Stock Rants #6: The Christians Did Not Steal Your Holidays

[kiya]

'Tis (one of) the season(s).


The Christians did not steal your holidays.

First of all: you celebrate the Wicca-derived "Wheel of the Year". The Wheel-Year is a largely modern invention, compiled from Germanic-derived celebrations of the solstices and equinoxes and Celtic-derived celebrations of the Fire Festivals (the cross-quarter days). Unless you are in possession of a time machine, this particular set of concepts postdates the development of Christianity in general.

You may also have noticed that the cultures that are particularly focused on those dates? Are found primarily in northern Europe. You know where Christianity originated? Not northern Europe. Your early Christians, you know, the ones who are hashing out this calendar shit? They're in Palestine, Greece, and the Roman Empire, and are thus going to be influenced by Mediterranean calendars. (And frankly after trying to make sense of how the Romans constructed their calendar my head kind of hurts, but it doesn't have much in the way of apparent giving a flip about equinoxen. Something about ten months plus a chunk marked 'winter' that wasn't counted or labelled, but I can't figure out when they decided to begin their year, precisely, aside from 'originally in March' and 'whenever the emperor said so, which led to a year of 445 days once when Julius Caesar decided to say the sun had something to do with it'.)

But, but you say, Easter is set according to the full moon and the equinox. That's, like, totes pagan, so clearly they did something with that, despite that whole fiddly contact thing. (Oh yes, the bunnies and eggs? Not from that area. More... French. And German. By the way. 'Easter' as a name? English only, derived from something ... Germanic. Everyone else calls it ... well, I'll get to that.)

You know who else counts their calendar by the solar position and the full moon? Judaism. You may have heard of it occasionally, as that religion that Christianity was, way back when, a weird heretic sect of? The sort of thing where someone might see leftovers from the old ways in how the calendar for the new stuff was set? Like, oh - if you ever actually paid attention in church back when you were building up a good head of hate for it all - the fact that that Crucifixion thing kind of interrupted a Passover festivity? That whole "Where do you want us to make preparations for you to eat the Passover?" in them scriptures passed you by, huh?

Now, Passover, and here's the thing. Passover begins on the fifteenth day of the month of Nisan. Which is the seventh month of the Jewish calendar (except in leap years, but that's a whole other level of detail). And you know what Nisan is? The month right after that spring equinox, give or take a little. (Though since the month starts at the new moon as I understand it, that leads to the Passover and Easter getting out of synch on occasion, given that the Christians may wind up a full moon early at times.)

And this is why in most other languages, the word for Easter is something like "Paschal" - Passover - and I seriously hope that their pagans aren't wandering around deluding themselves that something blatantly based on Passover and actually called "Passover" is somehow magically borne of the Wheel of the Year.

So now you want to argue Christmas. Clearly this was set to usurp the Mithraic cult that had their stuff happening around the solstice. Clearly Jesus was born at some other time of year, because shepherds watch their flocks by night at lambing time. Clearly yadda yadda Christmas tree (GERMANIC! ALSO, FIFTEENTH OR SIXTEENTH CENTURY! GEEZE PEOPLE!).

So - and here I'm riffing partly off this post which is a good Cliff's Notes for it, and has more details in case people are actually curious about the real history.

Apparently the whole thing has to do with early church fathers who were compulsively obsessed with numerology and similar things. (I suspect that a pagan who is spouting off this crap can probably tell me what their sign is, proving that this is a cross-cultural bit of whackjobbery.) They figured if Jesus was perfect he had to be a round number of years old, and so he had to be born or conceived on the same date that he died (which is why the Feast of the Annunciation is set where it is - someone went through and guessed which year Jesus was crucified and figured out when Passover fell that year).

Now, maybe the thing was set up to conflict with various pagan festivals, whether that's to provide cover for persecuted Christians or to lure people away with other party time, but I suspect it also had something to do with "We can't celebrate his birth and his death on the same day, these are clearly two different freaking holidays, otherwise it's a calendric and liturgical mess". Note that that's "celebrate" - there's no claim "He was born that day", just "this is when we hold the party".

Okay? So cut this crap out.


(By the way: the thing that always confused me was why the birth and death festivals were just a season apart, as it left the whole rest of the year devoid of Jesusness. Apparently I was supposed to pick up that the rest of the year was for celebrating the Apostles, who were kind of peripheral to what I thought I was supposed to be paying attention to back when I went to a Christian church. These are things that are not adequately explained to children.)

Comments

[thene]

What bugged me was that, in spite of the whole Anno Domini thing, Christmas and New Year were not the same day. So I later got all fascinated with the premodern English New Year, which is March 25/Lady Day/tomorrow.

Happy new year!

[kiya]

Also the Feast of the Annunciation. ;)

I seem to hazily recall that New Year's Day is set by - and here I am citing Judaism again, oh noes - the day for the bris.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

The feast of the Circumcision of Christ is indeed calculated by Jewish rules for the bris and consequently falls on 1 January - but it predates the decision also to use 1 January as the first day of the year.

AIUI, the rest of the year (aka Ordinary Time) is not so much for the Apostles as for reflection on Jesus's teachings. The Apostles are only supposed to be celebrated on weekdays - Sundays take precedence and will cover things like the Sermon on the Mount, the parables etc. So you effectively get biography from Advent to Pentecost and teaching from Pentecost to Advent, about half the year each.That pattern is somewhat spoiled in some of the modern calendars by the introduction of a pre-Advent season in October/November, though (mostly celebrating the Creation).

[necturus.livejournal.com]

Christmas is a season of the Christian calendar; it runs from December 25 to January 5. New Year's Day is right in the middle.

[beloitst.livejournal.com]

I love you.

[necturus.livejournal.com]

"Easter" is Eastron, an Anglo-Saxon (and probably general Germanic) fertility goddess.

It's interesting to compare the Jewish and Arab calendars, both of which are essentially lunar. The Jewish calendar has a mechanism that periodically resynchronizes it with the seasons, so Rosh Hashanah always happens in September, whereas the Arab calendar strictly follows the moon, resulting in a 355-day year and holidays that slowly move backwards through the seasons, making a complete cycle every thirty years or so. I imagine this reflects the absence of agriculture in Arabia, for anyone who grows crops for a living must take account of seasons.

The Christian calendar often strikes me as a thinly disguised pagan calendar. Christmas songs often speak of light piercing the darkness, stars in the east and so on; Epiphany hymns often describe Jesus as "daystar" or "light of the world"; and of course the Easter resurrection story mimics the reawakening of nature in springtime. I sometimes wonder how confusing the calendar must be to Christians living in the southern hemisphere where the holidays all fall at wrong times of the year.

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

I sometimes wonder how confusing the calendar must be to Christians living in the southern hemisphere where the holidays all fall at wrong times of the year

From my experience, it's split between ignoring the 'wrongness' and picking things that fit instead - for example This is a carol where the three Wise Men have been replaced with three drovers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wqoFg6Vabo), or the Australian Carol of the Birds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uBOhFCL-hA) which is also a favourite at the private carols event I attend (the early attendees wander around the neighbourhood singing carols for anyone who happens to be at home, with wine and sheet music).

Or there's the occasional outlier like my mother, who went nuts over the secularisation of Christmas until she went and did obsessive research and decided that Jesus was born some time in August and subsequently decided that we could have Christmas as secular as we wanted and she could celebrate Jesus' birth by herself at the 'correct' time.

But mostly, it doesn't really come up on my radar as an issue. My family has an icecream Christmas pudding instead of a hot one (you take all the tasty things you'd put in a Christmas pudding, all the nuts and dried fruit and alcohol, and you mix it into softened icecream and refreeze it), but that's OUR tradition :D Traditions get adapted to the local conditions :-)

[arethinn]

you take all the tasty things you'd put in a Christmas pudding, all the nuts and dried fruit and alcohol, and you mix it into softened icecream and refreeze it

Sounds like spumoni!

[zeborah]

I'm not sure how literal you're being about "thinly disguised pagan calendar"; "light of the world" is straight from the Gospels and the resurrection story is... um, kind of the point of Christianity at all. If that story can only ever occur as a pagan element then that'd have to make Christianity a pagan religion - not just "stealing from" but actually being. However resurrection stories and reawakening of nature etc are fairly widespread in all sorts of cultures worldwide so that'd then require saying that all those religions were pagan too, and that'd seem to dilute any useful meaning to "pagan" so I don't think it really gets us anywhere.

Regarding living in the southern hemisphere, there's nothing confusing about it at all. Christmas happens on the 25th of December and Easter happens in March or April, both of which must be the right time of year because they're the same times of year they've been happening ever since I was born.

Ever since I was a very young kid I knew that in the northern hemisphere the seasons were different at these times (one can't easily not know it when most books and movies are from the northern hemisphere), but even then I understood how seasons happened and why the northern and southern hemispheres had them at opposite times, so again, no confusion.

Religiously it makes no difference because nothing in the Bible stories mentions snow or spring. From a traditions point of view <shrug> like all traditions, we kept what we liked (as meaningful for us), adapted what we had to, and threw out what was irrelevant.

[ibnfirnas.livejournal.com]

There is plenty of agriculture in Arabia, both crops and animal husbandry, and even more historically. What may be tripping you up is that Arabia is much closer to the Equator than, say, Northern Europe, and as such its seasons work differently. They had to take account of the seasons--but they have different seasons.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the seasonal festivals in Christianity are (as lilairen mentioned) to a large extent derives from an overlay of events from the life of Jesus on top of existing Jewish festivals, which in turn are thought to represent an overlay of theologically-significant events from the scriptural historical narratives on top of pre-existing agricultural festivals, which were obviously determined by the regional seasons and may well have been effectively the same festivals celebrated by the ancient Canaanites and others in the same region. For instance, the spring harvest festival is overlaid with the exodus narrative to become Passover, which is overlaid with the crucifixion-and-resurrection narrative to become Easter. So if the Christian liturgical year is based on any pagan calendar, it's probably ultimately the Canaanite one - but really, it's probably more a matter of different parts of a wider regional culture developing along divergent pathways over many centuries, rather than anyone stealing anything from anyone else.

[zeborah]

Oh, originally I clicked the link to say, about the whole-rest-of-the-year thing, that there's also Pentecost. ...Which is about the apostles, come to think of it, but also about the Holy Spirit.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

If you'd like to know more about the Roman calendar, just ask.

[kiya]

Oh, of course you know! Duh.

What I picked up from trying to parse through the web was: there were originally ten months (March-December) and a winter season, that two more months were added for purposes of counting the winter, that even numbers were unlucky and the months originally alternated between even and odd numbers of days, that February's creation as an even-numbered month was okay because it was used for festivals to chthonic or ambivalent gods, and that the days of the month were counted in reference to the Ides, Nones, and Calends. Also that emperors would change the calendar every so often for reasons of their own.

The thing that I particularly wanted to know, and couldn't find, was how the beginning of March (and thus the original calendar year) was generally determined. It would seem odd for it to be from the equinox, since that falls so late in the month.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

That's mostly correct. Let's begin with the oldest known Roman calendar, and then we'll look at how it changed.

Back when Rome had kings, the kings had Etruscan advisers who eventually became the patricians of early Rome. The Etruscans brought with them a luni-solar year that was the earliest Roman year, with years being counted ab urbe condita, or from the founding of the city. (How accurate *that* dating was is anybody's guess.)

The luni-solar year began with the first new moon of spring. The night when the first, very thin sliver of the new moon was spotted in the sky after sunset was called the Kalends, a word that means "the calling out" because a patrician priest had to call out the sighting for it to be official, just like the Mufti of Jerusalem has to call out the sighting of the new moon today for an Islamic month to have really begun. So when the thin sliver of the new moon was spotted in the sky when the right constellations were visible to indicate that spring was underway, a new year began. The first month of the year was March, named for Mars (or Martis). The Ides of March occurred when the moon became full, and likewise every subsequent month had its Kalends at new moon and its Ides at full moon. The military campaign season began in March, as did the agricultural season. Both would last until mid-October (the eighth month of the year) at which point there remained another 2.5 official months in the year. After 10 lunar months there was an "intercalary" time between years while the priests waited for signs of spring. The high point of intercalary time was the festival of Sol Invictus, when the sun was observed to have begun rising more to the north after having reached its southernmost rise point at the winter solstice. (Usually about December 25th.)

I'll talk about January, February, and Mercurius in the next comment.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

As the centuries went by, Romans became increasingly dissatisfied with the annual intercalary time, and the patrician priests were under pressure to put actual months there. Somewhere around 450 BC they did so, creating January, February, and Mercury. January and February began and ended, as usual, with the new moon at the Kalends and celebrated the Ides at mid-month with the full moon. Mercury was a tricky little devil. It was the fast month, and it was intended to make up for the difference between the lunar cycle and the solar cycle. In principle it could be any length at all, from one day to however long it had to be. For about two centuries the patricians would have it be one day in length for around 25 years, beginning and ending during the dark of the moon. Once every 25 (or so) years they'd let it be a full proper month of ~28 days. This worked fairly well, but then politics reared its head.

Rome was governed by two consuls, elected together for a term of a year. Each one ruled in alternate months. So there was political pressure to make months as long as possible. (More later. I have a meeting.)

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

More please! (: I haven't delved into the Roman calendar yet, and this is very interesting. (:

[wcg.livejournal.com]

OK, I was talking about consuls and politics. As long as one consular army was in the field, there was never a problem with the regularity of the months, because the consul who was away from Rome had a priest who kept track of things and the army stayed in sync with Rome. But if both consuls were in Rome (usually either early or late in the year) there might be mischief with whichever consul currently held the fasces (eg: was in charge) bribing a priest to not notice the thin sliver of the new moon and allowing the consul to retain the fasces for another day or two. As you might guess, people got annoyed by this nonsense and pressures were brought to bear on the priests to regularize the months. Eventually, after one of the plebeian revolts, this resulted in a fixed calendar being posted in the forum every year with alternating 31 and 30 day months, and Mercurius being banished. But this arrangement soon got into trouble because (a) it was completely out of sync with the moon, and (b) it created a 366 day year. So now February had to be made an intercalary month, usually shorter than all the other months, with its length determined by the desire to have the Ides of March fall on the first full moon after the vernal equinox, that being the traditional start date for military campaigns. (Note that Julius Caesar was assassinated in the theater of Pompei, on the Campus Martius -- the field of Mars outside Rome's sacred boundary. That was the place to be on the Ides of March. But I digress.) People still grumbled, but this kludge kept the calendar in agreement with the seasons and at least had the Ides of March happening on the full moon. The kalends and ides were completely out of agreement with the moon by October, but most people accepted that as the price of regularity.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Now we come to Gaius Julius Caesar, who was really just one of many men with the same name. But the one we all know about was born about 110 BC and died on the Ides of March in 44 BC. He accumulated quite a bit of power, and got to the point where he was Dictator and Pontifex Maximus at the same time. He'd also hooked up with Cleopatra and become familiar with Egyptian time-keeping methods, from which he knew the year was 365.25 days long. He decided to revise the Roman calendar to make it 365 days long with a 366 day year every fourth year. (Being both Dictator and Pontifex Maximus has its advantages.) He did this at a time when the calendar had been allowed to get wildly out of sync with the seasons, due to the Marian and Sullan dictatorships, so it required a February of 44 days to make it all work out. BUT it also meant that the calendar was now completely divorced from the moon, and that upset people who were used to having the Ides of March happen under a full moon. Many scholars suspect that the timing of Caesar's assassination had to do with his tinkering with the calendar. (Of course it also had to do with the fact the senate always met on the Campus Martius on the Ides of March, which made it a convenient place and time.)

[wcg.livejournal.com]

So, the Julian calendar fixed everything and standardized things. That should have been the end of it, and indeed it mostly *was* the end of it until Pope Gregory came up with the Gregorian calendar 1600 years later, to account for the fact that the year is really 365.2422 days long, and not 365.25 days.

However, some people just can't leave well enough alone. Every once in a while an Emperor would decide to tinker with things, just because he could. Most of the time this just amounted to jiggering with the length of February so as to make the Ides of March fall on the first full moon of spring, but sometimes it was just because the Emperor got a wild hair and figured he'd screw with people. But all those little changes to the Julian calendar didn't last. In 450 AD Rome was sacked, and the Christian priests found themselves having to keep the fabric of civilization together as best the could. Rather than try to reconstruct all the little fiddly changes of the past four centuries, they reverted to the unmodified Julian calendar since Julius had been kind enough to propagate it out for a thousand years. Julius' propagation had begun at 700 a.u.c. and that made everything pretty convenient. A Turkish monk worked out that Christ had been born sometime during 752 (he was probably off by ~3 years, but again I digress) and by that time it was canonical to celebrate the festival of Christ's birth beginning on December 25th, when good traditional Romans were celebrating the festival of Sol Invictus and the Mithrasts (who made up a lot of the Roman army) were celebrating the birth of Mithras. Thus, 1 January 753 a.u.c. became 1 January 1 A.D. for official purposes, even though nobody had ever used "A.D." for time keeping purposes until the middle of the 5th century A.D.

[elf]

You have got it all wrong.

Christmas was stolen from Eris-worship, in which traditional groups would hang golden apples and hot dogs made of glass on a tree, which slowly turned into shiny globes and icicles. They would share a feast of apple dumplings and No Hot Dog Buns, and at the height of the feast, the oldest woman in the house would spear an apple on a kris knife and declare, "Here is the Kris Message," hence the name, which the stupid Celts who couldn't spell and wrenched around to "christmas." No idea where the H and T came from; some speculate it was their attempt to bring the hot dogs into that part of the celebration. (Yeah, there's no T in dog. This bizarre spelling error has resulted in countless generations of Orthodox Discordians feeding Earl Grey to their canine companions, from the mistaken belief that it's part of the history. They just can't accept that the Celt's couldn't spell worth a damn. I suppose we should just count ourselves lucky they didn't throw a Q in the middle somewhere.)

Easter, of course, celebrates the solace of Our Lady of Chaos with her friends, Bonnie and Chica, who helped her learn to cook hot dogs. Their names were eventually mangled into Bunny and Chicks, and symbolized with the popular rabbits and baby chickens. Bonnie made sure Eris had chocolate to keep her calm, and Chica sang to her, which has devolved into the concept of "peeps."

I AM SO SICK OF THESE CHRISTIANS STEALING MY CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS HERITAGE!

[tirani.livejournal.com]

I love you.

[cereus-sphinx.livejournal.com]

"Apparently I was supposed to pick up that the rest of the year was for celebrating the Apostles, who were kind of peripheral to what I thought I was supposed to be paying attention to back when I went to a Christian church. These are things that are not adequately explained to children."

As well as all the other saint's days the year was/is peppered with.

I agree about these things not being taught well to children.