To the editor:

I notice ideas about Christmas that I believe need to be challenged. You may think I am late in addressing this topic, but that is the first idea I want to challenge.  We are not in the Christmas season yet. This is Advent, a time to spiritually prepare for Christmas. Christmastide, the period of Christmas, starts on December 25 and lasts until January 6 when Epiphany starts, which commemorates the arrival of the wise men. All the songs and decorations we bring out before Christmas apply to events after Christmas.

I also want to address the idea that Christmas is a holiday based on pagan rites, in particular the Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a Roman holiday set on December 17 and eventually expanded to December 23. It started as an agricultural holiday, marking the end of fall harvest and beginning of winter planting.  It

was celebrated as a time of carousing and overindulgence. The poet Lucian of Samosata (AD 120-180) describes it: “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 dunking of corked faces in icy water – such are the functions over which I preside.”  Any similarities are hard to identify.

It’s also important to remember that the Christians were cruelly persecuted by the Roman Empire as enemies of the state until Constantine’s conversion (312 AD). Since Saturnalia involved the idea of human sacrifice, prior to Constantine some Christians were sacrificed during that holiday. The idea of Christians intentionally assimilating Saturnalia into one of their most important holidays would have been grotesque.  The modern equivalent would be celebrating the Holocaust with festive songs and Nazi decorations.

So superficial are the similarities and so weak the evidence for a connection between these two holidays that Dr David Gwynn, lecturer in ancient and late antique history at Royal Holloway, University of London, has stated, “The majority of modern scholars would be reluctant to accept any close connection between the Saturnalia and the emergence of the Christian Christmas.”

While the connection seems to be a foregone conclusion in modern culture, a look at the evidence contradicts that idea.

Rev. Patrick Crough

First Baptist “Old Stone” Church

Tiverton