He failed, but 200 years later, another monarch, King Svein of Denmark, succeeded, and it was thereafter celebrated on December 25, in accordance with the Roman calendar. Snorri’s account contains eerie parallels to today’s “war on Christmas” narrative when he gets to the part where King Hakon the Good of Norway, in the tenth century, tries to impose Christian practices on this pagan holiday. Yule, with its sacrificial logs, wassailing, and mistletoe, was in many ways the direct precursor to today’s Christmas. Let’s go back to the thirteenth century, to the time when the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson was writing about the holiday of J ól, or Yule, an ancient Germanic winter holiday that took place in mid-January. If solstice celebrations are older than Christianity and more common than Christmas, how did this one holiday become so dominant?
Judaism has a rich tradition of winter solstice wisdom stories with scriptural roots. The return of the light is an archetypal theme that resonates deeply, whether we are prehistoric people following the agricultural seasons or modern people looking for hope in a frenetic world.Ĭhristmas is not a national holiday in China, but the Chinese have marked the winter solstice with a festival since the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE). It is no coincidence that so many of these celebrations have clustered around the time of the winter solstice (December 21 in the Northern hemisphere), the shortest day and longest night of the year that heralds the gradual lengthening and lightening of days to come. Alongside the jingle bells, the debate rises again: is there a “war on Christmas”?Īs defined by Bill O’Reilly and his colleagues at Fox News, the war on Christmas is being waged by Secular Progressives, with their “Happy Holidays” and “Holiday trees,” who refuse to admit that this season is and should be all about Christmas-the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus.īesides its obvious affront to religious and cultural pluralism, the problem with this notion is that winter holidays have been celebrated for thousands of years and in many different cultural contexts, and Christmas as it is currently celebrated is a relatively recent development. These are, for better or worse, signs of the season we can’t escape, splayed across an ever-increasing span during the latter part of each year. Battle lines uneasily drawn over our right to hear “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays,” or vice versa. Grocery store shelves stripped bare the day after Halloween to make room for rows of red- and green-wrapped candy. Religion The Winter Holiday War: It’s Older Than You Think
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