Have you ever looked at the development of the Christmas festival? It is interesting and thought-provoking. I have reproduced below the article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Christmas so you can get a sense of what mainline historical scholarship says on the subject. The article mentions that one needs to read about the development of Epiphany also; both the Christmas and Epiphany articles are on my website here. I also provide, on my own website, some of my own comments and my own view on whether the church should celebrate Christmas. If you wish to publish pro-or anti-Christmas comments in the comment section on this post, you are more than welcome to do so, but keep in mind that I may not respond, including making a response to either further explicate or justify my own view on the matter. Anyway, to the article:

CHRISTMAS
(i. e. the Mass of Christ), in the
Christian Church, the festival of the nativity of the Jesus Christ. The history
of this feast coheres so closely with that of Epiphany (q. v.), that what follows must be read in connexion with the
article under that heading.

The earliest body of gospel tradition, represented by Mark no
less than by the primitive non—Marcan document embodied in the first and third
gospels, begins, not with the birth and childhood of Jesus, but with his
baptism; and this order of accretion of gospel matter is faithfully reflected
in the time order of the invention of feasts. The great church adopted
Christmas much later than Epiphany; and before the fifth century it was no
general consensus of opinion as to when it should come on the calendar, whether
on the 6^th of January, or the 25^th of March, or the 25^th
of December.

            The earliest identification of the 25^th
of December with the birthday of Christ is in a passage, otherwise unknown and
probably spurious, of Theophilus of Antioch (A. D. 171-183), preserved in the
Latin by the Magdeburg centuriators (i. 3, 118), to the effect that the Gauls
contended that as they celebrated the birth of the Lord on the 25^th
of December, whatever day of the week it might be, so they ought to celebrate
the Pascha on the 25^th of March when the resurrection befell.

            The next mention of the 25^th
of December is in Hippolytus’ (c. 202) commentary on Daniel iv. 23. Jesus, he says,
was born at Bethlehem on the 25^th of December, a Wednesday, in the
42nd year of Augustus. This passage also is almost certainly interpolated. In
any case he mentions no feast, nor was such a feast congruous with the orthodox
ideas of that age. As late as 245 Origen, in his eighth homily on Leviticus,
repudiates as sinful the very idea of keeping the birthday of Christ “as if he
were a king Pharaoh.”| The first certain of mention of Dec. 25 is in a Latin
chronographer of A. D. 354, first published entire by Mommsen.[1]
It runs thus in English: “Year 1 after Christ, in the consulate of Caesar and
Paulus, the Lord Jesus Christ was born on the 25^th of December, a
Friday and 15^th day of the new moon.” Here again no festal celebration
of the day is attested.

            There were, however, many
speculations in the 2^nd century about the date of Christ’s birth.
Clement of Alexandria, towards its close, mentions several such, and condemns
them as superstitions. Some chronologists, he says, alleged the birth to have
occurred in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus, on the 25th of Pachon, the Egyptian
month, i. e. the 20^th of
May. These were probably the Basilidian gnostics. Others said it on the 24^th
or 25^th of Pharmuthi, i. e.
the 19th or 20th of April. Clement himself sets it on the 17^th of
November, 3 B. C. The author of a Latin tract, called the De Pascha computus, written in Africa in 243, sets it by
private revelation, ab ipso deo inspirati, on the 28th of March. He
argues that the world was created perfect, flowers in bloom, and trees in leaf,
therefore in spring; also at the equinox, and when the moon just created was
full. Now the moon and sun were created on a Wednesday. The 28^th of
March suits all these considerations. Christ, therefore, being the Sun of
Righteousness, was born on 28^th of March. The same symbolical
reasoning led Polycarp[2]
(before 160) to set his birth on Sunday, when the world’s creation began, but
his baptism on Wednesday, for it was the analogue of the sun’s creation. On
such grounds certain Latins as early as 354 may have transferred the human
birthday from the 6^th of January to the 25^th of December,
which was then a Mithraic feast and is by the chronographer above referred to,
but in another part of his compilation, termed Natalis invicti solis, or
birthday of the unconquered Sun. Cyprian (de orat. Dom. 35) calls Christ
Sol verus, Ambrose Sol novus noster (Sermo vii. 13), and such
rhetoric was widespread. The Syrians and Armenians, who clung to the 6^th
of January, accused the Romans of sun-worship and idolatry, contending with
great probability that the feast of the 25^th of December had been
invented by the disciples of Cerinthus and its lections by Artemon to
commemorate the natural birth of Jesus. Chrysostom also testifies the 25^th
of December to have been from the beginning known in the West, from Thrace even
as far as Gades. Ambrose, On Virgins iii. Ch. I, writing to his sister,
implies that as late as the papacy of Liberius 352-356, the Birth from the
Virgin was feasted together with the Marriage of Cana and the Banquet of the
4000 (Luke ix. 13), which were never feasted on any other day but Jan. 6.

            Chrysostom,
in a sermon preached at Antioch on Dec. 20, 386 or 388, says that some held the
feast of Dec. 25 to have been held in the West, from Thrace as far as Cadiz,
from the beginning. It certainly originated in the West, but spread quickly
eastwards. In 353 – 361 it was observed that the court of Constantius. Basil of
Caesarea (died 379) adopted it. Honorius, emperor (395 – 423) in the West,
informed his mother and brother Arcadius (395 – 408) in Byzantium of how the
new feast was kept in Rome, separate from the 6^th of January, with
its own troparia and sticharia. They adopted it, and recommended
it to Chrysostom, who had long been in favor of it. Epiphanius of Crete was won
over to it, as were also the other three patriarchs, Theophilus of Alexandria,
John of Jerusalem, Flavian of Antioch. This was under Pope Anastasius, 398 –
400. John or Wahan of Nice, in a letter printed by Combefis in his Historia
monothelitarum, affords the above details. The new feast was communicated
by Proculus, patriarch of Constantinople (434 – 446), to Sahak, Cataholicos of
Armenia, about 440. The letter was betrayed to the Persian king, who accused
Sahak of Greek intrigues, and deposed him. However, the Armenians, at least
those within the Byzantine pale, adopted it for about 30 years, but finally
abandoned this together with the decrees of Chalcedon early in the 8^th
century. Many writers of the period 375 – 450, e. g. Epiphanius,
Cassian, Asterius, Basil, Chrysostom and Jerome, contrast the new feast with
that of the Baptism as that of the birth after the flesh, from which we
infer that the latter was generally regarded as a birth according to the
Spirit. Instructive as showing that the new feast traveled from West eastwards
is the fact (noted by Usener) that in 387 the new feast was reckoned according
to the Julian calendar by writers of the province of Asia, who in referring to
other feasts use the reckoning of their local calendars. As early as 400 in
Rome an imperial rescript includes Christmas among the three feasts (the others
are Easter and Epiphany) on which theaters must be closed. Epiphany and
Christmas were not made judicial non dies until 534.

            For
some years in the West (as late as 353 in Rome) the birth feast was appended to
the baptismal feast on the 6^th of January, and in Jerusalem it
altogether supplanted it from about 360 to 440, when Bishop Juvenal introduced
the feast of the 25^th of December. The new feast was about the same
time (440) finally established in Alexandria. The quadragesima of
Epiphany (i. e. the feast of the presentation in the Temple, or hupaponte)
continues to be celebrated in Jerusalem on the 14^th of February,
forty days after the 6^th of January, until the reign of Justinian.
In most other places it had long before been put back to the 2^nd of
February to suit the new Christmas. Armenian historians describe the riots, and
display of armed force, without which Justinian was not able in Jerusalem to
transfer this feast from the 14^th to the 2^nd of February.

            The
grounds on which the Church introduced so late as 350 – 448 a Christmas feast
till then unknown, or, if known, precariously linked with the baptism, seem in
the main to have been the following. (I) The transition from adult to infant
baptism was proceeding rapidly in the East, and in the West was well-nigh
completed. Its natural complement was a festal recognition of the fact that the
divine element was present in Christ from the first, and was no new stage of
spiritual promotion coeval only with the descent of the Spirit upon him at
baptism. The general adoption of child baptism helps to extinguish the old view
that the divine life in Jesus dated from his baptism, a view which led the
Epiphany feast to be regarded as that of Jesus’ spiritual rebirth. This aspect
of the feast was therefore forgotten, and its importance in every way
diminished by the new and rival feast of Christmas. (2) The 4^th
century witnessed a rapid diffusion of Marcionite, or, as it was now called,
Manichaean propaganda, the chief tenet of which was that Jesus either was was
not born at all, was a mere phantasm, or anyhow did not take the flesh of the
Virgin Mary. Against this view the new Christmas was a protest, since it was
peculiarly the feast of his birth in the flesh, or as a man, and is constantly
spoken of as such by the fathers who witnessed its institution.

            In
Britain the 25^th of December was a festival long before the
conversion to Christianity, for Bede (De temp. rat. ch. 13) relates that
“the ancient peoples of the Angli began the year on the 25^th of
December when we now celebrate the birthday of the Lord; and the very night
which is now so holy to us, they called in their tongue modranecht (modra
niht), that is, the mothers’ night, by reason we suspect of the ceremonies
which in that night-long vigil they performed.” With his usual reticence about
matters pagan or not orthodox, Bede abstains from recording who the mothers
were and what the ceremonies. In 1644 the English puritans forbad any merriment
or religious services by act of Parliament, on the ground that it was a heathen
festival, and ordered it to be kept as a fast. Charles II. revived the feast,
but the Scots adhered to the Puritan view.

            Outside
Teutonic countries Christmas presents are unknown. Their places taken in Latin
countries by the strenae, French etrennes, given on the 1^st
of January; this was in antiquity a great holiday, wherefore until late in the
4^th century the Christians kept it as a day of fasting and gloom.
The setting up in the Latin churches of a Christmas crèche is said to
have been originated by St Francis.

            AUTHORITIES.—K.
A. H. Kellner, Heortologie (Freiburg im Br., 1906), with Bibliography;
Hospinanius, De festis Christianorum (Genevac, 1574); Edw. Martene, De
Antiquis Ecclesia Ritibus, iii. 31 (Bassani, 1788); J. C. W. Augusti, Chrisl.
Archaologie, vols. i. and v. (Leipzig, 1817-1831); A. J. Binterim, Denkwurdigkeiten,
v. pt. i. p. 528 (Mainz, 1825 &c.); Ernst Friedrick Wernsdorf, De
originibus Solemnium Natalis Christi (Wittenberg, 1757, and in J. E.
Volbeding, Thesaurus Commentationum, Lipsiae, 1847); Anton. Bynaeus, De
Natali Jesu Christi (Amsterdam, 1689); Hermann Usener, Religionsgeschichtliche
Untersuchungen (Bonn, 1889); Nik. Nilles, S. J., Kalendarium Manuale (Innsbruck,
1896); L. Duchesne, Origines de culte chretien (3^e ed.,
Paris, 1889). (F. C. C.) (pgs. 293-294, The
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11^th ed., vol. VI. New York:  Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1911).

TDR

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