It’s become an annual tradition in the internet age to commemorate major Christian holidays like Christmas, Easter, and even Halloween with articles claiming that these really are old pagan holidays that Christians appropriated. The evidence for this ranges from “flimsy” to “literally disproved in the early sources.”
Even Snopes.com, which prides itself on debunking misinformation, shared an article by Lorna Piatti-Farnell (professor of popular culture at the Auckland University of Technology) on “The Borrowed Customs and Traditions of Christmas Celebrations,” in which she claimed to find traces of a number of pagan holidays beneath the veneer of Christmas. According to Piatti-Farnell, “while Christmas is ostensibly a Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus, many of the rituals and customs come from other traditions, both spiritual and secular.” Let’s see how that claim holds up.
First up, was Christmas a borrowing from Saturnalia? Piatti-Farnell finds the December 25 dating suggestive, saying,
It is not difficult to spot the similarities between our now long-standing Christmas traditions and the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which was also celebrated in December and co-existed with Christian belief for a period of time.
Saturnalia placed an emphasis on the sharing of food and drink, and spending time with loved ones as the colder winter period arrived. There is even evidence that the Romans exchanged little gifts of food to mark the occasion.
The reason it’s “not difficult to spot the similarities” between Christmas and Saturnalia is that the similarities she mentions—people ate and drank together, and sometimes shared gifts—are so generic that they could describe nearly any major holiday in almost any culture. Should we conclude (for instance) that Saturnalia was itself borrowed from the older Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, simply because people ate and drank together in December? Or is it possible that different religions and cultures might all have their own feast days in December?
The more you look at the particulars, the less the two holidays look like one another. For instance, Saturnalia was on December 17, although the Roman historian Macrobius reports that people would extend their “general excitement and religious rejoicing” until the feast of Sigillaria on December 23. The “twelve days of Christmas,” in contrast, run from December 25 to January 6. If the date of Christmas was set to appease (or compete with) the pagan festival of Saturnalia, why wasn’t Christmas set during Saturnalia? And why does none of the early Christians seem to notice or mention this connection?
But maybe Christmas comes not from Rome, but from Scandinavia. Piatti-Farnell makes the bold claim that “through the idea of gift-giving, we see the obvious connections between Odin and Santa Claus.” What are these “obvious connections”? Here’s her argument:
In the Norse religion, Yule was a winter festival celebrated during the period we now roughly associate with December.
The beginning of Yule was marked by the arrival of the Wild Hunt, a spiritual occurrence when the Norse god Odin would ride across the sky on his eight-legged white horse.
While the hunt was a frightening sight to behold, it also brought excitement for families, and especially children, as Odin was known to leave little gifts at each household as he rode past.
It’s true that there was a winter festival called Yule celebrated by Norse pagans before the arrival of Christianity, but we know little about it, other than it seems to have involved drinking, as well as the ritual eating of horse liver. In other words, what little bit we do know doesn’t look particularly Christmas-y. (The word “Yule” would later become a catch-all for Christmastime, which is why we have phrases like “yule logs” despite these originating only in the sixteenth century.)
As for the idea that Odin rode across the sky in a “Wild Hunt,” as a kind of forerunner of the popular image of Santa’s magical sleigh, the historian (and pagan) Ronald Hutton has pointed out that this simply isn’t true. “Behind the whole concept of the Wild Hunt,” he explains, “ultimately lies a single book, Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (German, or ‘Teutonic,’ Mythology) published in 1835.” Grimm (one of the two Brothers Grimm of fairy tale fame) was convinced that there were certain common myths, including a myth of the “wild hunt” found across the various “Teutonic” cultures. But no ancient sources bear out this idea. Instead,
as [Claude] Lecouteux has shown, medieval and early modern sources refer to three different kinds of spectral huntsman: a demon, chasing sinners; a sinful human huntsman, condemned to roam without rest as a penance; and a wild man who chases otherworldly prey and sometimes human livestock (Lecouteux 2011, 56-84). None usually has a retinue, of the living or the dead, and so are not aspects of what the Wild Hunt was later taken to be.
The popular image of Santa in his sleigh doesn’t come from Odin’s Wild Hunt (since that isn’t a real myth of the ancient Norse), nor from the ancient myths about demons chasing sinners, or hunter chasing prey. It’s also not even from Grimm’s inaccurate 1835 book. Instead, we can squarely trace this element of the Christmas tradition to an American poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, dating to 1827.
As for the idea that Odin gave gifts to good little girls and boys, the Old Norse specialist Jackson Crawford has pointed out that this is a wild distortion of Odin’s “gifts”:
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 Saga of the Völsungs, but those are always gifts to men that he is later going to directly harvest or kill for his army in Valhalla.
Once again, as soon as we actually compare the pagan custom and the Christian one, we see that they have less in common than it might first appear.
But that still leaves one detail: what about the fact that the one-eyed Odin rode an eight-legged horse, Sleipnir? This was a significant enough detail that in The Saga of Hervor & King Heidrek the Wise, Gestumblindi (who is really Odin in disguise) asks a riddle: “Who are those two, who have ten feet, three eyes, and one tail?” The answer, of course, is Odin riding his eight-legged horse. And sure enough, this does look just like Santa and his reindeer . . . provided that you don’t know the difference between a reindeer and a horse, or between a one-eyed Norse god and a two-eyed saint, or between one animal with eight legs and eight animals with four legs apiece.
Gestumblindi would surely be surprised to learn that scholars like Lorna Piatti-Farnell thought that Santa and his reindeer (for a total of eighteen eyes, thirty-four legs, and eight tails) looked just like the “ten feet, three eyes, and one tail” of Odin and Sleipnir.
In the end, there’s a strange reluctance by some to believe that Christianity (with its population of 2.5 billion believers and its 2,000-year history) is incapable of having come up with any of its own feast days. All of the apparently native practices of Christianity must really be imported from Rome or Scandinavia. But none of this is true. We find early arguments for the dating of Jesus’ birthday to December 25 in the writings of St. Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170-c. 235), centuries before Christians would ever hear of a holiday called “Yule.”
And as for the basic details of the Christmas festivities, one need not meet a Norseman or a centurion to know that food and drink and gift-giving make for good merrymaking. Jesus even takes that sort of knowledge as a given: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). So this Christmas, celebrate the feast of Our Lord with the knowledge that this is what Christmas is, and always has been, all about.
*Not counting Rudolph.