Christmas Day

While most Christians are vaguely aware that the actual date of Jesus’ birth was lost to history, they are not aware of how or when our Christmas day was set on December 25. During the first three centuries of our era, the birth of Christ was celebrated not on that date but on the date of the Epiphany, January 6, in memory of the event when the Spirit of Christ, as the dove, was seen to descend from the heavens and land upon Jesus of Nazareth at his baptism. Our “twelve days of Christmas” culminate at its threshold. So much is said in the number “twelve” from the Bible’s beginning to its end, all buried in the birth of the Jesus child.

It was not until the fourth century when the murderous Emperor Constantine merged Christianity into the Roman political system that December 25 was chosen—chosen because it had long been celebrated by the ancients because of its proximity to the annual birth of the Sun, the winter solstice (equinox) when days began again to lengthen. While Augustine barely remembered it, we no longer comprehend the spiritual reality behind the Sun worship of the ancients and how it related to the sojourn of the descending Christ in the Sun sphere. Nor do we understand how the Earth became the spiritual Sun when Christ’s blood dropped into it. Surely the spiritual Sun must have been born on the day the Sun is born each year, December 25. Christian chronographers at that time reckoned the solstices as occurring on the 25th day of March and December (see 16 Encylopaedia Britannica 305, 1992).

This is but a hint that there is much about the birth of Jesus that is certainly beyond the ribbons and the tinsel, or even the Midnight Mass, insofar as our understanding of this most magnificent event in human development is concerned.