Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer debunks the slew of popular myths about Christmas’s pagan origins.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and it’s that time of year again when people start claiming that Christmas is really pagan. Now, on the face of it, that’s not an entirely crazy theory. I mean, Christmas is celebrated on December 25th, a day not found in the Bible, and it’s on a day. That’s the winter solstice on the old Roman calendar. Plus you’ve got things like Christmas trees and even things called yuel logs that certainly seem pagan, right? Well add to that, that there’s this longstanding practice of certain Protestant groups telling their congregations that Christmases of pagan origins. This is one of the reasons that Puritans refuse to celebrate Christmas and actually outlawed it in the late 17th century in Massachusetts. And then you’ve got these days a growing chorus of modern non-religious people, non-Christians and neopagan who claim that Christmas is theirs, or at least not Christians.
And it’s not surprising given all of this, that people come to the conclusion that sure, maybe Christmas isn’t of Christian origin. Maybe it was just placed there on December 25th to counteract some pagan holiday, very common popular myth, but a myth, it is because the truth is the whole Christian Christmas is pagan thing really falls apart when you look at the historical evidence. Now this year I’m going to look at a brand new video called a Very Pagan Christmas, which claims to be a documentary despite not citing any documentation, but it has this going for you. It is pretty slick, it’s pretty well made. It uses AI pretty effectively in a way to draw you into the message being presented. And the core claim of the video is this
CLIP:
Hidden beneath this holiday’s, cheerful facade lies a story far older than the birth of Christ, one filled with powerful ancient rituals, strange symbols, and a mysterious darkness that still lingers in the air.
Joe:
So that’s kind of the thesis statement, if you will, of the video. It’s this idea that what we think of as Christmas traditions, everything from the date to elements like the Christmas tree and eLog, and we’re going to get into all of that stuff that it’s really rooted in not only paganism but pagan traditions that are actually much older than the birth of Christ. Now we’ll get into why none of that is true, but I want to start with the big issue. Why was December the 25th chosen? Well, according to the documentary, it was chosen because Theodosius had legalized, made Christianity the legal religion of the Roman Empire. Now, I do want to compliment them on this. People often think Constantine is the one who did that, and that is not correct. So they at least get the emperor and the year right. But everything else as we’re going to see goes disastrously wrong.
CLIP:
In 380 CE Emper, Theodosius went even further making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and banning all other forms of worship. Pagan temples were shuttered, rituals condemned, but the church faced a dilemma. Pagan beliefs and customs were deeply woven into the lives. The people to erase them would be nearly impossible. And so a new strategy was born, one that would take the familiar pagan rights and fold them into a Christian framework. The church began to absorb elements of paganism reinterpreting festivals and customs in ways that aligned with its doctrine. Ancient holidays celebrating the cycles of nature. The movement of the sun and the harvests were transformed into saints days and Christian festivals. The winter solstice, once a time of rebirth for the sun in pagan traditions was reimagined as the birth of Christ the Savior who would bring light into a darkened world.
Joe:
So if you’re paying careful attention, you’ll notice he’s really made two key claims and they’re important that we get the details of them right. Number one, soon after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in three 80, the decision was made to create Christmas on December 25th. And it matters there that it’s after Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire because the whole thesis is because of that, they’re looking for a way to appease these disgruntled traditionalist pagans who don’t want to give up their old practices. And so that leads to the second key claim that December 25th was chosen to rival ancient holidays on which Roman Pagan celebrated the cycles of nature like the solstice. So again, the timeline matters. The order of these things matters. If it turns out December 25th is much older, then Christianity becoming the state religion, then you’ll realize the whole thing falls apart, right?
Because here’s the good news, those two key claims are very demonstrably untrue. Let’s take them apart one by one, starting with the first one that December 25th was settled on shortly after the year three 80. None of that’s true. And to start, let’s turn to the work of Thomas Schmidt. Now, he was at the time at Yale, he is now I believe, teaching at Fairfield the university, not the hotel. And he has done some really good work as far as I know, kind of groundbreaking work on St. A, politics of Rome who was an influential early third century Christian theologian amongst other things who lived from about the year one 70 to about the year 2 35. Now, he was one of actually several early Christians who tried to put together a sort of timeline of the history of the world and of the Bible. Now, notice here in terms of just motives, they’re clearly not saying What are pagan feast days we can take over?
They’re just trying to say, okay, there’s all of these different books of the Bible and we’ve got ’em in different orders, and they describe all sorts of different events. How do all of these different things line up? And so he’s trying to do that to, we will say mixed success. The details don’t really matter. It doesn’t even matter if his calculations are right. We don’t even need to get into all the math. But the core of his theory is this, starting with the fact that he believes the world began on the first day of spring, which kind of makes sense. It makes more sense in the world, I guess beginning in the middle of fall or winter or something. And the first day of spring on the Roman calendar was March 25th, and he believed for a variety of reasons we don’t need to get into right now, that Jesus was born exactly 5,502 years and nine months later, which as Schmidt points out, would put his birthday on exactly December 25th.
Now, the point here is not that hypo politics is right, the point here is that hypo politics is not motivated by some pagan feast because notice a crucial detail how politics hypothesis lives and dies in the late one hundreds and early two hundreds. This is well before Christianity’s ever even legalized. He’s about a century before Constantine, and it’s much longer before Christianity becomes the official state religion of the Roman Empire. So the thesis that December 25th is being chosen because of Theodosius decision in three 80 makes no sense when you realize the politics is talking about it in the early two hundreds. As Schmidt points out, this also means that the December 25th date could not have in response to Saturnalia or the Feast of Soul Invictus because neither was celebrated on December 25th on that date in Roman history. As Schmidt points out, Saturnalia never was celebrated on December 25th, and the Feast of Soul was only celebrated on the feast of December 25th much later.
So apologies clearly, clearly could not have chosen that date to please pagan sentiments. In other words, he couldn’t be responding to two holidays that didn’t exist yet. The video talked about, oh, these longstanding pagan practices from well before the birth of Christ, and none of that is true. So that’s the first key claim. Soon after Christian, he became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The decision is made to create Christmas on December 25th. But you might say, well, hold on, that’s just one guy’s speculation and that’s fair. But we can point to what’s called the calendar of 3 54. And the calendar of 3 54 is basically an almanac, and in it, it’s looking at all sorts of different events. This is from that period in between when Constantine legalizes Christianity. So it’s kind of coexisting with Paganism and in three 80 when it becomes the official state religion.
So it’s still before the period that any of this is allegedly happening. So in the Almanac or in the calendar, it has both Christian events and Pagan one. And one of the things that it also includes is the first unambiguous evidence of Christmas being celebrated by Christians on December 25th. There’s just no getting around it. It is quite clearly just right there. So this obviously throws into not just doubt, but straight up disproves the idea that this somehow happened after three 80, and if it didn’t happen after three 80, that means it also didn’t happen because Christians had become the official state religion and were trying to appease pagans. So the whole thing falls like a chain of dominoes. And we’re just getting started because remember the second key claim, which is that, oh, well, they’re trying to either rival or maybe appease these ancient holidays on which Roman pagans celebrated the cycles of nature like the winter solstice. So here’s one of the moments in the documentary where it returns to this theme.
CLIP:
The winter solstice, once a time of rebirth for the sun in pagan traditions was reimagined as the birth of Christ the Savior who would bring light into a darkened world.
Joe:
And the video returns to this claim saying this,
CLIP:
For the early church, these deeply entrenched beliefs presented both a challenge and an opportunity. The Solstice traditions were an inseparable part of life, removing them entirely would likely fail.
Joe:
So allegedly these early Christians, sometime shortly after the year three 80 chose December 25th to respond to this deeply rooted pagan devotion to the winter solstice. The only problem with this is as Ronald Hutton, a scholar and pagan for that matter points out in his book the Stations of the Sun, Romans were actually unique in not having any kind of devotion to the solstice. He points out they didn’t even know exactly when the solstice was different. Roman authors give different dates for it. They didn’t seem to be particularly attuned to it. And what’s more the traditional pagan Roman calendar had left this period as a quiet and mysterious one. If you go back and look at a pagan liturgical calendar from ancient Rome, there are feast stays all over the place, and yet when you get to the winter solstice, there’s nothing there. So it would be very strange to take one of the dead spots on the calendar and say, this is the spot we’re going to claim to try to make sure Pagans get to celebrate that holiday.
They’re used to celebrating on December 25th, and they’re like, what holiday? The closest things we’ve got are Satalia, which starts back at December 17th and the calendar day from January 1st to third. So it’s actually kind of funny here because just given the sheer number of feasts of various gods in Roman paganism, imagine the Christians were trying to find one of those big feast days to co-opt it and turn it into a saint’s day or the birth of Jesus, and somehow they accidentally choose one of the days that has no particularly obvious important meaning to their pagan neighbors. So no, it is neither true that Christians came up with December 25th sometime after three 80, nor is it true that this is response to their solstice honoring pagan neighbors because neither of those things are true, and we can show those things are false, but you might object here, but weren’t there some pagans who celebrated the solstice?
And the answer is yes, as long as by some pagans you don’t mean the ones who are actually the neighbors of the Christians and the Roman empires, and you mean pagans a thousand miles away then That’s absolutely true. And if you pay close attention to the Christmases pagan crowd, it’s clear that they sometimes mean pagans from the Roman world and sometimes seem to mean something quite different. So this is one of those things you want to kind of pin people down on. When you say pagans, what do you mean? So listen to this clip for example.
CLIP:
Before Christmas became a Christian holiday, December’s coldest nights were marked by festivals honoring the sun’s return by celebrations where fire feasting and fervent prayer sought to ward off the long bitter nights. These early rights carried out by pagans in Europe and beyond were meant to channel forces they believed were essential for survival.
Joe:
So pagans from Europe and beyond are alleged to have celebrated the winter solstice. And as you can imagine, celebrating the fact that winter is halfway over was a big deal in various points in history and the coldest places in Europe, in places like Scandinavia. But for the first really 600 years of its existence, Christianity largely spread around the Mediterranean and around the Roman world and places that were comparatively temperate climates. To give you an example, in Rome, the average temperature in December or high of 56 and a low of 40, it snows so rarely that when it did back in 2018, it actually made the New York Times snow falls in Rome, and the eternal city takes a holiday with an article talking about how the army needed to come out to help clean up the snow. That’s how unprepared the city was for the reality that it could snow.
Contrast that with some of the AI generated images of pagans covered in snow, trying to celebrate their winter solstice from the documentary. And then for contrast, again, here’s a photo that I took during the time when I was living in Rome. This was December 6th, and as you can see, the blood orange trees are just ripe. They’re perfect. It’s not a time when people are hovering together, shivering, trying to survive the mid fifties. My whole point is this, this idea that Christians in the Roman Empire were trying to fight against a Scandinavian devotion to the winter solstice makes about as much sense as saying that the American Inauguration Day on January 20th exists because it’s trying to co-opt Cape Verde’s National Heroes Day. The theory in both cases, whether it’s the inauguration one or the Christmas one, is both historically and geographically illiterate. Now, to give you maybe, I don’t know, a helpful tool to use when you hear these kind of claims, oh, that thing you like, that’s really coming from Paganism.
I would say remember this, number one, paganism isn’t a thing. Rather what I mean by that, paganism is a catchall term that the early Christians used for non-Christians in much the same way that members of one country might refer to everybody else as foreigners. But if you imagine that paganism is a thing, that there is a pagan religion or pagan culture or a pagan calendar, simply it’s like imagining that there’s a monolithic group of people called foreigners that all eat enchiladas and pierogis and celebrate the Chinese New Year. The reality is obviously quite different. Roman paganism was incredibly diverse and so was Germanic and Norse paganism. So when you hear people claiming that X practice comes from paganism, I would give you these three questions. Number one, which pagans are you talking about? Number two, when did these pagan practices originate? I mean in this case allegedly centuries before the time of Christ, literally no evidence is going to be offered of this claim.
And when did Christians co-opt and what’s the timeline we’re dealing with here? And number three, what sources do you have confirming this? It can’t just be, oh, paganism is this many thousand year old sort of thing, because there’s this kind of myth that pagan cultures are always older than Christian ones, but pretty famously the Aztec Empire is younger than the University of Oxford. What I mean there is not just that Oxford existed at the same time the Aztecs did, but that when the University of Oxford was founded, the Aztecs weren’t even a people yet. They literally did not exist yet. So this myth that Pagan stuff is older and it’s kind of this monolithic thing, push back on that because when you hear those claims, they’re almost always untrue because people referring to this Pagan X, Y, Z tend to not know what they’re talking about.
But in fairness, let’s go back to the Roman Empire because while it doesn’t make sense to trace this story of Christmas to some hodgepodge of Greco-Roman and Norse paganism, there’s no Greco-Roman main devotion to the winter solstice and they weren’t close to the Norse and couldn’t have been influenced by them whether or not the North celebrated you at the time and there’s no evidence that they did. We do have one thing that at least is on its face, a plausible contender. There’s a Roman feast of Saturnalia because if Romans do in fact have a feast in Saturn in December called Saturnalia dedicated to the God Saturn. So what do we make of this? Here’s how the documentary presents the claim
CLIP:
In ancient Rome, the Festival of Saturnalia marked the heart of the winter season, a week-long event honoring Saturn, the God of agriculture and abundance. Beginning around December 17th, Saturn was a joyous and unruly time when societal norms were turned upside down, masters served, their servants, gambling was allowed and all were free to revel without restraint.
Joe:
What you just heard was really the high point of the documentary because those cleans were at least largely true. There really was a Roman fees called cilia. It was sometimes a pretty raucous affair with a lot of drinking and gambling and the like. And it did happen in mid-December, although not December 25th. In fact, it’s pretty different from Christianity’s Christmas or the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th and different enough that historians like David Gwynn have pointed out that the majority of modern scholars would be reluctant to accept any close connection between the Saturn and the emergence of the Christian Christmas. In other words, the mere fact that two holidays both happen in December doesn’t automatically prove that one of them influenced the other one. It certainly doesn’t prove that Christians were trying to steal Saturnalia by having a holiday on the same date and then ended up on the wrong date. I’ll get to that in a second. Microbes, a Roman historian from the fourth century actually wrote an entire book on Saturnalia, and in it he traces probably in more detail than you care about how it went from being a one day festival on December the 17th to a three day festival In practice, it ended up being Romans taking the entire week off because December the 23rd was also a holiday on their calendar called Cilia in which adults would give little clay toys to small children.
He actually jokes about this fact in the book is written as like a dialogue, and so he jokes in it about the idea that Cigarillo would be treated as a solemn religious holiday. It’s just a adults giving these little clay figurines to kids. But it also is clear by the way from the text that this wasn’t actually just seven straight days of celebration. He points out that it’s not all feast days, there’s some days of rest. In other words, you’ve got one to three days of feasting where you’ve got the drinking and the gambling and all the craziness, and then you’ve got another holiday a week after the first day of the first one. And so you may or may not have to work on the days in between. For instance, there’s some legal work you might have to do because I guess the equivalent of the courts are open.
So depending on your job, you may or may not get the day off. Slaves at least got one day off in context. There is actually something of a similarity to Christmas. Here you have one holiday Saturn, and then what appears to have been originally a different holiday. So really that’s six days after day one of Saturnalia and the Italians actually have a term for this, Faray Ponte to build the bridge. When you have two holidays close together and you just take off the days from work in between, you’ve built a bridge between the two holidays so you don’t have to work either of them rather than taking off coming back to work for a couple of days and taking off again. What if you just didn’t work that whole week? And again, there is kind of a similarity between how we do Christmas and New Year’s on kind of the secular calendar that if you’ve got December 25th off and maybe you’ve got New Year’s Eve off, then you might be tempted to say, well, okay, essentially if there’s a weekend in there, you’re like, I’ll just take the whole week off.
I’ll take a couple days off work. That’s what we’re talking about with Saturday night, not like seven unbroken days of just wild partying festivities, but just two close together December holidays and then people just taking that whole week off work in as much as they were allowed to do that. So yes, there is a superficial similarity. There are two periods of time where people have weeks off of work. In fact, in the Christian Case, you actually have 12 days of Christmas because remember, the Christmas season isn’t historically from Christmas to new. It’s from Christmas to the Feast of the Epiphany on January the sixth, and all of those were at least lighter days. There’s some interesting stuff from Christian history where monks were allowed an extra meal lunch, not really second breakfast, although the word could be translated to second breakfast. But here’s the thing, these are pretty superficial similarities.
I mean, it’s actually to me kind of striking that you get seven days off for Satalia and you get 12 days of Christmas and somehow there are no overlapping days here. The last day of the Saturnalia cycle is still two days before Christmas. If Christians are trying to create a Christian version of Sael, why in the world did they miss it? How did they not put this, at least during Saturnalia, if you wanted to say, okay, we’re going to start midway through Saturnalia, so people have to choose or I don’t know. I mean if the whole idea is we want to give people the version of the holiday they’re used to, how did they fail to do that So spectacularly, additionally, Saturnalia is not a winter solstice holiday. It was not celebrated on the winter solstice, on the Roman calendar. It was not the celebration of the birth of a God or anything like that.
Rather, it’s the story of the God Saturn breaking out of his jail in the temple for a few days and overthrowing his more powerful son Jupiter and just kind of upping the world in a raucous anarchy for a little while. And this is marked by feasting and gambling and drinking. That’s pretty different from how the early Christians celebrated Christmas. So I think a fair read would have to say, yeah, there are two holidays in the winter, but that’s about where the comparisons stop. There are different days, different dates, different customs. You’re not doing the same thing on the two holidays except at the most vague level and therefore different purposes. If this was celebrating the birth of the God, then you could make a more plausible, like maybe there’s a connection here, but as it is, the connections are just kind of the superficial connections you could make to almost any feast, almost any festival.
So you might as well argue that Saturnalia is just pagan stealing the Jewish feast of Hanukkah because Hanukkah is also an eight day winter festival. And I think we would reasonably say to that claim, these are just superficial similarities. And so be on the lookout for that. When people say, oh, we can tell Christianity borrowed this thing from Paganism, and the reason is something so generic like, oh, they like fires when it’s cold, or they give gifts to their loved ones. Just recognize it’s absurd to conclude from that week of evidence that there’s been proof of borrowing or cultural appropriation, if you want to call it that or anything of the like. Now I mentioned you’d have a stronger case if it was the Birth of a God. So let’s talk about the alleged Feast of Soul Invictus. Amazingly, I have no idea why this is the case in this whole very pagan Christmas video.
There was not one reference even claiming that Christianity had chosen December 25th because it was the feast of so Invictus, which I would’ve thought would for sure be the argument that they went with because you’ll find scholars who continue to make that claim. To this day, it’s quite common for people to claim that this was a really important feast day on the Roman calendar December 25th for the Feast of the Nativity of the Unconquerable son stolen vitus, and that Christians co-opted the day and the holiday more broadly and turned it into Christmas. Now, none of this, as far as we can tell is actually true, and Steve Ens hitman, I never know how to pronounce his name, has done some really good work in this area. He points out that there is literally only one even possible mention to a feast day for his soul being on December 21st.
And this was not a longstanding feast, but we have no evidence of that. The first time we see it mentioned is in the calendar of 3 54. If you remember, the calendar of 3 54 is also the first clearest instance that we have proof of the Feast of Christmas. And some people will seize on that coincidence and say, well, clearly something like the Christians must’ve taken it from the pagans, but it’s Hemmings points out there’s actually no evidence that the Feast for Soul on December 21st, excuse me, December 25th, is any older than the Christmas feast of Christmas. In fact, the traditional feast days for soul, we do know, and none of them are December 25th. They’re August the eighth, they’re August the ninth, they’re August 28th. Eventually December 11th gets added December 19th and particularly October the 22nd, which is the most important of the Roman feast days for the God’s. None of those are tied in any way to equinoxes or to solstices, because reiterating what I said before from Ronald Hutton, the Romans simply weren’t into the solar calendar in the same way other, like more northern pagans were.
Now, I mentioned there being one possible reference to the nativity of so Invictus. And the reason I say that is because the evidence part is actually weaker than I think people realize. Not only do we not have anything before the year 3 54 ad, but that section comes from this almanac called the calendar of, well, this is the part of the calendar of 3 54 called the calendar of Phylo Callus, and it includes a little notation in there, and so it has different days and then it has short little notations. And so the notation for December 25th has an N, which means nativity. And then in viti, which is where Invictus comes from, uncon or unconquerable with a notion, a notation, excuse me, that 30 chariot races were going to be celebrated that day. Now, there’s actually a name missing there. The author does not say who the Uncon being honored there.
And so many of us who are used to hearing soul Invictus are like, well, obviously soul Invictus. But the reality is that Invictus was a pretty common honorific to give to the gods and even to the emperors. And so we can’t actually say for sure that it was soul, but let’s assume for a minute that it’s, let’s assume it’s not an emperor. It’s not Jesus himself, it’s soul. If that’s the case, why would it make sense to come to the conclusion that Christians had gotten there? Second, that soul got there first and then Christians got there and chose December 25th to rival soul? Because there’s two problems with this theory, as Heman points out. Number one, soul wasn’t a particularly popular God. There’s a reason. If you’re a person who’s kind of at an ordinary level of exposure to Roman paganism, you probably know names like Jupiter.
You probably don’t know names like soul because Jupiter and for that matter, Saturn, those are much bigger gods in the Roman pantheon than soul is. There is some sun worship, but it’s not at the center of their paganism the way it is in some other pagan religions. But second, if you were so worried about this minor God that you wanted to create a rival to him, why on earth would you choose a unheard of feast day like December 25th? Why would you not choose October 22nd, which was a more important feast day for Sol? We see that even on the calendar of 3 54, whoever has a feast on December 25th is getting 30 chariot races. On October the 22nd, Sol is getting 36 chariot races. It is the chief holiday being offered to him. So it does seem kind of weird if the theory is this is a response to so Invictus, it doesn’t really make sense as a response.
A lot of this, by the way, is also rooted in an older now, I think largely discredited idea that there had been an old devotion to the pagan god’s soul. And then there’s an eastern devotion to soul Invictus who may be mirus that comes in. And I think scholars now realize, no, Invictus is just an honorific. This is just another way of acknowledging soul. It’s not a different God, it’s not a different kind of deity, it’s just them worshiping the sun or the sun God. So soul Invictus, that’s not where Christmas comes from, and there’s no good evidence to say that it’s let’s go up north now because a lot of what this documentary focuses on is the Norse Feast of Yol, and more broadly, I’m going to look at both Yol as a feast, but also some of the details of Christmas festivities that are allegedly coming from Yol, including things that seem like obvious ones like logs, but also things like Santa’s sleigh ride and Christmas trees. So let’s start with kind of the claims about Yol.
CLIP:
In Yuel celebrations, the winter solstice marked the beginning of the sun’s slow return and evergreens became central to the festivities.
Joe:
Okay, here’s why I think the use of these AI generated images is deceptive in a way that is actively making people dumber because it’s showing these ancient looking images of old pagan rituals involving the decoration of Yul trees with ornaments outside. And as we’re going to see as far as we can tell, all of that is fictional, but it looks really real because AI can make all sorts of crazy things. Just look at some of the fingers on the hands of some of the people in these pictures. Now, I should acknowledge at the outset here when we’re talking about Yol, I know a lot less about Yol and Norris paganism more broadly than I do about some of the old Roman customs. So I’m reliant upon people like Dr. Jackson Crawford, who spent years teaching Scandinavian studies and North language mythology and sagas at UCLA, uc, Berkeley University of Colorado, and has a YouTube channel where he just looks at north mythology and nor language and all sorts of stuff. So what do we know about Yul rituals as he explains? Not very much.
CLIP:
This is a plural word and actually refers to a ceremony that took place over the course of three nights, beginning with mid-winter night, so December 21st or 22nd by our reckoning, and then continuing the next three nights. We know that the festival contained a lot of feasting and drinking, although the specific actions that might’ve been undertaken are not so clear to us because our main sources for Norse mythology, such as the Poetic Etta and the Prozeta talk about myths, narratives, and stories, but very rarely about things like rituals and festivals and prayers.
Joe:
So when you’re hearing these detailed accounts of, oh, here are all the things that would happen at these ancient Yu rituals and festivals, that’s not because our ancient sources tell us that they don’t. It’s because somebody’s imagination told them that. And so be extremely cautious with that. We know very little about a lot of what ancient pagans did in their ritual. Now, Crawford goes on to point out that the things we do know from some of the stories involve a lot of getting drunk. There’s eating sacrificial horse liver. We don’t really understand the context of that, and several times we find the making of oaths primarily, at least in our sources, oaths about sexual conquests. None of that sounds very much like Christmas. You don’t hear a lot of the things depicted in the documentary where everybody’s just going out to decorate the Christmas tree out in the snow.
That’s not it at all. So what about things that certainly seem like, well, surely this comes from Yol and ancient paganism like the Yule log. I mean, it’s right there in the name. I mean, how could it possibly not be rooted in paganism? And the answer to that is, well, here’s the funny thing. The first references to Yu that we have aren’t actually to a festival at all, and Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Ro in their book, a Dictionary of English folklore, point out that the earliest reference to Yu that we have in any language is actually Saint Bead and the Venerable bead when he is talking about an ancient gothic calendar. And it has a two month period roughly corresponding to December and January that’s known as basically early Yu and Late Yu. Now, we don’t know, oh, why it’s called that you’ll apparently just means mid-winter, and all we can say for sure is that you’ll refer to a winter month and apparently to a religious event celebrated at the end of the year significantly.
We don’t know which name came first. In other words, we don’t know whether this season is named after the holiday, like Christmas time or whether the holiday is named after the season like the 4th of July or Juneteenth. We just don’t know. We don’t have enough information. We don’t know what the word Yu means or which words it’s related to, and there’s a lot of interesting theories that would point in either direction, either that even something like the Latian word for to blind, maybe it refers to the fact it’s a dark time of year. Maybe Yol is where we get the word jolly from via the French. We don’t know, and linguists have a lot of theories about it. I mentioned this because Yol doesn’t come down to us because, oh, this is a real thing that was rooted in the Fe, this North Feast of Yol.
Yol was the word used for winter time and eventually Christmas time in a lot of northern languages and as well as in places like Scotland. And so the fact that something was called yol whatever, doesn’t mean it was used in the pagan feast. It might mean that it also often just meant the Christmas thing, and specifically many things were intentionally given Y names in the 19th century because it was a fun way of making it sound old timey to English writers, though it wasn’t that this is something that authentically comes from antiquities, something that comes authentically from old paganism. It’s like saying ye old such and such in English today. It just is a way that sounds really old to our ears. And a great example of this is, as you might’ve guessed from the context, the Y log,
CLIP:
The Yu log, however, was perhaps the most ancient and powerful symbol of all in the cold, unforgiving winters of Northern Europe. Fire was more than a comfort. It was a lifeline. During the yuel season, families would select a massive log to burn through the longest nights symbolizing the sun’s return and the warmth it would bring. This log was no ordinary piece of wood. It was chosen with care often from an oak or ash tree which were considered sacred. Families would carve symbols into it and in some traditions sprinkle it with wine or salt as offerings.
Joe:
Yes, without the brilliance of paganism, how would we have ever connected fire to the symbolism of bright or hot? No, I mean other than those details, fire is hot. All of what you just heard appears as far as I can tell to be completely fabricated despite the old sounding names. Yu Logs aren’t a real Yuel tradition, and we know something about the history of them as Michael Jones has pointed out repeatedly. U Logs first appear in the 16th century and are originally called Christmas logs.
CLIP:
The first mention of a log burned around Christmas comes from Robert Harris’s poetry collection of 1648 where it is called a Christmas log. It is now referred to as a Yu Log until John Aubrey’s work from 1686. Prior to that century, we have no evidence of Yue logs, let alone evidence that it can trace back to the holiday of Yue.
Joe:
Okay, let’s underscore that because again, Christianity arrives in Scandinavia around the year 1000. It’s a little more complicated at kind of a country by country level, but roughly, so we’re talking about a half millennium later that we first hear about Yue logs and originally they’re called Christmas logs until they’re given an older sounding name. That’s pretty good evidence that this is not something authentically coming from a Pagan feast of Yue. So if they’re not part of an elaborate pagan ritual, what’s the story with them? The Swedish folklore scholar, Carl Heim Von, I’m sure I’m butchering his name. I listen to it in Swedish, I can’t pronounce it.
CLIP:
Carl,
Joe:
Apologies to Swedish listeners. He points out if you’re going to have a pretty lengthy party and it’s wintertime, winter is cold and you’re going to need some firewood and probably a really big piece of firewood helps. Basically, that’s it. A giant piece of firewood evokes the fact that you’re going to have a party for a while. It’s like bringing out the really big keg. You’re saying We’re here for a time. And so the really big log doesn’t have any special sacred significance. It just means a big party’s about to happen. That’s all we can find in terms of meaning to it and all the meaning that reasonably you would expect people like having parties, the fact that they’re having a party and that it’s cold, and so you put wood on the fire and you’re going to be there for a while, so you put a big piece of wood on the fire, doesn’t make it pagan or anything like that. It doesn’t trace back to some special sacrificial offerings of No, it’s wood on the fire because you’re going to have a party. Alright? The weirdest claim is the idea that Santa Claus is really Odin. I’m not a big Santa guy, but nevertheless, I thought it was probably worth defending his honor here because of the outrageous claims being made about how he is actually the Norse God. Odin
CLIP:
Santa’s origins are far stranger and more complex than the red suited image we know today. His roots reach deep into Pagan law, blending Christian saints folklore, and perhaps most intriguingly the ancient Norse God Odin.
Joe:
Unfortunately, Dr. Jackson Crawford is once again going to run on our parade, although this time he actually seems a little flabbergasted by just how bizarre this theory is.
CLIP:
I do not know where this idea originally comes from, but it seems like every year around this time, it starts spreading around the internet like wildfire again. And I just want to share with you a couple of good reasons for thinking that Odin is not in fact, Santa Claus.
Joe:
Alright, well let’s start here. What would be the reasons someone might think Odin wants Santa Claus?
CLIP:
During the yuel season, Odin took on a role that bears an eerie resemblance to Santa’s midnight journeys mounted on his eight legged horse, slight near, he was said to ride across the winter sky leading a procession of spectral figures known as the wild hunt. This procession was thought to sweep through villages, its ghostly riders bringing omens of fortune or doom. The Norse people believed that during Yuel Odin would fly overhead watching over humanity. Children would leave out offerings of straw, carrots, or treats for sleipner hoping to earn odin’s favor and protection. In return, he might leave small gifts or blessings marking a tradition that echoes today in Santa’s visits and the treats left for his reindeer.
Joe:
Alright, so again, let’s try to identify the key claims being made here. I see three of them. Number one, during Ell Odin would lead a procession called the wild hunt going across the sky. Number two, he had an eight legged horse, which is sort of like having an eight reindeer. And number three, he would bring gifts to the good girls and boys. Okay, now the first of these claims is weird because it doesn’t really sound like Santa at all. Is Santa leading a wild hunt across the sky on Christmas Eve night? Who is he hunting? Who is he hunting though? I mean the whole point of the wild hunt mythos is that the lead figure is leading a procession or a retinue, but as it is, you don’t need to worry about that because the whole wild hunt thing isn’t real. There is no evidence of Odin or any pagan gods leading a wild hunt in ancient mythology.
Rather, as Ronald Hutton points out, this whole legend of a wild hunt dates back to one guy Jacob Grim, the older of the two brothers grim to a book he wrote on German mythology in 1835. He was convinced that the German God Wuhan based on basically a mistranslation, I’m not going to get into all of that, that the German God Wuhan would lead these things and Wuhan seems to be the same God as Odin. So you can see where people are sort of getting this, but the thing is grim is just wrong. There is no evidence of these wild hunts taking place in ancient pagan sources. Rather, when you go back and look at the old sources, whether they’re medieval or early modern sources, basically prior to the kind of 19th century stuff we’ve got with grim, we see instead three different kinds of spectral.
So we do find huntsmen in the sky, but they’re not the chief God with his retinue. Rather you see a demon chasing sinners that is alarming. You see a sinful human huntsman condemned to roam without rest as app penance. Or number three, you see a wild man who chases other worldly prey and sometimes human livestock. Now none of them, by the way, are leading processions. So the whole mythos of like, oh, Odin or somebody is leading all these other figures, that’s a product of our modern imaginations and not ancient mythology. Also, by the way, this idea, oh, that looks and sounds like Santa in his reindeer. Well, Santa’s reindeer is a really recent part of the Christmas kind of imagery and we can trace it pretty easily. There’s a children’s book in 1821 that is the first depiction of Santa with, in that case, one reindeer and Santa looks bizarre.
Two years later, more famously, you get the poem, a visit from St. Nicholas that are known as the Night Before Christmas, and that is Popularizes the idea that Santa’s got a bunch of flying reindeer now significantly, while the authorship of that poem was originally anonymous, there are two claims about who is the author, and it’s a little unclear and scholars debate it still, and I’m not going to try to adjudicate that. I don’t have any idea, but significantly, the two claimants are on the one hand, Clement Clark Moore, who is the son of an Anglican or Episcopalian bishop or Henry Livingston Jr. Who is the brother of a Dutch reformed preacher. My point here is in either case, this is something solidly coming from the imagination of American Protestants. It’s not something coming from ancient north mythology. This goes to New York to the 19th century. That’s where Santa’s reindeer comes from. So, okay, clearly then the wild hunt thing isn’t true. Santa’s reindeer are not coming from north mythology. Odin didn’t actually have a wild hunt across the sky in a Santa type thing, so that part’s clearly not true. What about the second part that he had an eight legged horse slept near, which is sort of like having a reindeer Again, this part is true. Sort of. I’ll turn it over to Dr. Jackson Crawford who points out, this is a weird thing to claim is the similarity.
CLIP:
One of the strangest arguments for the notion that Odin is the progenitor for Santa Claus is that Santa Claus has eight reindeer and Odin’s horse sleep near has eight legs. Leaving aside the fact that eight legs does not mean eight reindeer, that a horse is not a reindeer and that you can get the number eight from any number of other places. There’s no reason to think that the eight reindeer of Santa Claus are a particularly old phenomenon, right? The figure of Santa Claus is a pretty new thing. Culturally speaking, we’re looking at something that really only kind of comes to cultural prominence in the 19th century.
Joe:
There’s a detail that I want to make sure we don’t miss, which is that Odin only has one eye. Now he actually references this Odin, not Dr. Crawford Odin references this in one of the sagas in which he’s in disguise and he’s giving a riddle. And the riddle is who are those two who have 10 feet, three eyes, and one tail? And the answer alarmingly is Odin riding his horse slept near. Now, I wondered, what would it look like if Santa and his reindeer really did look like Odin and slept near? And so I asked Chet, JPT to create an image of a one-eyed Santa riding one eight legged reindeer. And I have to warn you, the result is pure nightmare fuel. You might notice if you’re watching this instead of listening, this is one of those times where you might be like, I’m glad I don’t watch the YouTube.
I just listen. You might’ve noticed if you’re watching that chat, GPT seems to have miscounted the number of eyes that a human or a Santa has and gave him, I’m going to conservatively say six eyes. I pointed this out to chat GPT, and it admitted that it had given him two eyes by mistake and promised to correct it. It then reduced the number of eyes to four, although disturbingly, it still has an eye for a nose, and for some reason added two more appendages to the reindeer. So now is more like 10 limbed, although I think only eight of them are legs. I then asked it about this and it confirmed that Santa has two eyes, but one of them is covered with a festive eye patch. It eventually admitted that this eye patch was not visible. All of this struck me because when I was rewatching the part of the documentary, I noticed that he had the same problems with ai because as he’s talking about eight legged slept near onscreen, there is very clearly an AI generated horse with four legs. But I guess you’re going to have to use your imagination and just try to envision a one-eyed Odin riding an eight legged horse.
That’s again, as you heard from the riddle, that’s 10 legs, three eyes, and one tail. Whereas Santa, I don’t say the real Santa Santa and his reindeer. You’ve got 18 eyes, 34 legs and eight tails, and that doesn’t even add Rudolph to the mix, which is going to complicate that even more So clearly, the whole an eight lagged horse is clearly the same as having eight deer thing doesn’t make a ton of sense, which leaves us just with that last claim, this idea that Odin brings gifts to the good little girls and boys. And as Jackson Crawford points out, this gets things ever so slightly wrong.
CLIP:
Odin is also not a figure associated with gift giving, certainly not the kind of kind and selfless and friendly gift-giving that Santa Claus participates in. Odin gives gifts to men, for example, in the sag of the sings, but those are always gifts to men that he is later going to directly harvest or kill for his army in UL or Valhalla. You have to remember that Odin is in constant anxiety about the coming final battle at which his enemies such as Fenra, the wolf will kill him and the rest of the gods. And so he is trying to raise the biggest, best army of men that he can in his hall of ol, and that the only way for men to go to that hall is to die in battle, preferably at the prime of their fighting age.
Joe:
So yeah, he doesn’t give gifts to the good little girls and boys. He gives gifts to men whose souls he’s going to harvest for his battle in the underworld in Valhalla. So I think it’s fair to say that is somewhat different than the Santa story. I mean, if you can’t tell the difference between number one a figure who wants to give gifts to small children, either as a reward for good behavior or as a reminder of the birth of the Christ child. And number two, a figure who wants to give weapons to those men whose souls he’s going to harvest after he has some die in battle so that he can raise an army of the dead to fight in Valhalla, I at least suggest you shouldn’t be a mal Santa anti. Alright, the last thing I want to touch on is the Christmas tree because what comparison between paganism and Christmas would be complete without someone spuriously claiming that Christmas trees come from paganism.
CLIP:
In Yue celebrations, the winter solstice marked the beginning of the sun’s slow return and evergreens became central to the festivities. People believed these trees held special power connecting earth and sky, representing protection and renewal. They were adorned with small tokens, sometimes carved ornaments or bundles of food as offerings meant to please the spirits believed to reside within. Decorating. Evergreens became a ritual of gratitude, a way to ask for good fortune and ward off spirits said to be active in winter’s depths. As Christianity spread through these regions, the church allowed the practice to continue but gradually infused it with new meaning.
Joe:
So you’ll notice both from what you were hearing and from what you were seeing with the AI generated images, there’s this idea not just that somebody put carvings on a tree, you’ll find that kind of thing all over the place, but that specifically you have clearly the forerunner to decorating Christmas trees and that Christians embrace this, although they change the meaning of it, and that’s where we get the Christmas tree. Now, as you can probably guess by now, none of that is true. I mean, other than maybe a superficial, sometimes people would carve things on trees. Okay, great. But in terms of celebrations of yue, none of this, none of what you’ve just heard is accurate. And in fact, the Christmas tree is a relative newcomer, not as new as Santa’s reindeer, but still perhaps younger than Protestantism. And Dr. Andrew M. Henry of religion for breakfast, a pretty interesting religious, religious studies YouTube channel. He points out the fact that Christmas trees are relatively recent. These do not go back to early Christianity, and they certainly don’t go back to paganism.
CLIP:
The Christmas tree is not ancient. Maybe you’ve heard the custom is rooted in the ancient festival Solia a Roman holiday celebrated in late December, or maybe you’ve heard it originates from Norris mythology from the Old Norris World tree Idra cell, or maybe the Yule log inspired it. But the reality is the Christmas tree appears somewhat suddenly in the late medieval period, long after the Roman Empire, long after the Christianization of the dramatic peoples. And while historians don’t really know for sure why the practice emerged and how it caught on, they do have a pretty good idea of when and where.
Joe:
Now, if you watch the rest of this video, which is called the very recent origins of the Christmas tree, if you want to look it up, he looks at the work of a German scholar by the name of Baron Bruner who does a lot more of the legwork of showing how far back it is that we can trace the Christmas tree. And it’s not too ancient paganism, it isn’t anything like that. Rather it’s his Strausberg cathedral. And it’s only to about the 15th or 16th century as Bruner points out Stroudsburg, which is nowadays in France. It used to be in Germany. Thanks world I back in 1539. That’s the first clear evidence we have of the existence of a Christmas tree, and it’s right there in the church. And so if that is in fact the earliest one, we don’t know that for sure, that would mean that the Christmas tree is younger than Protestantism, which is itself a fairly new phenomenon when you’re talking about Christian history. Speaking of Protestantism, you’ll often also find this myth about how Martin Luther allegedly was the first person to put up a Christmas tree. In fact, weirdly, the same video that days it back to nor Paganism, at least throws this out there as a legend.
CLIP:
According to legend, Martin Luther was the first to place candles on a small fur tree inspired by a night walk beneath the stars.
Joe:
I think it’s kind of weird that they even mentioned that legend since it seems to undermine the idea that this was like a longstanding practice that Germans had of decorating Christmas trees, going back to their pagan roots. But no matter, it’s also not true. I mean, at least this time, they acknowledged what they were giving is just a legend, not a real thing. As Bruner points out, Martin Luther not only wasn’t the originator of the Christmas tree, he probably never saw one in his life because they didn’t make it to Wittenberg until the 18th century long after his death. Now, just for the sake of, I don’t know, nuance and clarity, it is possible that the Christmas tree is older than the first one that we see there in Strausberg. There’s some evidence, maybe even as early as 1419 that there’s something being decorated, that the language here is ambiguous.
It was either like a wooden pole, like what you might see with a may pole or a tree. In either case, though, we’re clearly not going back to ancient paganism. We’re not going back to tree worship or anything like this. These are late medieval people who have decided to put decorations on a tree and bring it in their house. And I would suggest that they’re doing it for the same reason people do it today. It looks really pretty. So what can we say in conclusion, I want to return to kind of the thesis of the video and I’m going to tell you how they wrap it up. And then I want you to consider whether they’ve supported really any of the claims they made
CLIP:
Through feasts and fires, spirits and songs. We’ve explored a holiday born from a complex blend of Christian faith and ancient pagan ritual. Each tradition we hold dear carries with it echoes of yue and saturnalia of offerings to spirits and fires lit to ward off the darkness. Santa’s midnight ride, the Christmas trees enduring green, the were sailors songs. All these customs are bound to a past that shimmers just below the surface, unseen, but ever present.
Joe:
Alright, hopefully by now you realize that almost nothing in that documentary is true and demonstrably untrue goes against everything we know from the actual historical evidence goes against everything. Scholars in the field actually believe, and we can show that these things are false claims. They’re either claiming something existed when it clearly didn’t, or claiming something didn’t exist yet, like the date of Christmas when it clearly did. And it preys upon people’s goal ability and upon this idea that anything that seems different or mysterious or alien from maybe your personal reading of the Bible or your culture must be demonic or pagan. And unfortunately, there’s this strange willingness to believe on the one hand that pagans were endlessly creative in their religious rituals, while also imagining that for 2000 years, Christians apparently came up with nothing on their own. There couldn’t be any festival, any holiday, any celebration, any detail that Christians just came up with because they wanted to honor Christ.
But the reality is so much simpler than that Christians celebrate Christmas because we’re glad that Jesus Christ was born. And it was, as the name suggests, the date upon which the early church put a mass to celebrate his birthday on the liturgical calendar and its motives. In doing so, we’re right there out in the open and we don’t to imagine or second guess or invent theories. It wasn’t about trying to impress pagans. It was based on the fact that that’s when they thought roughly Jesus was born. You don’t need to be a pagan to realize that the warmth of a fire on a dark night is a good symbol for the Messiah who’s coming with foretold centuries before the North even existed by the prophet Isaiah with the words, the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness on them has light shined a Messiah who declared himself to be the light of the world.
You don’t need to be a pagan to know how to give good gifts to your children. In fact, Jesus points this out. Even the wicked know how to do this and God knows how to do this all the more. You don’t need to be a pagan to realize that if you’re going to have a big Christmas party, you’re probably going to have to get some wood for the fire. Now, there’s much more that could be said. There are many big and little aspects of the Christmas season and it might be fun, entertaining, but time consuming to explore the origins of all of them. But my point here is this, if you’re either one of those people who, number one is afraid to celebrate Christmas because you think it’s secretly pagan, or number two, one of those people who rejoices in trying to tell other people the thing they like is actually bad. I’ve got news for you. Christmas is Christian, always has been. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.