But Christmas is, of course, most strongly linked with religion, with the big day celebrated by billions of Christians commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ.
But although this highlight of the festive calendar these days always lands on December 25, this was not always the case.
Peter Lynas, U.K. director of the Evangelical Alliance, suggests the Bible offers few clues as to why Christmas came to be associated with Jesus’ birthday.
He told Newsweek: “Jesus was almost certainly born in the main room of a Palestinian house because there was no room in the guest room, the better translation of inn or stable.
“He would have been surrounded by family and despite the suggestion from Away In A Manger, he would have cried because he was fully human as well as fully divine.
“The Bible doesn’t mention Mary riding a donkey, or three kings of the Orient or any animals around the manger.
“We also aren’t told anything about the date—it wasn’t until the fourth century that we started celebrating on the 25th December.
“But what is clear is that God showed up, the divine in a skin, Emmanuel meaning God with us.
“Christmas is still celebrated around the world, giving gifts as God gave his Son to us and that moment, that rupture in time, still divides history to this day.”
Andrew McGowan, dean and president of Berkeley Divinity School and McFaddin professor of Anglican studies and pastoral theology, agrees, adding the Christian holy book is lacking in date details.
He told Newsweek: “No one knows when Jesus was born, and for a while, few people were even interested. When the question arose—long before the celebration of Christmas—they seem to have calculated based on the (well-known) date of his death, assuming a life which was (providentially!) a whole number of years.
“Since he died at Passover in Spring, his conception—or incarnation—had to take place then too, which meant his birth had to be close to the solstice (but nothing to do with pagan solstice festivals).
“December 25 was one guess, January 6 another—the compromise between the two gave us the 12 days of Christmas.”
However, McGowan believes the exercise of searching for the date of Christ’s birth does retain “significance.”
He said: “While we (still) don’t know when he was born—and the earliest Christians were blissfully uninterested—thinking about his birth was a means of elaborating the story in a way that brought Jesus closer to human experience.
“He was born like us as well as died like us. The development of Christmas was a kind of affirmation of God’s interest in the world and in human life—birth as well as death.”
He added this scarcity of birthday information stands in remarkable contrast to the relative wealth of information concerning the Son of God’s death.
McGowan wrote: “This stands in sharp contrast to the very early traditions surrounding Jesus’ last days. Each of the Four Gospels provides detailed information about the time of Jesus’ death.”
January 6 was purportedly the first date associated with Jesus Christ’s birthday, approximately two centuries after his death.
The first major reference to January 6 as the day of Christ’s birth arrived from Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria approximately 200 years after Jesus’ first birthday.
Although Christ’s birth was by this time marked on several dates, Titus Flavius Clemens attempted to calculate the date of Jesus’ birth by studying the time lapsed between Jesus’ birth and the death of emperor Commodus in 192.
Using an Egyptian calendar, he determined the date to be January 6.
The first mention of December 25 as Jesus’ birthday can be traced back to a mid-fourth-century Roman almanac that lists the death dates of various Christian bishops and martyrs.
The first date listed, December 25, is marked: “natus Christus in Betleem Judeae,” translated as “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.”
A final reason early Christians may have landed upon December 25 is due to the early church periodically Christianizing pagan holidays to facilitate the integration of converts.
This practice is believed by some scholars to have motivated the establishment of December 25 as the Christmas feast day
McGowan said: “Mid-winter festivals had already been common—the Romans had their Saturnalia, and other peoples of northern and western Europe kept holidays at similar times.
“Ancient authors had already noticed the connection and claimed it as a sign of providence, but nineteenth-century scholars, spurred on by the emergent study of comparative religion, seized upon this coincidence with fervor. Were these not just thinly veiled pagan festivals?”
However, despite “such views have since become dogma on Facebook,” the scholar believes the “truth is different and more complex.”
He said: “There are two problems with the ‘borrowed solstice’ theory. The first is that the oldest evidence for dating Christmas is too early to make sense as a Christianized Saturnalia, since it comes from the time when Christians actively avoided pagan customs.
“The second is that while holidays related to Jesus’ birth came late, these actual dates—or one of them at least—had been identified a century or more before anyone treated them as festivals.”
