Sanitized Tradition

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Christmas is a Christian holiday, right? And New Year’s has always been strictly secular, a time for champagne and party hats? Oh, and Valentine’s Day is just a contemporary holiday, isn’t it?

Nope.

Every holiday has a long and varied history, fascinating and confusing, all at once. The most popular holidays are no different, and even those steeped in one faith or another are not wholly of the faith they appear to be of.

No—nearly all of these holidays have Pagan origins that extend deeply into the past, into times when people sought to gain some measure of control over their lives by appealing to various spirits, gods, and natural forces. Think Jesus planted that first Christmas tree? Think again.

But this isn’t a bad thing! The mixture of holidays gives us the opportunity to learn about our collective past, and to see how cultures slowly meld together over the course of centuries.

Few know the true origins of these holidays because of the preconceived notions that sometimes revolve around Pagan beliefs—that these traditions are somehow inherently wrong. Because of this, our contemporary culture has largely sanitized these holidays, removing most traces of their Pagan roots.

Let's dig a little more deeply into the truth with a look at these 5 holidays and their Pagan origins.

All Saints' Day

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The tradition of All Saints' Day is a primarily Catholic one, falling on November 1st. It is a festival celebrating the saints of the Church—those who have attained heaven. It is followed by All Souls’ Day on November 2nd, which is dedicated to those who have died, but have not yet reached heaven. In essence, it’s about giving thanks for the lives and deaths of the aforementioned saints.

The holiday is usually celebrated by a rendition of “For All the Saints,” a hymn by Walsham How, which is sung during a worship service. In Europe, the day is also commemorated with offerings of flowers and candles on the graves of the dead.

But this holiday has roots that dig deeply, down below the Christian topsoil and down into the rocks of Paganism below.

The Pagan holiday of Samhain, came before the advent of All Saints' Day, and was celebrated by the ancient Celts. It had many themes in common with All Saints' Day, most notably the connection and celebration of the dead.

Over time, old Celtic festivals were gradually Christianized by the encroaching Church in the 800s AD, and the Samhain link to the dead became a Catholic link to the saints. At this time, it was celebrated in a similar way to Samhain, with huge bonfires and parades and costumes.

Today, the holiday has been mostly scrubbed of its Pagan origins, but hints of Samhain can still be seen in the essence of the holiday.

Christmas

Christmas is the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus—although it is becoming increasingly secularized.

But in what do Christmas’s origins lie? There certainly weren’t any Christmas trees around in Jesus’ time, after all. How did these elements come to be associated with the Son of God?

To find the answer, we can turn to Roman traditions. Christmas, indeed, wasn’t observed by early Christians, and only came about in the fourth century, when the Church mandated the celebration on the day of Mithratic rites—a Pagan festival. During this festival, homes were decorated with lights and greenery, and gifts were given to the poor. Added to the tradition were Celtic Yule rites, which included Yule cakes, fir trees, and fires—symbols of warmth and life.

Christmas, then, the holiday most commonly associated with the founder of Christianity, overflows with Pagan traditions and symbols.

We’ll soon find that this historical blending of disparate cultures is much more common than we think.

Easter

What, exactly, do rabbits and eggs have to do with the resurrection of Christ?

That’s the question that will lead you down the path to explaining the Pagan influences intertwined with the Easter holiday.

On this day, one of the most holy of Christian holidays combines with a Pagan fertility festival. The very name, “Easter,” comes from “Ostara,” the Ango-Saxon Goddess of Spring.

The Easter Egg has its origins in the fertility traditions of the Indo-European cultures—it was a symbol of spring and fertility to these peoples. The same goes for the symbol of the rabbit—it, too, was a symbol of reproduction.

Later, Christians took the egg and bestowed upon it religious symbolism—it became the symbol of the rock tomb that Christ emerged from after the resurrection.

Again, we see Pagan symbolism and tradition Christianized over time—sanitized through religious connection and incorporated into the merriment of a religious holiday.

Valentine's Day

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Valentine’s Day is the holiday of love, wherein we all give gifts and letters and other, small tokens of affection to our significant others. But do you know this holiday’s origins?

Ostensibly, this holiday originated as a Christian feast day honoring St. Valentine. According to popular accounts, Saint Valentin of Rome was imprisoned for performing wedding ceremonies for certain groups who were forbidden to marry, and for ministering to Christians, who were being persecuted by the Roman Empire at the time. According to legend, St. Valentine healed the daughter of the jailer and, before his execution, wrote her a letter signed, “Your Valentine”.

Later, the holiday was popularized as a romantic holiday by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century, when it transformed into something more like the holiday we see today.

The holiday may go back much further than this, however, to the Pagan feast day of Juno Februata. Celebrated on February 14th, this feast, celebrated by the Romans, involved slips of paper placed into a container. These papers had names of women written upon them, and men would draw these names, traditionally becoming sexual partners with the woman they drew for the rest of the year.

New Year's

The celebration of the New Year, as you might guess, has been marked throughout history.

The earliest known record of a New Year’s festival hails from Mesopotamia in 2000 BC, where the year began with the new moon after the spring equinox.

In ancient cultures, the beginning of the year was determined by varying events. For example, the Egyptians began their year with the rising of Sirius, coinciding with the beginning of the flood period of the Nile. Later, the Greeks celebrated their new year on December 21st—the winter solstice.

The idea of a ritual that does away with the past and purifies the self in preparation for the new year stretches all the way back to these first celebrations. Some past symbols of this purification include dousing fires at the turn of the year, subsequently starting new ones, and starting sacred bonfires to ward off evil spirits and ensure a fruitful and blessed new year of harvest, as we see in Samhain.

One thing that unites them all, however, is the collective desire for a better year, and the symbolic quest to gain some measure of control over the future.

Celebrating Candlemas Day

Learn about the origins of Candlemas day plus ways to celebrate this Pagan holiday which promises of the return of the light and the renewal of life. Read next feature >