Christmas is the annual festival of Christ's birth. Christmas Day falls on December 25 and celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem as recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is, after Easter, the most important feast in the Church's year. Since the Gospels make no mention of dates, it is not certain that Christ was born on this day. In fact, Christmas Day did not officially come into being until 354 when Pope Gregory proclaimed December 25 as the date of the Nativity. In doing so, he was following the early Church's policy of absorbing rather than repressing existing pagan rites which, since early times, had celebrated the winter solstice and the coming of spring.

The pagan festival most closely associated with the new Christmas was the Roman Saturnalia, which honoured the god of the harvest, Saturn, on December 19 and was marked by seven days of riotous merrymaking and feasting. At the same time in northern Europe a similar winter festival known as Yule was celebrated in which giant logs, trimmed with greenery and ribbons, were burnt in honour of the gods and to encourage the sun to shine more brightly.

Having incorporated these elements, the Christian Church subsequently added, in the Middle Ages, the Nativity crib and Christmas carols to its customs. By this time lavish feasting was the highlight of the festivities with large quantities of food, including a decorated boar's head, ceremoniously consumed over eight or nine hours by rich and poor alike. All this came to an abrupt end in Britain at least when in 1552 the Puritans banned Christmas, a move followed in Massachusetts seven years later. Although Christmas returned to England in 1660 with Charles II, the rituals all but died out until revived in Victorian times.

Information: Encarta 99 CD
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