January 4, 2004

The Twelve Days of Christmas were regulated by the Second Council of Tours in 566. They are ignored by people who start Christmas carols around Thanksgiving in order to drum up business, and in Advent have Christmas parties which are more of a social burden than a feast. On the second ay of Christmas you’ll not hear any Christmas music on the radio. The Church condemned nonsensical, superstitious, and even obscene, partying as early as 692 at the Trullan Council.

Because the date of December25 for Christmas was set by a Pope, Julius I, some heretics later banned the feast together. It was rare in the early Puritan days of our country. In England, the “Dissenters” who executed King Charles I and abolished the Established Church forbade Christmas by Act of Parliament in 1664, requiring that shops be open. Plum puddings were forbidden. All this sounds like today’s secular establishment in our schools and government censoring Christmas symbols and even the name of Christmas (which is a nickname only about one thousand years old, from the Old English “Cristes Maesses”).

Further to denigrate Christmas, in the late seventeenth century a German Protestant scholar, Paul Ernst Jablonski, maintained that the Christmas feast was a Catholic “paganization” of Christianity, by which Catholics adopted the pre-Christian winter festival of Saturnalia. There had indeed been festivals of “Natalis Invictis Solis” (the “Birth of the Unconquered Sun”) but these were in August. There were no significant pagan observances of the Winter Solstice on the Julian calendar. Opposite the widespread belief that Christmas is a sort of baptized Saturnalia, the Emperor Aurelian who was assassinated in 275 seems to have pumped up the unimportant Natalis Invictis Solis celebrations and moved them to December 25 in order to compete with the growing popularity of Christmas, which his pagan soul scorned.

Complicated calculations decided on December 25 for the Birth of Christ, and you can read about them at length in the Catholic Encyclopedia. The immediate matter is this: Forces in our culture are trying to do what the pagan Emperor Aurelian did, in confecting winter festivals and ethnic celebrations to replace the Feast of the Birth of Christ. December 25 was most probably not the historical date of Christ’s birth, but Christmasis not about when He was born, but about the fact that He was born. If Aurelian were alive today, he would ban the public display of crèches and would create Saturnalia cards as “a celebration of ethnic diversity.” Jesus has His own Christmas message for anyone who says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Happy Christmas” or who lights candles for anything other than the birth of Christ in the Twelve Days of Christmas: “Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:33).

Fr. George W. Rutler