalgamated into modern culture.

Look at a major artistic work and read literary criticism of it, everyone insists there is some different meaning behind the text: "well Shakespeare is obviously alluding to..."

Find one where the author has commented on it and you see them reject most of these supposed 'meanings' as pure fantasy where the critic is projecting their own desires onto the text.

It's a bit like claiming Harry Potter was 'pagan' because it has elves and goblins in it, and that JK Rowling was using consciously using pagan symbology rather than common Western cultural tropes.

Do you have any evidence that these are genuinely old traditions, rather than 19th C imaginations and projections (or 18th, 17th, 16th C imaginations)?

Look you at least convinced me of the origin of Christmas. Your arguments after is an underrepresentation of the influence of continued rituals and symbol the persistence of beliefs of the people. I have read the literary criticism. I have read the arguments and you have done well but JR Rowling and Tolkien drew on symbols and mythology that was anything but Christian. I appreciate your arguments but to conclude that these symbols of Christmas were not residuals of pre-Christian beliefs is being blind to the reality. Jesus nor St. Nicholas used elves. This mythology survived long into the history of Western European culture. But your arguments are well documented in the culture that preserved the written language which was one sided. This is one of the fallacies of written history. The oral traditions continued despite suppression and are of equal relevance of what has given us our current culture.

 

[Augustus]

This mythology survived long into the history of Western European culture. But your arguments are well documented in the culture that preserved the written language which was one sided. This is one of the fallacies of written history. The oral traditions continued despite suppression and are of equal relevance of what has given us our current culture.

While I agree we shouldn't necessarily equate 'first written' with 'first', we also shouldn't assume a hidden and highly conservative oral tradition extending over 1500 years.

If we look at the oral traditions of religions we see they evolve rapidly in a creative manner.

We can look at the hadith and sirah literature and it's plainly obvious that a large amount of this is made up by later generation. We look at the Gospels and Apocrypha and know that these aren't accurate renditions of Jesus' life, even though we know they come from oral traditions.

Oral traditions are added to, adapted, combined and created, and after a few generations may contain almost nothing that relates to the original tale.

What you are relying on is an oral tradition surviving in an accurate form over many more centuries without any central authorities attempting to preserve it.

I have read the arguments and you have done well but JR Rowling and Tolkien drew on symbols and mythology that was anything but Christian.

It's not that they are 'Christian', but that pre-Christian things evolved beyond all recognition in a folk-Christian context. As such considering such things to be authentically 'pagan' or reflective of pagan culture is misleading.

Elves are a good example, just look at the Wiki page as it explains how something that may have started as 'pagan', elves, evolve far beyond what can be attributed to ancient oral tradition.

Beliefs about elves have their origins before the conversion to Christianity and associated Christianization of northwest Europe. For this reason, belief in elves has, from the Middle Ages through into recent scholarship, often been labelled "pagan" and a "superstition". However, almost all surviving textual sources about elves were produced by Christians (whether Anglo-Saxon monks, medieval Icelandic poets, early modern ballad-singers, nineteenth-century folklore collectors, or even twentieth-century fantasy authors). Attested beliefs about elves therefore need to be understood as part of Germanic-speakers' Christian culture and not merely a relic of their pre-Christian religion. Accordingly, investigating the relationship between beliefs in elves and Christian cosmology has been a preoccupation of scholarship about elves both in early times and in modern research.[8]

If we look at elves, for Tolkien an elf is a noble, magical humanoid, good at archery, etc. basically a superior kind of humanoid.

For Rowling an elf was a sort of servile goblin type thing.

Santa's elves are clearly closer to Rowling than Tolkien, yet Tolkien's elves are closer to 'pagan' elves.

The little magical elf helper was mostly the product of the 19th C Romantic literary tradition, the same that Jacob Grimm was writing about Frau Holde in. It is not the 'authentic' pagan version of Norse mythology.

With industrialisation and mass education, traditional folklore about elves waned, but as the phenomenon of popular culture emerged, elves were reimagined, in large part on the basis of Romantic literary depictions and associated medievalism.[143]

As American Christmas traditions crystallized in the nineteenth century, the 1823 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (widely known as "'Twas the Night before Christmas") characterized St Nicholas himself as "a right jolly old elf". However, it was his little helpers, inspired partly by folktales like The Elves and the Shoemaker, who became known as "Santa's elves"; the processes through which this came about are not well-understood, but one key figure was a Christmas-related publication by the German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast.[144][143] Thus in the US, Canada, UK, and Ireland, the modern children's folklore of Santa Claus typically includes small, nimble, green-clad elves with pointy ears, long noses, and pointy hats, as Santa's helpers. They make the toys in a workshop located in the North Pole.[145] The role of elves as Santa's helpers has continued to be popular, as evidenced by the success of the popular Christmas movie Elf.[143]

Elf - Wikipedia

I appreciate your arguments but to conclude that these symbols of Christmas were not residuals of pre-Christian beliefs is being blind to the reality.

To what extent can we say something is a 'residual of pre-Christian belief' when basically nothing about it is pre-Christian though?

If I wrote a book about an elf, but decided that elves were a magical zebra-giraffe hybrid, would that still be a residual of pagan culture simply because I used the term 'elf'?

It's like the joke "I've had the same broom for 20 years, it's only had 5 new handles and 8 new heads"

 

[Altfish]

Also:

S Hijmans - Usener's Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism

TC Schmidt Calculating December 25 as the Birth of Jesus in Hippolytus’ Canon and Chronicon

Or for people who can't be bothered to actually read articles, I summarised all 3 last year (along with Northaft's Early Christian Chronology and the Origins of the Christmas Date)

in this thread: Christmas 25 Dec: Scholarly views

They are wanting me to pay to access those reports - sorry, not that desperate.
Do you have anything not behind a paywall?

 

[Augustus]

They are wanting me to pay to access those reports - sorry, not that desperate.
Do you have anything not behind a paywall?

The 3 I linked to are free.

My summary of them is free

The remaining one you can access for free via https://www.jstor.org/stable/23358685 “alternative access options” and read online for free after registering.

 

[Altfish]

The 3 I linked to are free.

My summary of them is free

The remaining one you can access for free via https://www.jstor.org/stable/23358685 “alternative access options” and read online for free after registering.

My problem with these is that they are all from 'Religious' websites.
I could point to many from Atheist sites that say the opposite.

 

[Augustus]

My problem with these is that they are all from 'Religious' websites.
I could point to many from Atheist sites that say the opposite.

Have you even opened the links? First you incorrectly said they were all paywalled and now you seem unable to distinguish between peer reviewed journal articles and “religious websites”.

They are all peer reviewed scholarly journal articles. You know the kind of high quality resources written by experts that people who care about evidence and reason are supposed to value.

That doesn’t mean they are automatically “right” but you should at least make a rational argument against them. Seems to me you are just finding excuses to dismiss them out of hand so you can maintain your original beliefs.

Now which peer reviewed articles did you read for your Saturnalia theory? Feel free to point to them if you like.

 

[Altfish]

Have you even opened the links? First you incorrectly said they were all paywalled and now you seem unable to distinguish between peer reviewed journal articles and “religious websites”.

They are all peer reviewed scholarly journal articles. You know the kind of high quality resources written by experts that people who care about evidence and reason are supposed to value.

That doesn’t mean they are automatically “right” but you should at least make a rational argument against them. Seems to me you are just finding excuses to dismiss them out of hand so you can maintain your original beliefs.

Now which peer reviewed articles did you read for your Saturnalia theory? Feel free to point to them if you like.

The link I opened was pay walled. It wanted £20+ for me to read the paper - I was NOT incorrect
The next I opened was a religious based organisation. Sorry, but that is biased.

 

[Augustus]

The link I opened was pay walled. It wanted £20+ for me to read the paper - I was NOT incorrect
The next I opened was a religious based organisation. Sorry, but that is biased.

None of the 3 I linked to were paywalled, and I summarised the paywalled article and provided means to access it for free. I summarised them all for your convenience as most people won't want to read multiple articles. I just linked them so people can check if they want and see my summary is accurate. Summary is here: Christmas 25 Dec: Scholarly views

Did you happen to notice who it was pay walled by btw?

By any chance was it paywalled by Cambridge University Press, and would you agree that this is not a “religious website” or publisher of religious apologetics?

The others are also peer reviewed journals, except the Hijmans article which is from an edited scholarly volume. None of them are from "religious organisations".

These are objective facts, not opinions and you can verify them yourself in a matter of seconds. My guess is that because the scholarly journal is called "Church History" or the likes you have mistaken it for a religious website rather than a peer-reviewed history journal published by Cambridge University Press.

Ironically, the version you consider "unbiased" actually is religious apologetics, specifically Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda that became pop culture “common knowledge”. I'm sure, in general, you would be somewhat sceptical of fundamentalist Protestant narratives, especially those with a sectarian agenda.

Surely as a Secular Humanist, you do indeed value scholarship and evidence over religious propaganda though, and are open minded enough to concede that it would be fallacious to dismiss out of hand multiple peer reviewed sources as "biased" simply because they go against your preconceptions.

You can of course make rational arguments against them if you disagree as history can always be debated (as I acknowledge in my summary of the texts I linked to), but to dismiss them out of hand as biased is just an ad hominem fallacy.

Being truthful, if a religious apologist, without evidence and based on a erroneous premise, rejected out of hand an article from a peer-reviewed scholarly text as it was "biased" as it went against their preconceived beliefs, would you consider that to be rational or intellectually honest? Surely you hold yourself to higher standards?

Even if you don't want to read them, perhaps you could address one simple question: why do you think Saturnalia and Christmas were celebrated side by side in the same societies on different days for over a century if Christmas was a marketing ploy replacement for Saturnalia?

 

[Altfish]

None of the 3 I linked to were paywalled, and I summarised the paywalled article and provided means to access it for free. I summarised them all for your convenience as most people won't want to read multiple articles. I just linked them so people can check if they want and see my summary is accurate. Summary is here: Christmas 25 Dec: Scholarly views

Did you happen to notice who it was pay walled by btw?

By any chance was it paywalled by Cambridge University Press, and would you agree that this is not a “religious website” or publisher of religious apologetics?

The others are also peer reviewed journals, except the Hijmans article which is from an edited scholarly volume. None of them are from "religious organisations".

These are objective facts, not opinions and you can verify them yourself in a matter of seconds. My guess is that because the scholarly journal is called "Church History" or the likes you have mistaken it for a religious website rather than a peer-reviewed history journal published by Cambridge University Press.

Ironically, the version you consider "unbiased" actually is religious apologetics, specifically Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda that became pop culture “common knowledge”. I'm sure, in general, you would be somewhat sceptical of fundamentalist Protestant narratives, especially those with a sectarian agenda.

Surely as a Secular Humanist, you do indeed value scholarship and evidence over religious propaganda though, and are open minded enough to concede that it would be fallacious to dismiss out of hand multiple peer reviewed sources as "biased" simply because they go against your preconceptions.

You can of course make rational arguments against them if you disagree as history can always be debated (as I acknowledge in my summary of the texts I linked to), but to dismiss them out of hand as biased is just an ad hominem fallacy.

Being truthful, if a religious apologist, without evidence and based on a erroneous premise, rejected out of hand an article from a peer-reviewed scholarly text as it was "biased" as it went against their preconceived beliefs, would you consider that to be rational or intellectually honest? Surely you hold yourself to higher standards?

Even if you don't want to read them, perhaps you could address one simple question: why do you think Saturnalia and Christmas were celebrated side by side in the same societies on different days for over a century if Christmas was a marketing ploy replacement for Saturnalia?

OK, I must be a liar then.
Or maybe it is paywalled in my country.
I've not read passed the first comment, I don't care

 

[Rival]

OK, I must be a liar then.
Or maybe it is paywalled in my country.
I've not read passed the first comment, I don't care

It's free in the UK.

 

[Augustus]

OK, I must be a liar then.
Or maybe it is paywalled in my country.
I've not read passed the first comment, I don't care

You aren’t a liar, you just aren’t reading what I actually said.

The 3 articles I posted aren’t paywalled anywhere.

The one that was paywalled (and I explained how to get for free) was posted by someone else.

All were peer reviewed scholarly resources though, and none were “religious websites”.

 

[Augustus]

It's free in the UK.

“I’ve never seen evidence to show I’m wrong” (here are multiple peer reviewed scholarly articles)
“I can’t access them” (yes you can, I also summarised them)
“They’re all biased religious websites anyway” (they are all peer reviewed academic articles)
“I don’t care, I won’t read them”
*some time later*
“I’ve never seen evidence to show I’m wrong”

It’s exactly things like this that made me stop identifying as a secular humanist.

Folk would bang on about the importance of evidence and reason, and how they would always choose an inconvenient truth over a comforting fiction.

They would then do exactly the same thing they criticise believers for. They would believe any nonsense that showed religion in a bad light, and be impervious to revising this opinion regardless of the evidence. Anything that challenged the group think was dismissed out of hand as “biased” or “apologetics”.

The only thought is “how can I justify to myself that I am dismissing this out of hand?”

I used to do the same, and it is so obvious when others do it here.

Nothing is better at disabusing one’s faith in the idea that educated, smart humans can be consistently rational than discussing religion with a Secular Humanist (give or take the odd exception here and there).

 

[☆Dreamwind☆]

It's a mix if we're being honest. It was co-opted from older pagan beliefs. It mutated into a Christian one, then everything mutated some more when the dreaded commercialized Christmas Creep attacked. It still retains plenty of elements from both, but is also considered to be about family, togetherness, and generosity.

It's sort of like how St. Patty's went from being a day about a Saint, to people using it as an excuse to drink green drinks, puke green puke, wear green, pinch people with impunity, and become Irish for a day in hopes of scoring a kiss.

 

[metis]

It mutated into a Christian one, then everything mutated some more when the dreaded commercialized Christmas Creep attacked.

Capitalism at its "finest".

 

[☆Dreamwind☆]

Capitalism at its "finest".

Christmas Creep kills Christmas spirit.

 

[metis]

Christmas Creep kills Christmas spirit.

Only if one allows it to do as such. We did it more when our kids and grandkids were young but do little of it now, and our kids have followed suit.

 

[☆Dreamwind☆]

Only if one allows it to do as such. We did it more when our kids and grandkids were young but do little of it now, and our kids have followed suit.

It's annoying that it backs itself up into other holidays. It's a special December holiday, not a special November, October, and September holiday. People don't wanna see Christmas decorations for sale during Halloween. Although my local stores are finally starting to realize that playing Christmas music for several months straight, tends to annoy the crap out of people.

 

[Debater Slayer]

It’s exactly things like this that made me stop identifying as a secular humanist.

A few years ago, I was growing increasingly distant from secular humanism and challenging myself on the melioristic views I still held to see whether they would stand up to scrutiny. I was debating with a few self-identified secular humanists who claimed that "atheism has never killed people, unlike theocracy." I asked them what they thought of specifically anti-religious violence committed by Marxists-Leninists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc., and the answers I got were either some variation of "those communist ideologies were basically religions too" or "those were dictatorships where the cult of personality practically became deified and had a religion created around him."

I found that quite unconvincing and reminiscent of religious apologetics, except it was in defense of secular meliorism rather than religion. After other issues I had with the worldview remained unresolved and only grew in extent, I ended up moving on from the secular humanist label and from meliorism altogether.

 

[GardenLady]

Only if one allows it to do as such. We did it more when our kids and grandkids were young but do little of it now, and our kids have followed suit.

In our family, starting in the Katrina year (2005), we began to "gift" one another donations and it continues today. Our various family members have donated to Feeding America, Habitat for Humanity, Heifer International, state Diaper Funds, Undies for Everyone, etc.