Thread by @LancelotAndrew3

ABOUT DECEMBER 25 AND CHRISTMAS:

Every year we see the widespread idea about during the first centuries of the Christian era the Church "adopted" the pagan celebration of light and sun in winter, replacing it with Christ, the Light of the World.

However, in that time, the Church was constantly defined by emphasizing the radical differences between Christianity and pagan Roman world. The earliest phase of the development of the ecclesiastical year was the decision that the ancient Church made to celebrate Easter Sunday.

Our Lord´s resurrection is the central event that establishes the meaning and purpose of our Christian life. That Jesus Christ is God and overcame death is what defines who we are and what we defend as Christians.

Every time we gather on Sundays, we are continuing the celebration of Easter in the Holy Eucharist. And this celebration, in the spring, became the central point for the liturgical development of the entire ecclesiastical year.

Later, the Church fixed its attention on the birth of Christ. In the West, the tradition emerges to observe the Feast of the Nativity in relation to the shortest day and the longest night of the year, the winter solstice.

In the 3rd century, the date of birth of Jesus was the subject of both great interest. It is of general acknowledgement that the birth of Christ was celebrated not taking into consideration the historical date of birth, but a conventional one.

Several first Christians attested December 25 as the exact date of the Birth of Christ. Around AD 200, Irenaeus wrote that Christ was born in the 25th of December.

Theophilus of Caesarea, born yet in the year AD 115, wrote: "We ought to celebrate the birth-day of our Lord on what day soever the 25th of December shall happen."

Likewise, Hippolytus of Rome wrote in the second century: "For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years.

He suffered in the thirty-third year, March 25th, Friday, the eighteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Roubellion were Consuls."

In AD 274, the Roman emperor Aurelian establishes the celebration of the winter solstice, the "Sol Invictus" (Unconquered Sun).

The emphasis rested on the symbolic rebirth of the Unconquered Sun. In the 5th century, Bishop of Rome Leo I the Great, forged these holiday observation patterns by emphasizing in his lithurgical writings themes about light, the conquest of darkness,

and Jesus Christ represented the light that had come to a dark world.

"The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light." (Romans 13:12)