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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

The pagan origins thing is a myth, btw—all the various bits which people point to as evidence still date back to a Christian-era Europe and cannot be traced back further. Christianity has been around for a very very long time and has had a lot of time to evolve its own traditions. :)

For example, Christmas trees date back no later than the middle ages:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m41KXS-LWsY

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> pagan origins thing is a myth, btw

Saturnalia? (I’m watching your video.)

Given how diversely Christmas is celebrated, it seems wild to conclude that it hasn’t been significantly affected by predecessor celebrations.

Saturnalia is covered here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsctaPJSvo

That’s the video I began watching.

What is the argument for it not having influenced many modern Christmas practices, including but not limited to the celebration’s timing in the West?

The fact that there's almost nothing that overlaps with Christmas besides the timing, and that the timing has other plausible explanations.

FWIW, I'm very open to the timing having been shifted to coincide with other festivals, but that's not what most people mean when they say Christmas has pagan origins. They're not saying that Christmas isn't actually the day Jesus was born (I'm totally on board with that idea), they're saying that X, Y, and Z aspects of the Christmas celebration were originally pagan and were adapted for Christianity. I have seen no compelling evidence in favor of that claim about any aspect of Christmas traditions, and I've seen plenty against.

> fact that there's almost nothing that overlaps with Christmas besides the timing

The drunken revelry?

Given these two explanations for the drunken revelry,

1. Christmas has its origins in Saturnalia, but the only remaining similarity is the approximate date and the drunkenness.

2. Humans will happily accept any excuse to get drunk during the longest nights of the year.

I lean towards option 2 as a much simpler and more likely explanation.

All of the bits that do make up secular christmas, do have pagan origins, which is more or less my point.

My general take is that every major religion has some sort of solstice related celebration.

No, they don't. That's my point—all the bits that make up secular Christmas have Christian origins and have become secularized over time. For every tradition that is commonly cited as having pagan origins, we can trace it back until it becomes entirely unrecognizable and it's still all Christians all the way down.

As near as I can tell the myth of the pagan origins of Christmas has its roots in fundamentalist Christians who wanted to abolish things that aren't contained in the Bible. "Pagan" made a good rhetorical whip at the time, but it's since been taken as a serious approach to history by popular culture.

Nonsense. You're conflating tradition (tree in this case) with festivals and ancient religious rites. See:

- Yule

- Dísablót

- Koliada

- Lohri

- Saturnalia

- Yaldā Night

- Nardoqan

No, I'm not. All of these are, to the extent we know about them at all (which in some cases we don't know much), entirely unlike any Christmas traditions we have today which are claimed to be pagan in origin.

How do you know Christmas simply didn't align itself to those holidays themselves, because after all, a year end winter feast is nothing new in history? Or that the traditions we have today may have at once been part of such syncreticization but then died out until the modern day? In other words we don't necessarily have to see such traditions today per se for Christmas to have absorbed them over its time.

We don't. But we also don't know that they were, and we don't have enough quality evidence in favor of that hypothesis to justify the confidence with which it is asserted.

In the absence of evidence about the timing being affected by other festivals and in the presence of much evidence that all the actual traditions are far more recent than pagan, I don't believe it's fair to claim Christmas has pagan origins. The absolute best we can do is say that its timing may have been influenced by other, pre-Christian celebrations.

I agree but I also would be interested to see any proof for the claims you're talking about with regards to Christmas not having any pagan roots, where are you finding this information or rather, where can I read more?

I linked one example—a video on Christmas trees from a religious studies scholar. They have similar content on the date of Christmas, and there are plenty of sources on each other tradition.

Here's another one on Saturnalia from the same scholar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsctaPJSvo

Great, appreciate it. Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas indeed!

One small exception Russian empire turned a figure from Pagan mythology into a St Claus like figure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ded_Moroz But my understanding is that him handing out gifts didn't come from Pagan traditions and was a result of largely copying Santa Claus traits.

Later during Soviet times secularish Christmas traditions including Ded Moroz were moved to New Year's.

In Scandinavia languages, xmas is still called Yule. Not sure if having the same name is enough to prove that its a continuation?

Yeah, but you can 100% remove Christian theology and still have a fun time.

Correct, but that's because most of the traditions have always been somewhat secular in nature (with religious significance strapped on after the tradition was already going) and have only become more so, not because they were borrowed/appropriated/adapted from a pre-Christian source.

It was also entirely contrived by the Council of Nicaea.

ChatGPT and Grok say Christmas either does or might have pagan origins, but not that it definitely does not have pagan origins (yes, I know "proving negatives"is very difficult†).

ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/676c8fd1-b6e0-8005-a86f-d43ac17634...

Grok: https://x.com/i/grok/share/8fQKIFO1WGl3nDVZ6uFaJmPTW

†Grok on proving negatives: https://x.com/i/grok/share/kcHkjqzJ5lx5kMyl4GL0nMuw3

LLMs do very poorly at judging the truth of long-term myths. When something has been asserted confidently on the internet over a long enough period of time it becomes baked into the weights, regardless of truth.

I provided a source from a religious studies scholar on Christmas trees specifically (one of the most frequently-cited "pagan" traditions). If you can point me to something with similar provenance I'll read it, but I'm not going to waste time on LLM responses.

Ok, but what about asking someone who knows (anything)?

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