December 25th did not replace any pagan holiday.  The pagan holiday was the solstice, four days earlier.  

As for the cold, please note that the average lows for December/January time in that part of the world are well above freezing.  This would hardly be "too cold" for shepherds.

The Church chose December 25th because, it was always celebrated on December 25th.  Do Jєωs celebrate birthdays?  Perhaps it was common knowledge that Jesus was born on that day.

I don't believe The Church knows for certain that the 25th December is Christ's birth date, but I read in my missal it was chosen to replace the pagan day. What about the theories that it couldn't be December because it would have been too cold for the shepherds

‘The Lord hath said to me: Thou art my son,
this day have I begotten thee.’ (Ps 2:7) and (Heb 5:5-6)

As we know, Christians celebrate the birth of Christ on the 25th December, a fixed 24-hour day set in the calendar, ‘whilst the whole liturgical Cycle has, every year, to be changed and remodelled to yield that ever varying day, which is to be the feast of the Resurrection.’  Abbot Guéranger goes on to say the four weeks of our preparation in Advent before they reach the 25th day of the month of December are in the image of the four thousand years that preceded the great coming of Christ (Genesis Creation to Christ). According to a sacred tradition, the creation of man took place on a Friday; Incarnation day, 25th March, also the day Christ died on the Cross to redeem mankind. He chose to rise from the dead after ‘three’ days, a Sunday, the day light was created, visible on earth.
     Christmas day however, is different to others, it falling on all the days of the week in turn so that its holiness may ‘cleanse and rid them of the curse that Adam’s sin had put upon them.’ This of course applies to the whole universe, which, as St Paul told us, was also affected by Original Sin. ‘This day is referenced not to the divisions of time marked out by God himself, but to the course of that great luminary that gives light to the world, because it gives light and warmth. Jesus our Saviour, the Light of the World, was born when the night of the idolatry and crime was at its darkest; and the day of His birth, the 25th December, is that on which the material sun begins to gain his ascendancy over the reign of gloomy night, and show the world His triumph of brightness.’

“On this Day which the Lord had made,’ says St Gregory of Nyssa, ‘darkness decreases and light increases, and Night is driven back again. No, brethren, it is not by chance, nor by any created will, that this natural change begins on the day when he shows himself in the brightness of his coming, which is the spiritual Life of the world. .. Nature seems to me to say; Know, O Man, that under the things which I show thee Mysteries lie concealed. Hast thou not seen the night, that had grown so long, suddenly checked? --- Abbot Guéranger: The Liturgical Year.

St Augustine had said ‘The day he chose was that on which the light begins to increase. It typifies the work of Christ, who renews our interior day by day. For the eternal Creator having willed to be born in time, his Birthday would necessarily be in harmony with the rest of creation.’ Guéranger then addresses those who dare scoff at the divine plan as having its origin in the pagan feast of the sun on the winter solstice that occurs days earlier, on Dec. 21/22. ‘In their shallow erudition they conclude that a Religion could not be divinely instituted, which has certain rites or customs originating in an analogy to certain phenomena of this world; they deny what Revelation asserts, namely, that God only created the world for the sake of his Christ and his Church.’    

I don't believe The Church knows for certain that the 25th December is Christ's birth date, but I read in my missal it was chosen to replace the pagan day. What about the theories that it couldn't be December because it would have been too cold for the shepherds

The Church has passed down the 25th of December as being the Day being the birth of Christ through the sacred traditions of the Church....

Also, if this is not good enough for you...  The Blessed Mother did verify all of this to Venerable Mary of Agreda as if mentioned in her book, The Mystical City of God, Volume II, The Incarnation...  This book has been approved by the Church for about 400 years.  :-)

What year is your missal?

....the reason I write that the Church doesn't have concrete info on the subject is from my 1955 missal..it reads on page 60

"This feast may have been instituted at this date to replace a pagan feast which honored the sun."

Which is why I wrote what I wrote above.  Such comments have no place in a Catholic book--and this was a Missal from before Vatican 2.  In fact, this has no place in any book since there is no evidence other than the fact that heretics and apostates just assume that it is true.  This is just more evidence that Modernism was alive and well in the years before the Council.  

Has the Church ever made an absolute declaration that Jesus's birthday was really December 25th?  I don't know.  But the Church has never made an absolute declaration that every person has a guardian angel either.  But the fact is that both have been the common teaching since antiquity.  

It was Yom Kippur, the Jєωιѕн feast of Atonement that the priest Zacharia went into the Holy of Holies to offer incense when he encountered the angel who told him that he was to be the father of John the Baptist. Five and a half months later the angel went to Mary to tell her that she was to be the mother of Jesus. Nine months later Jesus was born. December 25 may or may not be the exact date of Jesus birth but it corresponds to what the Gospel of Luke tells us.

http://www.catholic.com/blog/jon-sorensen/why-december-25

The Reason for Choosing December 25

Although the date of Christ’s birth is not given to us in Scripture, there is docuмented evidence that December 25 was already of some significance to Christians prior to A.D. 354. One example can be found in the writings of Hyppolytus of Rome, who explains in his Commentary on the book of Daniel (c. A.D. 204) that the Lord’s birth was believed to have occurred on that day:


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.

The reference to Adam can be understood in light of another of Hyppolytus’ writings, the Chronicon, where he explains that Jesus was born nine months after the anniversary of Creation. According to his calculations, the world was created on the vernal equinox, March 25, which would mean Jesus was born nine months later, on December 25.

Nineteenth-century liturgical scholar Louis Duchesne explains that “towards the end of the third century the custom of celebrating the birthday of Christ had spread throughout the whole Church, but that it was not observed everywhere on the same day” (Christian Worship, Its Origin and Evolution: a study of the Latin liturgy up to the time of Charlemagne, p. 260).

In the West, the birth of Christ was celebrated on December 25, and in the East on January 6.

Duchesne writes “one is inclined to believe that the Roman Church made choice of the 25th of December in order to enter into rivalry with Mithraism. This reason, however, leaves unexplained the choice of the 6th of January” (ibid., p. 261). His solution, therefore, was that the date of Christ’s birth was decided by using as a starting point the same day on which he was believed to have died. This would explain the discrepancies between the celebrations in the East and West.

Given the great aversion on the part of some Christians to anything pagan, the logical conclusion here is that one celebration has nothing to do with the other. In his book, Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI explains:


The claim used to be made that December 25 developed in opposition to the Mithras myth, or as a Christian response to the cult of the unconquered sun promoted by Roman emperors in the third century in their efforts to establish a new imperial religion. However, these old theories can no longer be sustained. The decisive factor was the connection of creation and Cross, of creation and Christ’s conception (p. 105-107).

While these explanations of how December 25 came to be the date of Christmas are all plausible, we know one thing for sure: The evidence that this day held a special significance to Christians predates the proof of a supposed celebration of Sol Invictus or other pagan deities on that day.

That the Christians chose a date so close to the winter solstice is also not proof that this was done to mimic pagan festivals. The various pagan religions all had festivals spanning the calendar. Whatever month the early Christians might have otherwise chosen would still place Christmas near some pagan celebration, and oppositional theorists would still be making the same claims.

The solstice was important to everyone for agricultural reasons in the same way water is important to the survival of human beings, and so we see rituals involving water showing up in various religions. That doesn't prove that one borrowed the idea or theme from another.

#2  Michael Paul - Crook, Colorado  

There doesn't have to be a pagan holiday that Christmas or other Christian feast days were intentionally replacing (though we know that Pope Gregory the Great told St. Augustine of Canterbury to co-opt pagan festivals and sacred space and make them Christian, so this practice did take place). For one thing, Romans had a holiday about every three days, so every saints day or event in the life of Christ would likely fall close to a Roman holiday and was not necessarily intentionally placed on that date to coopt a pagan festival. Secondly, St. John Chrysostom gave a homily on Christmas (in fact, five of his Christmas sermons survive) about 386 AD (Migne, Patriologus Graecae, vol. 49, cols. 351-362, esp. Section 5, col. 357) in which, by looking at the Gospel of Luke, he was able to argue that Christ was born in late December; he didn’t argue that it was merely an effort to replace a Roman or pagan festival. He argued that if Zachary was serving in the Temple "and all the multitude of the people was praying without" (Lk 1:10), it must be the greatest Jєωιѕн Feast of Tabernacles, which occurs in late September or early October. Zachary returned home, Elizabeth conceived soon thereafter, and the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary while Elizabeth was “in her sixth month” (not after six months), which would be late March, and Jesus was born nine months after that, in late December. So Christmas doesn’t have to be a coopted pagan festival.

December 19, 2013 at 8:13 pm PST

#4  J P Rodrigues - goa, Goa  

Is there any thing wrong in the following straight forward answer based on Gospel of Luke?

"Jєωιѕн tradition use two kinds of calenders, one is
 Civil calender which meant exclusively for kings, childbirth n contracts. The second was Sacred calender for religious festivals. Following are the months of Jєωιѕн Civil calender:
 Tishri overlaps on Sept. to Oct. and is the first month.
 Heshvan overlaps on Oct to Nov, Chislev overlaps on Nov to Dec. and so on; next is Tebeth, Shebat, Adar, Nisan,Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Ab and
 Elul. Now Luke in verse 1:26 says that it was in the sixth month angel Gabriel was sent to Mary, meaning it was month of Adar which overlaps on Feb to March. If we take this as the time of Jesus' conception then we come close to Nov to Dec after nine months. So this is a strong biblical support for Christmas to be in December. Further Luke says at verse 1:36, that it is now sixth month for Elisabeth's pregnancy, meaning St. John the Baptist was born in the month of Sivan which is somewhere June and that is how we are celebrating his day on 24 th June."

March 12, 2014 at 12:00 am PST