Pagans Are the REAL Reason for the Season!

Always eager to play the role of oppressed minority in a country where they are the overwhelming majority, I’m always amused by the cries of Christians who claim that Christmas is under attack by those who either celebrate other holidays or those who just don’t celebrate Christmas at all. They declare that, “Jesus is the reason for the season!” and they scoff at the mention of any other “happy holidays.” But as with most parts of their church’s history, they tend to forget the real reason that Christians celebrate Christmas – assimilation. Many ancient religions celebrated the Winter Solstice on or around December 25th – the ancient Babylonians, for example, celebrated the feast of the Son of Isis on the 25th. Where Christmas took most of its inspiration, however, was from the festival of Saturnalia, first introduced around 217 BC. (Yes, that’s one long-ass time before Jesus.) It lasted almost a week, starting on the 17th and culminating around the 25th. Here are some of the highlights…

During this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the weeklong celebration. The festival began when Roman authorities chose “an enemy of the Roman people” to represent the “Lord of Misrule.” Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival’s conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman. The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in his time. In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).

Leave it to the Christians to take something cool like human sacrifice, naked caroling, and week-long anarchy and turn it into a two-hour mass where you have to listen to that same lame story about some old guys following a star to visit a baby in a manger (a story also taken from the pagans, by the way) while you prop up grandma in her pew to make her appear awake. Every Christmas tradition we know today, from the Christmas tree to giving presents to mistletoe, was originally derived from one silly religion or another, but certainly not from Jesus. In fact, in keeping with early Jewish tradition, the early Christians really didn’t celebrate birthdays at all, which is probably why there’s no mention of the day or year Christ was born in the Bible…it just wasn’t that important to them. (My, how times have changed.)

Christians had a tough time converting the pagans, as I’d imagine it’s hard to get people to give up substance abuse and human rights violations for eternal guilt and constant pious misery, so the early Christian leaders let them keep their holidays, as long as they said “Christ” in place of “Saturn.” The early Christmases were not unlike the original festival, with sexual indulgences and copious amounts of drinking. And it wasn’t until 350 AD that Pope Julius I declared that the 25th would be an official celebration of the birth of Christ, which didn’t sit well with the Puritans and many other Christian sects, who dismissed it as a blasphemous pagan tradition. Here’s another piece of history that I’m sure the Christians would love to forget…

Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.

As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.” On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into anti-Semitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw, 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two million rubles worth of property was destroyed.

Merry fuckin’ Christmas, right? So the next time someone tells you to get into the holiday spirit, make sure to down the rest of the eggnog, strip naked, and sing carols while sexually violating the blow-up Santa in your neighbor’s yard as you throw rocks at passing Jews. If the police try and stop you, take a cue from your Christian brothers and cry religious oppression. They may take away our public nativity scenes, but they may never take our history!