Why is Christmas on December 25th? No one really knows, but there are several theories.
Christmas is the day to celebrate the birth of Christ in a lot of the world. It is traditionally celebrated on December 25th, but there is no actual evidence for this date. The only accounts for the birth of Jesus come from the gospels and they were not written as historical accounts. Also, they were all written many years after Jesus lived and died. The Gospel of Mark is the earliest and it was probably written in AD 66.
Some people have tried to work out when Christ was born by looking at the gospels. They talk about shepherds watching their flocks of sheep when they saw the star of Bethlehem. It would be unusual for shepherds to have their sheep outside in December, but not impossible. The winters are fairly mild in Bethlehem. Still, this is one reason why a spring birth might have been more likely. Other people have looked at the star of Bethlehem to try to give a date. The star of Bethlehem was probably not a real event, but several astronomers have taken it as such. There are three events it could have been. The first was a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn, which happened sometime in 7 BC. The second was the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in June of 2 BC. The third was a comet that passed overhead in April of 5 BC. However, it is probably unlikely that these were the actual star of Bethlehem.
The first recorded celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th was in AD 336. Before then, his birth was considered to be on January 6th. Clement of Alexandria was the first person to describe a Christmas celebration. He was living in Alexandria, Egypt and people at the time considered Jesus’s birth to be spiritual and not human. It was an epiphany. Clement of Alexandria says that other religious groups celebrate Christmas on different days, but he calculated that it was on January 6th. He did this by using an Egyptian calendar to work out the length of time between Jesus’s birth and the death of the emperor Commodus in AD 192. Clement wrote a book called “stromateis”, which was an account of the Christian religion. He said that another group of people, called the Egyptian Basilideans had used the Alexandrian calendar to calculate the date as January 6th as well.
He said that he calculated the date, but it may also have been a coincidence. There was a pagan festival of the virgin goddess Kore and the birthday of the god Osiris on that day, so the early Christians may have just been trying to adopt a festival. Christians still celebrate January 6th as the Epiphany, and countries such as Egypt, Greece, and Russia celebrate it as Christmas.
So, Christmas was celebrated by the early Christians, but on several different days. However, Christ’s birth was not celebrated as much as his death and rebirth at Easter. In fact, Easter was so important to the Catholic Church that they convened a council to work out a formula to keep track of it and they even reformed the whole calendar (Gregorian calendar) to make sure that Easter stayed in the correct place.
In 336, the Roman Emperor Constantine decreed that Christmas should be on December 25th. There appear to be two reasons why December 25th was chosen, but there is no real proof for any of the reasons. The first reason is that Sextus Julius Africanus, a Roman Christian historian, dated the conception of Jesus to March 25th. He believed that this was also the day that the world was created. He then counted nine months on from then and figured Christ must have been born on December 25th.
The second reason is that December 25th was already a pagan festival. The Romans honored Saturn, the god of agriculture, and Mithra, the god of light, on that day. It was very common for the early Christian religion to slide their celebrations in to celebrations that already existed. All they had to do was slightly tweak the reason for the festival and it worked.
Whatever the reason, there was no guarantee that the festival would take and become as strong as it has. When the Roman Empire split, the Western Empire continued to use December 25th, while the Eastern Empire used January 6th. Then, there was a lot of infighting in the Catholic church over the ideology, and the celebration of Christmas declined for a few centuries. It became popular again in Europe after about AD 800 and was spread around the world by Roman Catholic and Christian countries creating colonies and empires.
So, why is Christmas on December 25th? There are several theories, but no one actually knows. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.britannica.com/story/why-is-christmas-in-december
https://www.history.com/news/why-is-christmas-celebrated-on-december-25
https://www.whychristmas.com/customs/25th
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas