Jesus’ official birthday
I’m sure it will come as now surprise if I say that Jesus was probably not actually born on 25th December. There are various options for the actual date but one thing we are sure of is that it wasn’t 25th December. So why is this the day that we celebrate Jesus’ birth?
It could be that it is simply the date 9 months after the day Jesus was believed to have been conceived (March 25th). Or it was picked because it was 6 months from the date of Jesus’ death (which was believed to be significant for a prophet). It may just have been picked because it seemed to be a good day to celebrate. The earliest physical reference to the Christian celebration is dated to a 354AD (read about it in Wikipedia) where both Sol Invictus and Christian Christmas get their first mention. Of course both festivals would have been celebrated on that date before this but which one came first can never be proved.
Well in the U.K. this makes a lot of sense to us because our monarch (Queen Elizabeth II) has an official birthday and an actual birthday. The official birthday is the day when the country celebrates her birthday (we have a thing called Trooping the Colour) and then the Queen celebrates her real birthday with her family and friends.
When I was talking about this with my youngest son he pointed out that we all do the same. We have a real birthday and then an official birthday when we have a party. Sometimes the party is on the same day but more often it isn’t.
So 25th December is Jesus’ official birthday and the day we all join in celebrating it.
Now, some party poopers like to make something out of some of the ancient festivals that used to happen on the 25th December. Whilst it is true that 25th December was the Romans official date for the winter solstice (shortest day) it was only later (quite possibly after the time of Jesus) that it ever became the date for a festival (the celebration of the Sun god – Sol Invictus). Later the followers of Mithras claimed the day for their own celebrations (Mithraism is notorious for jumping on popular ideas to gain a greater following – it died out of course) but the evidence really points to this happening after Christians were celebrating on that day. It’s true that nearly every western culture had a festival in mid-winter (Yule for instance) but this doesn’t mean that the Christian tradition of celebrating the official birthday of Jesus Christ has any less of a claim on the date.
The other old chestnut that is often roasted around this time of year surrounds the headlines of “Puritans ban Christmas” which isn’t – needless to say – the whole story. Then this tends to get twisted to the idea that Christians don’t really like Christmas anyway (Puritans = all Christians in the modern journalists mind). Christmas was seen as a Roman Catholic idea and so the Puritans (being fervent opponents of Roman Catholicism) wanted to call it Christ-tide (getting rid of the mass bit). They also banned various things that people used for the celebrations (including mince pies, etc). The celebration of Christmas was surrounded by 12 days of partying and drunkenness and they wanted to reform this. This was hugely unpopular – as you can imagine. So the Puritans didn’t ban Christmas at all they simply wanted to reform it – in some ways an admirable thing to try and do, and we do the same (encouraging people not to drink and drive for instance) but it seems to me the modern approach of encouraging people to act in a more responsible way rather than forcing them to do it is a better approach. Oh, and by the way I like mince pies.
So Christians haven’t stolen someone else’s idea for a celebration and we haven’t tried to ban Christmas in the past. This is just the day for our official celebrations of the birth of Christ.
A very merry Christmas to you all.
