Father Yule is coming to town - The pagan origins of Christmas
Hey there, traveler! Christmas is just a few days away (yeah, I know, it’s still March for me too), so being the party poopers that we are, we thought we’d dissect this happy family holiday to it’s really pagan roots. So grab your candy canes, put on that Santa hat and hold onto the nearest eggnog - and let’s see what weird origins lay beneath Christmas’s surface. The name Christmas literally translates to “a mass on Christ’s day”, but as I’ve read, it’s a fairly new name in terms of history. In the early days of christianity, people (or more precisely, clerics) really opposed the idea of celebrating someone’s day of birth, even that of Christ. Celebrating birthdays was seen as a pagan tradition, whereas christians celebrated the day worthy people (saints, martyrs, etc.) died and were allowed into heaven. However one day a historian named Sextus Julius Africanus (yeah, he was very Roman, but the Christian kind of Roman) made the first complete chronology, and in that he named the 25th