The early Catholic church did a lot of fiddling with things in order to get acceptance. Their biggest fiddle was replacing locally worshipped pagan deities and their festivals with Christian saints and their feast days. One of the big events of the year was the Winter Solstice, so it just made sense to juxtapose the Nativity over this holiday. I can't really fault the church fathers for doing this. It made a lot of sense. The whole point was to take over the narrative -- get people thinking in Christian terms instead of pagan terms.
I sort of watched this in reverse when I was in contact with the local neo-pagan community. They were sort of inventing their own religion, and they had to address this very sort of thing. How do you take your belief system and map it over the existing culture? For instance, you've got children and Christmas and Easter to deal with; how do you remap your beliefs so that the kids don't see you as competing with Christians? How do you get your kids to see Samhein (Halloween) as the centerpiece of your year when everyone else is centered on Christmas and Easter.
Surprisingly, it was much easier to do all that than some of the Christian sects I visited that abhored Christmas celebration. Folks don't know this, but our early forebears like the Pilgrims tried to do away with Christmas. They saw it as popish and pagan. In modern times, some Christian churches tred to do the same. It ultimately leads to failure for the simple reason that the holidays match perfectly with the cultural tides. It's much easier to just get with the flow.
If you ask me, I think Christ was probably born in June or thereabouts. That's when the shepherds in that part of the world stay out all night with their flocks. They still do.
I agree, that is a great post, Shaman. But if I could pick ONE nit, I would replace "cultural tides" with something more along the lines of "existential tides". As I said above, it's not a conspiracy that farmers sow in the Spring. It's the cycle of nature, the cycle of our existence. Early Winter just happens to be a time of celebration in the Northern Hemisphere. The harvest is in, it's cold enough to kill the animals and enjoy fresh meat for longer than just the day it was killed, and, in an agrarian community, there isn't much work that needs to be done. It's a natural time of celebration. Contrast that with, say, April, when everything is greening up and nature is coming back to life. Then, your potatoes and winter squashes, etc are going bad, your sauerkraut is pretty rotten (if you still have any) and we are in what agrarian societies call "The Hungry Gap". Too early for the garden to be yielding.
