the celebration of Christmas starts from the explicit event they celebrate: the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. However, no study has been able to prove reliably when Jesus of Nazareth could have been bornand, what is more disturbing, there is still no archaeological evidence that shows that the person we recognize with that name existed, neither before nor after the year one of his own era. Despite scientific uncertainty, Christmas is one of the longest traditions in time and also one of the most complex, including an extensive calendar of festive events that covers almost three weeks of rituals, customs, symbols, myths, ceremonies, Legends, beliefs and conventions around which we meet at least one third of Earthlings at least (the equivalent of the two billion Christians that inhabit the planet).
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| Christmas |
The ways to celebrate Christmas are as many as celebrants. If in a family it can be difficult to agree on whether the sea bream is more appropriate than the capon for Christmas Eve dinner, imagine the amount of variations that we could find between Hawaiian Christmas, the Coptic in Egypt or the one celebrated by the Inuit from Greenland with its traditional kiviak(fermented poultry meat in the body of a seal). At present, many customs have been mimicking as an effect of the massive presence of mass media and the cultural hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon countries in these media. However, some of the Christmas traditions were coinciding long ago, as an effect of other global processes of cultural hegemony, especially Christianization. In this sense, there are two traditions that we often take for granted but that have controversial origins: the very date on which we celebrate Christmas and their disconcerting relationship with giving gifts. When did they arise and why? What relationship exists between both?
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The birth of Jesus and other celebrations of December 25
Some historians and many contemporary pagans argue that the celebrations that coincide with the end of December and the beginning of January in our calendar did not originate in the Christian celebration but, much earlier, in the agrarian cults that would celebrate the winter solstice, which is characterized by being the time when the days begin to lengthen again. Certainly, at this time the Romans celebrated the festivities dedicated to Saturn, god of time and agriculture, which also included the exchange of gifts and ended with the feast of the Undefeated Sun on December 25. The saturnals began to be celebrated at least four centuries before the Sun Invictus cult adopted a certain autonomy already with Aureliano in the second century AD This autonomy that the cult of the Sun is gaining over the cult of the agrarian gods has interest because it represents a particular form of evolution from polytheism to monotheism that has occurred numerous times in the history of ancient religions
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