Midwinter festivities are far older than Christianity and have appeared in every culture of the northern hemisphere. When Christianity, on controlling Europe, first reached England, Northern Germany, and Scandinavia, its missionaries found Pagan rites already celebrated on Christmas day. The early Christians tried to convert Pagan celebrations to Christian ones but with only partial success. In the resulting tangle, Paganism has partially held its own and many objects associated with Christmas are explicable only as deep folk memories. So, Christians incorporated many of these rites into their Church festival.

The root of midwinter rituals is the winter solstice, the shortest day which falls on or around 21 December. In the days before the solstice, rituals were devised to prevent the sun getting any weaker. When they worked, with the day getting longer after the solstice, was the time for celebration. The date of 25 December was when the sun visibly began to rise again after three days at the lowest ebb. It was the Roman festival of the “unconquered sun”, Mithras, proving by his rising again that he was again unconquered. It was chosen deliberately to Christianize this traditional celebration. In Scotland, never subject to the Romans, the main midwinter festival is still the entirely non-Christian one of Hogmanay, the New Year, although the Christmas celebration has advanced in popularity in recent years.

Besides sun worship, today’s Christmas festivities reflect a complex of other Pagan rites, many distorted from their original purpose. The two chief ones are the Roman Saturnalia and the Germanic-Nordic festivities centering around Wotan and tree worship.

The Roman Saturnalia, held on 17 to 19 December, were days of public revelry in honour of the god Saturn, with much sexual licence. During the Saturnalia all business was suspended and many distinctions of rank were forgotten. Masters sometimes waited on their slaves—a custom reflected to this day in the military custom of officers serving Christmas dinner to their men. Saturn is one of the ancestors of Father Christmas.

Evergreens, the mistletoe of the Druids, the yule logs which had been brought in every year to blaze on the open hearths, the feasting and carousing, have all come down to us, often from northern Europe in Pagan days and from Pagan sources. The side boards of the well-to-do are still often graced by the head of a boar, the successor of the beast which slew Adonis. Various modern customs show that Christmas is still a developing institution. Father Christmas is the outstanding example, and so are some carols. The words of “Good King Wenceslas”, for example, were made up by a nineteenth-century clergyman, J M Neale, to go with an old tune.

People who attack the commercialisation of Christmas are missing the target. For uncountable centuries the midwinter festival has been a time for jollity in a most material way.