Christmas Thoughts
‘Tis the season to be jolly’. Hmmm. The older I get, the less jolly I feel at Christmas time. It seems the real reason for the season, the birth of Jesus, is slowly being pushed aside to make room for all the commercialism that now dominates this holiday. I don’t like it. There has also been a lot of skepticism over the past few years about the roots of the celebration of Christmas, and so I decided to investigate it myself. It seems that Christmas, initially called the Saturnalia Festival, started as a pagan holiday. Romans adopted it with hopes of turning people to Christianity. From “Christmas, the Real Story” In the 4 th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate...