What is Christmas and How Did It Get Its Name

Whether you view Christmas as a holiday and time for vacating or as a holy day of worship, Christmas is in fact a mixture of various cultures from around the world which has been accumulating for hundreds of years. Turkey dinners with cranberry sauce, decorated evergreen trees and the colorfully wrapped gifts at their bases, Christmas cards and their heartfelt greetings, jolly old Santa Claus and his reindeer, yule logs and chestnuts roasting on open fires, mistletoes and granted kisses, chiming bells and carols are all many aspects of Christmas which we have come to consider as inherently inseparable and at the heart of December 25, all came in bits and pieces from different peoples.

Today’s Christmas is a celebration of Christ’s birthday but in reality, no one knows when Christ was born and until the early part of the fourth century no one cared. Birthdays were no reason to celebrate or commemorate but deaths were. Theologians, researchers and historians through the ages have attempted to pinpoint the Nativity to a specific date but came up with a profusion of unrelated dates such as January 1, January 6, March 25 and May 20, but none found the slightest evidence that would even remotely point to December 25. May 20 became the most often agreed upon date of the Nativity because the Gospel of Luke maintains that the shepherds who received the news of Christ’s birth were watching their sheep by night and it is known that sheep where watched around the clock only at lambing time which was in the spring.

In an attempt to cast a shadow on an ancient pagan religion, Mithraism, whose December 25 festivities threatened to attract more Christians than the church could afford to lose, clever church elders suggested celebrations of the Nativity on the same day. Although they encountered much opposition from the more conservative sector of the church which claimed that it is sinful to even as much as contemplate observing the birth of Christ “as though He were a King Pharaoh” and not a divine son of God, the renegade fathers ultimately prevailed.

The church thereafter legitimized December 25 as the birth date of Christ and its observance would be characterized in meditative prayer, in giving thanks and in pensive rejoicing — a mass, Christ’s mass. One Christian theologian wrote in his journal in the latter part of the 320s: “We hold this day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the sun, but because of Him who made it.”

Thanks to the psychological power of group celebrations, the unification and equalization of ranks and social classes, the solidification and affirmation of collective identity and the reinforcement of a common belief system and its objectives, the celebration of Christ’s mass or Christmas on December 25 took hold in the Western world. However, Christmas did not become permanently rooted until the Roman emperor Constantine was baptized in 337, an event which for the first time united the Roman emperorship with the Christian church and made Christianity the official religion of the state. And when in 354, Bishop Liberius of Rome reiterated the importance of celebrating not only Christ’s death but also His birth; those few who still remained aloof from the church were finally convinced.

The word Christmas stems from the abbreviation of “Christ’s mass” which is a derivative from Middle English Christemasssee and Old English Cristes maesse. The earliest found evidence of this phrase was recorded in 1038 which was also an amalgamated derivative of the Greek Christos and the Latin missa. In the Greek translations of the New Testament, the letter X (chi) is the first letter of Christ. By the mid-16th century, X was used as an acronym for Christ and Xmas became the abbreviate form of Christmas.